Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I turned 49 yesterday in New York. 16 years ago, I arrived in the city to begin graduate studies in writing poetry. Stepping into the stupendous Great Hall of Grand Central Station to take the Metro-North train to Sarah Lawrence College, I thought, as many did before me, I'm finally here. On the train, I spoke to the first New Yorker I didn't have to. He turned out to be an elderly jeweler whose family fled the war in Europe. New York is a city of refuge for many people, including artists. Here you find, at last, your own people, who are related to you, not by blood, but by spirit. On the morning of my birthday, I wrote a poem about a young gay Singaporean who came here to study fashion and found himself, before graduation, marrying a man 21 years older than him, and, upon graduation, adopting two teenage children. During our interview for the poem, it was obvious that he was still amazed at what he had done. ...

Walter Benjamin's library card With Y, I saw the show "The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin" at the Jewish Museum today. A few of the contemporary works were well worth seeing, but the show as a whole was disappointing. Benjamin's unfinished project The Arcades assembled a miscellany of quotations and commentaries based on a principle and a purpose. The principle was represented by these iron and glass vaulted shopping malls in Paris, the cultural capital of the nineteenth century. The purpose was to mount a critique of capitalism through an examination of the materiality of experience. Both gave Benjamin's project its coherence and interest. The principle of the museum show was Benjamin's text. Its purpose was to put up a museum show. As such, the selection of contemporary art works, from various times, places, and artistic practices, failed to illuminate any particular time, place, or practice. Worse, they failed to illuminate Benjamin...

For those of you who have been reading my haiku, I must now reveal that they are not my own works, but translations of Japanese originals. Six of these English translations have now been re-translated into Chinese by Zhou Decheng, and published in the Chinese-language Poetry Monthly . The story of my English translations is as follows: In February 2011, when I moved into my Upper West Side apartment, not far from 80 Riverside Drive, where Yone Noguchi boarded for a time, I found a sheaf of haiku in the bedroom closet, almost as if it had been left for me. To my surprise, the poet made numerous references to people and places that I knew from living in New York City. I was thus compelled to translate the poems from the Japanese. As I worked on these exhilarating, enigmatic pieces, I found myself searching out the street corner, the tree, and even the bird that had so enraptured our poet. In this manner I traced the route taken through Central Park—entering at 86th Street on the west ...

Two men love the trees in Central Park so much that they have made a map. They spent two and a half years of their lives and $40 000 of their savings to produce the two-sided, waterproof, 36-by-26 inch map called “Central Park Entire: The Definitive Illustrated Folding Map.” 19 993 trees from 174 species are captured in detail. overcast morning i pay my debts to the park by drawing up a calendar * at the end of may the smell of new books for summer reading

With some friends from out of town, we walked the High Line yesterday, a cold fall day. After running parallel to the Hudson for blocks and blocks, this most linear of parks curves in its third and final section toward the river and floats over the storage and maintenance yards for Long Island Rail Road. at hudson yards the trains laid down like rain in hiroshige

In gay terms, I am ten years old this year, a young un. I was not out as a gay man to myself for the first thirty-four years of my life, even though I knew since primary school that I was strongly attracted to boys. I had to move from Singapore to New York in order to come out as gay. Unlike many friends, I lacked the courage to come out in Singapore. It was not easy to come out in New York either. I remember walking back and forth in front of a gay bar, terrified of going in. I had to join a coming-out group at Identity House for group therapy and discussion. I was not sick, but you don’t need to be sick to need therapy. You only need to be damaged. The first time I plucked up the courage to attend a meeting of the Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), I made sure I did not cross my legs in the room filled with gay Asian men; I did not want to appear effeminate. But it was at the next GAPIMNY meeting, which of course ended with supper in a Chelsea restaurant, that I ...

