Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I'm very happy to share with you that an excerpt from my hybrid work of fiction Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an Insignificant Japanese Poet is featured at Poetry Daily today! I hope you will enjoy reading it. Poet and literary critic Vivek Narayanan comments very kindly: "Koh’s work in some moments can seem disarmingly simple, even if always rigorous in its language, lighting on the ordinary, but as you delve further it reveals a rich intelligence, omnivorous and cosmopolitan in its influences, balancing its interests in high and low, the cerebral and the bodily, the experimental and the straight, narrative and ellipsis." ( read the rest of his commentary ) If you'd like to get hold of the book, please consider getting it from Bookshop , as the online store shares its profits with independent bookstores. Or ask your local bookstore for it. Friends in Singapore, I hope to be back and see you next summer.

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . After the thunderstorms, they are back in the shady corner of Marcus Garvey Park again, the homeless. They are back with their plastic bags and shopping trolleys, their folding chairs and milk crates. They stand alone or sit in a group under the trees, a tent almost giving up, as if they are camping. They are men and women, black and white, young and old. They shoot up in broad daylight. They share their needles with one another. They talk to each other quietly, mostly. The children have disappeared from the playground nearest to them. They have been visited, once, by two women who looked like social workers. More certainly, they have been visited by an emergency medical team, and an ambulance has taken away one of them, the one who got tired of waiting around. Jee Leong Koh July 8, 2021

The subtitle delivers what it promises: a secret history of poetry and kitsch. We look at kitsch differently when we see it as originating from controversies and scandals about poetry during the rise of popular culture in the eighteenth century, and not just with reference to the visual arts and material culture in the twentieth century. We also look at poetry differently when we see how entangled with kitsch elite poetry was, and still is, despite Wordsworthian attempts to purify the language of tribe, and Modernist efforts to denounce kitsch and switch attention from diction to form. As a poet, I'm rather more interested in looking at poetry differently, and this volume casts new light on, finds a thread through many apparently different lots of poets: the renovators and falsifiers of the ballad revival in the eighteenth century, the Shenstone and the Walpole sets, Baudelaire, Ezra Pound, the first and second generations of the New York School, and five twentieth-century American...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The number of people forcibly displaced by war and violence has not only increased in the last three years, but the time taken for resettlement in a safe "third" country has also grown longer. In fact, the number of refugees who have spent more than 5 years in exile has jumped from 7 million to 11.9 million. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), out of the 20.4 million refugees of concern in 2019, less than 1% are resettled every year. This is just one of the many revelations in an op-ed written for SP Blog by Beth from Advocates for Refugees-Singapore (AFR-SG) as part of Refugee Awareness Week (RAW) 2021, an annual campaign held in conjunction with World Refugee Day commemorated globally every June 20. Beth also reveals Singapore's more humane past when the country hosted Vietnamese refugees from 1977 to 1996 in Hawkins Road Refugee Camp, a former Br...

The passing-around of the point of view between the four girls and their parents, the movement of the stories back in time from New York to the Dominican Republic, the intensely poetic prose of Yoyo or Yolando, obviously the stand-in for the author: all these narrative devices make these stand-alone stories cohere into a vivid portrait of an immigrant family, into a novel. The best story is "Daughter of Invention," which is both playfully poetic and immensely moving in its depiction of the passing of the creative torch from mother to daughter.

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . June is Pride Month in New York, and in Singapore, Pink Dot, an annual picnic-turned-rally for LGBTQ equality. After having come out as a gay man for years, more and more I find June to be a time not just for celebration but also for reflection, on what the LGBTQ movement has achieved and how far it has to go. This June, a Facebook post by a young Malay-Muslim gay man from Singapore made me think harder about the goals of the movement. I share his post with his permission. "Someone asked me this morning whether I tuned in for Pink Dot, and my reply is always the same. I have a complicated relationship with PD and Singapore's LGBT movement in general, because my entry into gay spaces at 18 just made me even more aware of my alterity. It was not a moment of self-acceptance and solidarity commonly imagined in popular coming-of-age narratives. The gay community in Singapore was often a brutal ...

A fascinating attempt to meld psychoanalytic and Marxist analyses, which yields many insights and much hope. While holding fast to Freud's idea that civilization is the result of the repression of the pleasure principle in favor of the reality principle, Marcuse argues for his own idea of a surplus repression, which is the result of historically determined social domination due to scarcity. As technology creates abundance, such domination becomes increasingly irrational, opening the way for the reduction of surplus repression and even biological repression. In short, we will work less and play more. As civilization matures in the era of abundance, sexuality will be transformed into Eros, which will diffuse the pleasure principle into all aspects of life, including work. Right now, we don't have abundance, but we do have aesthetics ("the science of sensuousness") and archetypes such as Orpheus and Narcissus to provide an image of what can and will be. From Herman Hesse...