Song of a Reformed Headhunter

  My name is on the book cover, but the book is in fact written by many hands. My grateful thanks to the many Singaporeans in America who shared their stories with me and gave me permission to write them up in verse. Here it is, a book about us: SAMPLE AND LOOP: A SIMPLE HISTORY OF SINGAPOREANS IN AMERICA. "Based on personal interviews, these poems together tell a part of the story of the migration of Singaporeans to the United States of America. Sample and Loop traces the nonlinear, multidimensional, and surprising trajectory of lived experience in musical verse. Here are the Ceramicist, the Pediatrician, the Scenic Designer, the Chef, the Porn Star, and a host of other migrant-pilgrims sharing the tales of their lives even as they continue to make those lives in a country not of their birth. By narrating their discoveries, troubles, hopes, and sorrows, they refract a powerful beam of light on both countries and compose a wayward music for the road." All sale proceeds go t...

The Pediatrician for Lakshmi Ganapathi (WhatsApp video call, October 19, 2019) The playground, a pin cushion, needles here, needles there, stuck in her mind but also the fun of being children among children, without a care for streaming, only screaming their hearts and lungs out in mock threat and fear. The honest threat struck in an HIV hospice in India, where as a volunteer she heard a sex worker her age—eighteen—dying and the steep silence of the stricken mother whose ten-year-old just died. Their chronicles made her resolve to work in global health. Singapore gave next to no room for it but corridors of senior doctors screaming at juniors, or else dropping words like acid. She saw her self changing, her world contracting to a conveyor belt, another Yeo’s packet drink with a well-wrapped plastic straw. She wanted more, for herself, for her work, friends who are less, not more and more, like her.... Thanks, Lakshmi, for sharing your stories with me. And thanks, Ian Chung, for publish...

Chin was an old army mate, whom I met again years later and oceans away, in NYC, in the home of common friends. We had to see one another again, of course, and find out what has transpired, as much for the window into another life as for the mirror held up to our own. We had a most engaging conversation, after which Chin approved of the poem "The Philosopher" that I wrote for him. It's a part of a working series of poems about Singaporeans in America. Here's the poem , two years later, in the midst of a pandemic, published by Creative Flight, an international open-access peer-reviewed e-journal in English. Thanks, Dipak Giri, for publishing it.

I have 3 poems in the beautifully designed this/that/lit , thanks to Abayomi Animashaun. It was such a surprise to me to find a fellow Singaporean in the NYC private school where I teach. Phillip Cheah has been such a blessing to me, and others, through his friendship and his music, and I really wanted to write about his journey from the US to Singapore and back to the US. W.'s story is also extraordinary. Who would have thought that, raised to be so pragmatic as we were, that a Singaporean would marry in February, graduate in May, and adopt two boys in June. Well, W. explained that his Singaporean upbringing actually trained him for it, although the upbringing did not prepare him for the pains of early fatherhood. Finally, the poem I wrote for Zizi Azah's graduation from her MFA program is also here. The news that Broadway will be closed until the end of the year is devastating, but we writers and artists must remain strong and be in solidarity. Enjoy the poems !

Hijinks in high style. There's even a pilgrim born in Singapore, Tim Canon-Yeo, who obtained a Medieval English degree from Oxford and taught TEFL for several years in Colombia, before becoming a personal trainer and bodyguard to paranoid pop stars. Tim resides in Kent and writes a poem a day. Thanks, Larry Breiner, for the recommendation after hearing I'm writing a book of poems based on The Canterbury Tales .

Ian Chung kindly accepted two poems "The Muslim" and "The Scenic Designer" for Eunoia Review , publishing one immediately after the one, as is apt for these double portraits of a married couple. Thank you, Zizi Majid and Izmir Ickbal, for sharing your stories with me. The stories illuminate the experience of Singaporeans living in America.

"For some reason I cannot pin down, I go to the word “soft” often in my poetry. It does not only speak, it also touches and tastes, and it does all this while meaning, variously, listen, gentle, vulnerable, honest, subtle, strong, tender, comfortable, pre-erection, post-orgasm, receptive, sympathetic, malleable, formal, transformative. It is not the opposite of hard, but is a state of hardness, just as hard is but a state of softness. It appears in conjunction with “ware,” “water,” and “power.”" Pleased to be included in this special Singapore feature of the Portugal-based journal Jogos Florais. Shout-outs in my interview to Tan Pin Pin, Sonny Liew, Gwee Li Sui, Dorothy Wang, Timothy Yu, Jahan Ramazani, and Gina Apostol. And thanks, Marguerita, for sharing your story with me. Your poem has appeared! Poems and interviews by Angeline Yap, Anne Lee Tzu Pheng, Cyril Wong, Edwin Thumboo, Jee Leong Koh, Loh Guan Liang, Pooja Nansi, Shirley Geok-lIn Lim, Tania De Rozario, and...

New poem, "The Christian," published in Eunoia Review. Thanks, Caleb Goh, for trusting me with your story. And thanks, Ian Chung, for publishing it.