Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Poetz is back. Jackie Sheeler is back in force. Now it has not one poetry calendar but six up-to-date calendars for different locations, including Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia and, of course, New York City. It also  has an in-house poetry journal called Poetzine. The spring issue publishes 12 poets. I have three ghazal s in it. *

Toxic flora. Poisonous fauna. Welcome, world. *

I thought I was done with my pillow book, but it is not done with me. I could replace the weakest link. Which one is it? The cartoons I loved xxx The cartoons I loved to trace were Conan the Barbarian, wrists lashed with ropes to his ankles, and Flash Gordon, heaving under chains. Superhuman strength against unbreakable restraint. xxx Matt tied to his bed, that was the first time I was hard enough to penetrate. xxx To make Wolverine, the adamantine has to go in. *

Here's the final poem of my pillow book, to make up the mystical number of thirty-three: 33. I mark my place in books xxx I mark my place in books with bits of trash. A bus ticket in Great Expectations . A grocery receipt in Beyond Good and Evil . In The Ambassadors an old postcard from Singapore. It occurs to me this morning while shelving my books that I mark my place in men with bits of my body. My dick in Todd. Big toe in Doug. Eric, whom I thought I was done with, has my left elbow. The beautiful boy last night who did not give his name has all of my fingers holding him open. *

I made a small change to the title, and it has made all the difference. 32. All Things xxxxx All things diminish as they grow older, a friend of many years said last week. Even the expanding universe must contract. This morning, as I am boiling water to make coffee, his words come back to me, as sure as before, but smaller, because the whistling of the kettle takes up space. The steam was not so long ago a patch of snow. Love is what life boils into. *

31. Hybrid Things xxx Not only India but Japan. Think, for a moment, of Zen. *

30. Things that Quicken the Pulse xxx Hurricane warning. Running the hand through a man’s thick hair. Merino wool cardigan. A wave of flamingoes taking to the air. Coming on Matisse’s Red Studio . The thought of an approaching quarrel. The restaurant door opens, and lets in a draught. *

Heard with TH last Thursday three Stravinsky works for the first time. Svadebka (Les Noces or The Wedding) (1914-23) was traumatic. The bride pleaded over and over again with her mother not to tear her hair in order to plait it. Scene Four: The Wedding Feast was anything but joyous. The work was sang by four soloists and the Chorus of the Mariinsky Theatre. The musical instruments were pitched and unpitched percussion and four pianos, mostly played as percussion. Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920, rev. 1945-47) was brief--12 minutes--but colorful. Stravinsky used "symphonies" to signal the original Greek meaning of "soundings together." The work is dedicated to Debussy, whom Stravinsky met in 1910, when Debussy congratulated him enthusiastically on the premiere of The Firebird. L'Oiseau de feu, or The Firebird, is based on a Russian folk tale. Originally a ballet score, it was written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The tale in brief: Prince Ivan free...

29. John Stahle is dead Talk. Fleshy jowls. Boys with ambition to publish. A call on Craigslist for cultivated homos. Moved with dad all over Europe from base to military base. Separate checks. Blowing his bench-pressing boyfriend. The Gnostic Gospels. It is a perfect scandal, he says, that for the lack of funds MoMA blocks off a whole level in its last renovation. *

28. The old Chinese poets xxx The old Chinese poets composed a shi after walking just a few short steps. The closest I have come to this was to write a lousy sestina in my head after walking up and down the Bronxville park bounded on one side by train tracks and the other by a motorway. xxx Walking in a cemetery is charming when there is light. In the summer the headstones can still be scanned at eight, or even nine o’clock. In the fall the leaves litter the graves and give them a melancholic look of being forsaken. In the winter the bare branches bring out the grittiness of the stones. In the spring, when the trees put on their freshest green and the birds are almost intelligible, the cemetery turns into a sculpture garden, like the Tuileries. xxx I also love to walk around a city. San Francisco with Winston. Amsterdam with Tim. New York. xxx It is comforting to walk along a familiar path. The mind returns from observing, deciding, and judging to itself. It is like wandering out...