60 Dutch guilders what price would I pay in May at Inwood?

I met Henry Abelove at Dorothy Wang's book party, and was introduced to his book of essays called Deep Gossip . The title is taken from Allen Ginsberg's elegy for Frank O' Hara. After describing O'Hara as a "Curator of funny emotions," Ginsberg praises him for his ear "for our deep gossip."  The essays are as engrossing as gossip, an apt compliment if we think of gossip as the sharing of information between disempowered people. In these essays, Abelove  performs careful and gracious corrections to what has been underestimated, overlooked and sidelined.  Like many gay men, I have read Freud's letter to the American mother, but had not realized that it was his last riposte to the moralism of American psychoanalysts. In the next essay, the suggestion that other sexual practices besides "intercourse so-called" have been redefined as foreplay in the late eighteenth century is brilliant.  Since I am not a fan of marriage, Abelove's read...

spring rain in New York City italicizes

Debbie Chou invited me to a concert at Steinway Hall last night. The ornate building was put up in 1926, white marble from Italy, green marble from Greece. I was glad to see it before the company's move at the end of the year. The performers were the Albek Duo, twin sisters from Switzerland. Ambra Albek played the violin and viola, Fiona Albek the piano. They opened the program with pieces by American composer William Perry, who was present in the audience. I enjoyed very much their performance of Edvard Grieg's Sonata No. 3 in C minor, Opus 45, (1886). Their musicianship shone through. They were lovely in person too, when we talked a little during the reception afterwards. Wrote another haiku this morning. Not related to the concert last night. I forgot my heavy coat-- miss you.

"Hudson River Day Line," Joan Mitchell An informative biography, full of details about Mitchell's family background (Chicago steel heiress), love affairs and artistic struggles. Her competitive desire to be "one of the boys" of the New York School. Her fear of abandonment and death. Her steadfast love of van Gogh. She painted from the memory of a landscape, until she abstracted it in the idiom of Abstract Expressionism. The writing of the biography is in places too breezy and purple for my taste. The biographer clearly admires her subject, but does not hide her flaws.

Finally read Washington Square over the Memorial Day weekend. It's comforting, physically, to be in the hands of a master. Catherine Sloper, who has to choose between father and lover, is a wonderful creation. She is dull and plain, but her predicament achieves tragic intensity, and, finally, poignancy. Her father, the successful New York doctor, is also a formidable achievement. A diagnostician of men and women, he judges his daughter rightly, but overlooks the alienating effect of his condescension toward her.  The other two main characters are simpler. Mrs. Penniman, the nosy aunt, is a slightly more sophisticated version of Austen's emotional women; she is more sensibility than sense. The lover Morris Townsend is a charming rogue, and not much more. The main axle that moves the story forward is the relationship between father and daughter; that relationship looks forward to the one in James's masterpiece The Golden Bowl , in which not two, but four fully draw...

My sis sent me two easy reads on India for my birthday, Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure by Sarah MacDonald, and Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple. Reading the latter, and coming home yesterday, gave me this poem this morning. For All I Know When I come home, my neighbor does not bark, her dog does, short, sharp cuffings of the musty air, but she’s not home yet or else ignores my tramping up the stairs. In two years, I have seen her, maybe, three or four times. Once, with a young man her age never seen again, unlocking her door. On a Saturday, coming down the stairs with her dog, brunette terrier. Yet another time, she was alone, pushing open ahead of me the building entrance, sliding in her boyish hips. For all I know, she could be a dear votary of Yellamma, dedicated to sacred prostitution, one of the nine lives recorded by William Dalrymple in his Indian travels, or a hereditary singer of the Rajasth...

Photo by Benjamin Swett; cover image for his book New York City of Trees On My Way to a Photo Exhibition of Trees in New York City I’m walking into the wind. Now I know what the sail feels, the tiller in another’s hand. Now I know the sad flapping of clothes pegged to a short line. The street sign quavers on its metal stem like a cymbal struck. It is not a human sound, and the black coats, feet scratching the sidewalk, will strain in their drift toward a human sound, but, as Dante observed, before he heard the love that Francesca da Rimini bore for her husband’s handsome young brother, the lights are mute here. 

Nice morning surprise. My Pillow Book has been selected as a Staff Pick by Wendy Chin-Tanner at Lantern Review . Thanks, Wendy and LR! Had a wonderfully relaxing time at Aires Ancient Baths yesterday afternoon. GH and I luxuriated in a series of pools of different temperatures. The 97 F warm pool was a gentle introduction. Going from the 102 F hot pool to the 61 F cold pool was supposed to improve one's blood circulation. The propeller jet bath prepared one for the massage, which we added to the bath package and were very glad that we did. My favorite tub was the salt water pool at 100 F, in which one surrendered oneself to the water and floated. There were a steam room too and a lounge to drink tea. The baths were patronized by straight young couples on the day that we were there. We had dinner afterwards at Thalassa , a Mediterranean and Greek restaurant, also on Franklin Street. The fish specials and on the menu were displayed in ice. I chose the Lavraki, which came ...

