Resolutions and Irresolutions

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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 steadfast critic. If not, it is but a totalitarian regime.

While I was talking with a poet-friend recently, we laughed over the fact that I had titled my recent books in the format of dualities: Connor and Seal, Sample and Loop. I did not plan consciously to do so, but it happened. In fact, as I thought about it, the dualities were there all along: Steep Tea, Bite Harder, Payday Loans. Even when the two words are the same, as in Inspector Inspector, there is a difference, a gap, between them. The difference interests me.

Jee Leong Koh
January 11, 2024

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