27. Japanese Things xxx Tamagotchi. The highest standard of living in Asia. xxx A third language offered in secondary school, besides French and German. xxx Comics illustrating love between men, created by women for women. xxx Hugging pillow, also called a Dutch wife. xxx His cock still inside me, the man answered a call from his mother in Tokyo. xxx Suicidal sects. Asymmetry. xxx After the Japanese occupied Singapore, they purged the island. Among the men shot at Changi Beach were donors to the China Relief Fund, men with tattoos, and Hainanese. The death toll is claimed by some to be 100 000. The Japanese claims 5 000. The truth is buried in between. xxx The Red and White Song Competition. Akina Nakamori. *

Today mailed off the books for the Singapore Literature Prize. I hesitated for a bit because of the big Lambda disappointment, but went ahead. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I don't know who else it is up against, besides Hsien Min's new book. It is very interesting to me how the judges would square up the two books with somewhat similar formal concerns but quite different themes. The last two winning books were queer, and so I know that is not a problem in my case, unless someone feels that it's time a straight poet wins. Would the facts that I left the country, and that my book is self-published abroad count against it? All these are extraneous to the poetry, but it would be naive to think they are extraneous to the judging. * The production of Our Town , directed by David Cromer, and performed at Barrow Street Theatre, was pure magic. I didn't know the play and so thought I was in for a large dose of cherry-hued nostalgia. Instead, I was moved to tears (yes, I...

26. The Public Service Commission xxx They have seen us all, these six men who interview the brightest in Singapore to decide on scholarships. Civil servants, military officers, and business leaders, they could have sat in that formidable row for thirty years, just as we, alone on the other side of the long table, are in a certain sense interchangeable. The idea does not diminish them or us. xxx But I am asking their support for changing me. I am asking for the Lee Kuan Yew Scholarship to become a poet. I explain it is time to develop more than factories, battalions and public housing, it is time to develop a language of our own. xxx They are not impressed. They can see through me. They know that I will quit Singapore for the States, that I am a queer one. xxx What they cannot see is that working in a rented room in Queens I write by the light of Singapore, a tall fluorescent streetlamp with its cloud of flying insects. Rallying my troops with Matisse’s fighting words—to be a forc...

25. Things Out of Place xxx A flute in a trumpet case. Red crayon slash on white linen. Sprays of heath in a plastic pail outside a deli. A cheeky boy among mourners at a wake. A beautiful man married to a woman. A Singaporean in New York City. The Singaporean in Singapore. xxx The moon in a lake. *

23. Why I moved to America and not Britain xxx When I walked in McDonalds in Welshpool, the floor sucked at my shoes. The server would rather rib his friend who came in after me than take my order. He gave me a cheeseburger when I asked for a quarter-pounder with cheese. He counted the change laboriously. The fries must have sat in the sieve for a long time for they were cold. xxx That was in 2002, when the Queen celebrated her Golden Jubilee, New Labor was losing its shine, and Nelson Mandela called Tony Blair "America's Foreign Minister." When I walked out of the joint, I had decided to go where real power resided. Since then I have discovered that the superpower does fast food badly too. That the corner where McDonalds is done the way McDonalds should be done is Singapore. 24. Things that Tilt xxx The Empire State Building in a snaphot. Rain. All the strokes of the letter W, upper or lower case. The fingers of the Bharata Natyam dancer. xxx To observe somethin...

21. After they return from field training xxx After they return from field training, before they change out of their sweat-stiff uniforms or muddy boots, the servicemen clean their M16s. They snap their rifles apart. They pull a steel brush through the barrel several times and several times more a strip of flannel held in the eye of the cleaning rod. They dismantle the bolt carrier group, the guts of the gun, to wipe the carbon off the bolt carrier. When the soot comes off, the firing pin is pure silver. Then the firearm is reassembled, the parts clicking into place. The steel body is brushed with oil and the buttstock blackened with boot polish. The rifles are restored to their racks, a chain is run through their charging handles, the showers hiss. xxx All this done with a fatigued swiftness still easy to recall now, so many years later, and so far away, sitting at my desk, writing. The speed and the exhaustion stay in the body, bright as a firing pin. 22. The Pledge xxx Scho...

20. First Things xxx The first time I entered a storytelling competition, I told the story of the greedy dog. Snapping the bone in the water, he lost the bone in the mouth. xxx The first time I fell in school, I muddied my white shorts. Terrified of looking as if I had fouled myself, I tried to clean my arse on the white walls. The stain not only stayed but spread. xxx I was thirteen the first time I published a poem. It was about looking at the rain lash the bronze back of the land. xxx The first time I fell in love, I was talking to God. After Darren prayed for me in Lee Abbey, I could hardly stay away from him. At the Lord's supper, I could hardly wait for the body of Christ to give each other the sign of the peace, when I could hold him briefly. I was twenty-one. xxx I had to bring a date for the Civil Service Dinner and so I brought a girl out for the first time. xxx The first time I saw New York was like the first time I saw Oxford, although one was more like a movie a...