Went with GH and SH to Governor's Island yesterday. We walked along the promenade to Picnic Point, where we had lunch at Eva's. Pulled pork sandwich, corn on the cob, blueberry pie, Shiraz, yum. We looked directly into the distant face of the Statue of Liberty, through the legs of Mark di Suvero's giant steel sculptures. The Sculptors Guild was holding an exhibition titled "Process" in one of the old four-storeyed buldings. I liked Elaine Lorenz's organic-looking sculpture of fiberglass and resin. Jeremy Comins's work also caught and held my eyes. The wooden frame hung on the wall reminded me of homely shelf displays and of a box of children's blocks. The single figure sitting and clutching his knees looked quite sad. The work had a strange mixture of domesticity and isolation. We sat down on a lawn, under another di Suvero piece, and chatted and read the papers desultorily. The New York Times told the history of New York City through 50 objects, ...

In the words of its brochure, "Living as Form" presented "over 100 artists and projects, 25 curators, and 9 new commissions highlighting 20 years of socially engaged art." On Sunday GH and I wandered through the mostly empty Essex Street Market building in which the exhibition was held. The projects were not readily comprehensible, their explanations in densely written booklets, their images played on looped videos. Mitch Corber was there to show the interviews and books of Poetry Thin Air Cable Network, as was Cindy Hochman. Cindy was kind to press on me a copy of her new chapbook The Carcinogenic Bride , but I insisted on paying a poet for her work. The poetry is lively. I particularly like the last poem "Under Anesthesia," in which the disoriented patient addresses the doctor like a lover in a swirl of weird imagery and knowing humor: Doctor, I am lying on your table with my compliant bones Doctor, soon you will be under my anonymous skin Doctor, y...

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) began drawing and painting at the age of sixty-three. He grew up among artists but had no formal training himself. I found his drawings of animals and biomorphic forms and his portraits, on show at Asia Society , beautiful and mesmerizing. He did not title his works because he did not want words to come between the viewer and the artwork, but his lifelong work with words surely influenced his art, and gave him its central conception, that of rhythm. A happy coincidence that I was teaching just then Coleridge's "The Aeolian Harp," in which he describes "the one life within us and abroad" as "rhythm in all thought." "Seated Woman: forward bend" (c. 1930-31), done with colored ink and watercolors on paper, is a dark enameled egg. The early ink-on-paper work "Striding Bird" (1928) is calligraphy in motion. I did not care so much for Tagore's landscapes, which struck me as rather sentimental and uno...

Roxanne was kind enough to invite me to share the table with her press, Poets Wear Prada. Somewhat to my surprise, I managed to sell seven books. 1. A woman quite soon after the start of the festival at 10 AM bought a copy of Seven Studies for her son, an English teacher who loves poetry. 2. Not too long after, another woman dipped into both of my books and bought Equal to the Earth on my recommendation that she get to know my work from the beginning. This sale is especially meaningful to me, for she liked enough what she read to pay for the risk of reading more of a stranger's work. 3. I sold another copy of Equal to a high-school junior who wants to write, and who loves T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg and Cavafy. 4. A woman was thrilled to find Frida Kahlo and Egon Schiele in Seven Studies and bought a copy. 5. A colleague from school bought a copy of Equal . 6. An older gentleman liked what he read of Bob Hart's Lightly in the Good of Day , and bought a copy. 7....

Hot, but a beautiful day for a walk. I had visited Long Island City for dinner, but had not walked around the neigborhood. We followed a guide in Time Out . After coming out from the underground at Hunters Point, we tried to get brunch at M. Wells diner, but it was still packed at 1:30. We walked over to Vernon Boulevard and ate at Tournesol instead. I had a delicious terrine with foie gras. The server answered my questions about the menu very patiently. Both GH and I had a Bloody Mary, which was also very good. We walked to the new condominium developments at the waterfront. Everything was very well laid out, even overly planned, but the wild grass fringing the boardwalk was sensibly left alone. We dutifully saw the big Pepsi-Cola sign that looked over the East River. The wooden deck chairs and double hammocks were thoughtful additions to the Gantries Park. We walked to PS1 but did not go in. On 45th Avenue was a row of Italianate houses that date from the 1880s, the homes of the af...