Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly Column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Yesterday I was asked by a student writer of the school's newspaper to recommend a recent read for an article about students' reading habits and preferences. This was what I wrote back to her: "I just finished reading Rachel Heng's novel  The Great Reclamation , and I loved it. It is a bildungsroman, but it is also an epic. The story follows Ah Boon from boyhood in a fishing village to adulthood in the government. In the process, it also traces the trajectory of Singapore from the last days of British rule to the heady times of the country's post-independence development. What is lost in the rush to modernize? What does modernization do to one's sense of self? These are questions that the novel explores with keen sympathy and insight. And with magical islands to boot." What I could have added to modernization but did not, was the question about what is lost in the rush to statehood....

Column written for the weekly Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  As poetry editor of the Evergreen Review, I'm organizing the NYC-based journal's new year poetry celebration "Resolutions and Irresolutions," featuring Amber Atiya, Brad Vogel, and Katherine Swett, on Tuesday, Jan 16, 7 pm, at a Tribeca home (RSVP me at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org). Why that event name? I was thinking of the obligatory new year resolutions, certainly, but I was also thinking of the equally obligatory irresolutions of poets and poetry. The fiercer the pressure on poetry to be didactic and activist,  the harder I find myself resisting it in favor of indecision, ambiguity, questions, and irony. There is a gap, I have discovered, between being a citizen and a poet. They are related, but they are not the same. The citizen wants justice above all, the poet wants beauty. And an ideal society worthy of its name must find the space to accommodate the poet, its unreliable ally, its steadf...