I am having such trouble with my laptop. The pointer keeps blocking text and dragging it all o ver the screen. If anyone can tell me how to fix this, I'd be so grateful. 19. Happiness xxx I wrote this haiku for Kimiko's class: xxx An old man walking an old dog. xxx Rain tonight. xxx Reading it again this morning with a great deal of self-satisfaction, I remember Stevens's great poem "Description Without Place." My pleasure reddens into happiness. *

16. Mount Faber is a misnomer xxx Mount Faber is a misnomer for the hill by which I grew up. It is not even the tallest hill in Singapore. I don’t know who Faber is, but the word has always sounded delightfully like fable. xxx I went to a very small school on the hill. Radin Mas Primary School consisted of two distinct parts, the lower grades at the beginning of a long flight of stairs, the upper grades at the end. It was enough to teach one about large ambition and little achievement. xxx About the efflorescence of Singaporean poetry in the last two decades, Gwee is right. It is not the result of cultural change, certainly not because of government programs. It has sprung up like wild flowers on a hillside, and it may die without altering the landscape. The best of us still aim to become admirals of a small navy, pioneers of second-rate products, prime ministers of an island. The dreamier of us turn to poetry. xxx On every visit to Singapore, I make it a point—of what?—to walk up...

15. Hateful Things xxx Caramel in chocolate. Hot rain all year round. Cold sea in the summer. A tulip browning in the spring. Babies. Pedestrians who hog sidewalks. Commuters who hog staircases. Small talk when I have not had a drink. Squeaky voices. They are especially unbearable when they read poems. They scratch like chalk on a chalkboard going on. Dates who talk about themselves the whole time. List poems. Dogma of any kind. It is even more hateful in the mouth of an ugly man. Beet. To be contradicted. *

14. Her name was Margaret xxx I sat with a dying woman in the hospice, and her name was Margaret. She taught me how to use a fork and knife at a hotel buffet. She encouraged my writing by buying books for me. She brought me to Christ. Her name could have been Mother. xxx Now she was asking me to promise her something. What was it? What was it? I didn’t want to promise it. In a voice frail and fretful, she asked me again and again to promise her. I’m dying and you won’t do this? xxx A tree shot up from the broken ground. It raised a crown of whispering leaves. It rode as rigid as a scepter. Its name was Good and Evil. Its name was I Am Alive. Its name was Flame of the Forest. *

11 and 12 go together. 13, written before NoPoWrMo, goes rightly after them, I think. 11. When I go home with someone xxx When I go home with someone, there is always the question of how I leave. xxx I untie his embrace and make to go, whether the sex has been good or not. This way, when he implores me to stay, his pleading eyes appear in a charming light, and his fingers tighten on me in a regathering of the seam. xxx I stay if I like him or if it is late. He presses me against his chest or turns over to his side of the bed, and we sleep till day outlines the curtain in chalk. How delightful when he kisses me with his eyes and slips my hand down to his morning hardness. Yet another kind of delight when he bounces up to make breakfast. The smell of pancake wafts to the disheveled bed tasting of dried sweat and semen. xxx Or I leave, despite his plea. He asks for my number and writes it in a graceful hand in a leatherbound diary. He comes to the door, unlocks it in the most relu...

10. I impressed my first students xxx I impressed my first students by reciting from memory “Nature’s first green is gold.” I had been reading them S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders , and amidst the jaunty and raucous talk suddenly pealed the poem’s deep bell tones. xxx In the 90s, when I started to teach, Singapore required its citizens to think. The best schools of the country turned independent. Educators talked about thinking out of the box, and so nothing essential changed, except the school fees. When Pioneer Junior College wished to discard school uniforms, it was stopped by the Ministry. The situation is aptly described in the senryu: The Prime Minister. All the officers shoot up— a field of lallang. xxx The independent school where now I teach is less likely to talk about lallang than laurel. Seated on the upper end of Manhattan island, it guards its autonomy fiercely. So fierce that a supervisor’s criticism is resented as an attack. “Experienced teachers,” says my colleag...

Last Thursday TH and I saw Roundabout Theatre Company's production of this American classic. Directed by Gordon Edelstein, this production offered the innovation of setting the entire play in the New Orleans hotel room in which Tom Wingfield lives out his unfulfilled literary ambition, after he abandoned his aging mother and crippled sister. The staging made clear that the play is Tom's creation, from different parts of remorse and self-justification. We saw things from his point of view as oppressively as we remained in that dingy, spartan room. As if to match the dourness of the setting, the lyricism of Tom's speeches had also been exchanged for the gritty realism of the work of an incompetent writer. Patch Darragh was rather inconsistent in his portrayal of Tom, at different times fey and butch, as one NYT reader commented. The interpretation leaves no doubt that Tom is gay, and that the movies is an excuse for frequenting the bars. Judith Ivey was convincing as the na...

