Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The Straits Times published a story about Steep Tea making the list of Best Books of 2015 in the Financial Times . The Singapore paper included only part of the email interview with me. The full interview below. Read it and you will understand ST's selectivity. How does it feel to be one of the four poetry works named by the FT as best of 2015?  Amazed. Humbled. Grateful that someone likes the book so much. We just celebrated Thanksgiving here in the US. I'm so thankful for the encouragement given by Maria Crawford, the FT editor who selected Steep Tea . Looking back, what were some challenges you faced in writing Steep Tea?  I couldn't have written Steep Tea without moving to the US to come out as a poet and a gay man. The poems in the book reflect the experience of finding my rightful place in New York and a useful perspective on Singapore. The poems were written over the course of 12 years, as both place and perspective come slowly. You might say that I had t...

Once in a while the paper would trumpet that a news article was by its own correspondent. Most of the time, however, the paper paraphrased other news sources, such as the Evening Standard or the China Morning Post, and cited them by name. In "A Peculiar Ban in China.--Cigarettes and Torches" (March 11, 1929, 17), the paper quoted directly a correspondent of the North China Daily News. So my quotation of The Straits Times is really a quotation of a quotation: another way of looking at the writing of history. So far (Oct 1928 - Mar 1929) the news articles were not organized in any sections like International, Home or Sports. On page 17, news about China might be juxtaposed with an opinion on the English public school; a review of a new edition of the Bible might find itself next to municipal news. The front pages of the paper were given over to advertisements completely. Commercial and shipping statistics were given prominent place. The initials in a person's name I cou...

Last weekend I started work on my book based on the prime number of 17. It will be a history of Singapore written according to Oulipian rules. I take the 17th word on the 17th page of The Straits Times and put the words together to form a poem. The Straits Times  (ST) is Singapore's main English daily broadsheet newspaper. It was started by an Armenian, Catchick Moses, and launched on 15 July 1845 as an eight-page weekly. Since the earliest edition of the paper had only eight pages, I cannot begin my history at the beginning of the paper. I will begin, instead, in media res , so to speak, not at the so-called founding of Singapore by Stamford Raffles, not at the proclamanation of independence from the British, nor at the establishment of a newspaper by Moses. The beginning will be owned by no one, except accident. But the beginning of my history is not without logic. Of course it made, and still makes, sense to publish a newspaper in multiples of four pages. Two sheets of newsp...