9. The delicacy in gaudy things xxx The tip of a peacock feather. Porcelain spoons in a bowl of ice kachang. The face of a four-metre Guanyin. These are common examples of delicacy in gaudy things. xxx More uncommon is the delicacy not found at the edge of things, or in their finish, or at a height, but the opposite. Like the heart’s recognition of a gold Rolex watch. xxx When one could show up the ignorance of an enemy, but refrains, that is delicate too. *

8. He gave his name but I cannot give it xxx When I visit Singapore now, I stay with my parents. This means, among other things, that I sleep in my old bed, the bottom bed of a double-decker. The long pillow still stretches out there but it no longer hugs me back. The first man I brought home was an army warrant officer. I was in National Service again, only this time it was a pleasure. He gave me his name but I cannot give it. xxx Thomas’s family migrated from China to Vietnam to Singapore before settling in the United States. He in turn ran away from them by going to serve the Singapore army. Living in the barracks, he heard his officers entering their men’s rooms at night, and sometimes in the day. Their shadows would flit across his shutters. We were eating pork congee in Chinatown in the winter when he told me this, certain of being understood without explanation. xxx When Yi-sheng told the army he was gay, he was categorized as medically unfit for operational duty. xxx I hear...

7. Sharp Things xxx A clever child. xxx Magnetite in a homing pigeon’s beak. xxx Paper. xxx A hairpin bend. A nail clipper. xxx Cook Ding’s knife. At first the whole ox. After three years the openings between the joints. Now perception and understanding have come to a stop and the spirit moves where it wants. *

6. Chinese wedding banquets are insufferable xxx Chinese wedding banquets are insufferable. Guests arrive at the restaurant an hour late and dinner is served an hour later. Ten courses in clattering succession, from cold cuts to almond jelly. The couple, their parents, and the photographer struggle from table to table to table. The bridegroom is puffy red from too much drink. The bride, corseted in some heavy gown, purple or salmon, not white which is the color of mourning, looks as if she is about to cry from tiredness. There is nothing charming in the scene. Worst of all, one or the other of my parents would get drunk—mother turning loud and coarse, father sullen—and we would have such trouble getting them out of the restaurant, down the lift and into a taxi. *

It was gripping theater, this play about Mark Rothko and his decision to pull out of the prestigious commission of muralling the fancy Four Seasons restaurant. Plenty of art talk, between Rothko, played by a tremendous Alfred Molina, and his studio assistant Ken, the young Eddie Redmayne who more than held his own against the older actor. But the art talk was so impassioned and so well-written that one was convinced, no, convicted, that art mattered to these men more than anything else in their lives. If red represented to Rothko life and passion, black symbolized death. But this obvious symbolism was challenged by his assistant, and Rothko revealed his actual fear, to be measured and found wanting. If I have a quibble, it is that the character of Rothko could have been delineated more individually. At some points in the play, Rothko spoke as the Artist and little else. Ken, on the other hand, remained painfully and awkwardly human throughout. Redmayne brought out the vulnerability a...

5. Musical Instruments xxx I was on my way to hear the New York Philharmonic when a woman entered the car of my train and started to play a pianica. I was instantly transported back to the music room of my primary school, where a squad of boys fumbled on the keyboard of their instruments and blew lustily into the creamy white tubing. The pianica, the poor man’s piano. Under the direction of the busty music teacher, whose name I cannot remember, we blew out the music we had also to learn to sing. Humoresque. Sunrise, sunset. Is this the little girl I married? Is this the little boy at play? I don’t remember growing older. When did they? After music practice, my father cycled me home. Perched on the top tube of the frame, I clicked down the long curving road, which covered up the hip of the hill at the bottom of which we lived. xxx The next instrument I learned to play was the guitar. It was the thing to do in secondary school. No more the small music room with its floor of fla...

TLS March 19 2010 from Benjamin Markovits' review of Lyndall Gordon's LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS: Emily Dickinson and her family's feuds : . . . Henry James's description of the writer's life from The Middle Years : "We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art". Oe John Berryman's Dream Songs : "I am obliged to perform in complete darkness/ operations of great delicacy/ on my self". * By dressing up such riddles as a kind of Hamlet ploy. Gordon obscures something important about Dickinson: her preciousness, her pretension. In the process, we lose what is moving about her story. For Gordon, Emily's refusal to publish shows a heroic unwillingness to bow to public expectations, rather than the self-defeating stubbornness of a lonely inhibited woman who has become suspicious of the way her passions alienate people. It is true that her fi...

4. Disorganized Things xxx  The Botanic Gardens after a storm. The apartment after a party. xxx Before the command to come to attention, the enlistees relax in various states of sleep, their rifles entangled with their limbs. xxx When I cross the checkpoint into Johor Bahru, I cannot help observing that the trees that are planted in regimental intervals now sprout in confusion. The city has poured and set around them, and not they for the city. If the trees have given the pleasure of pattern before, they now surprise with their surge of green. xxx Disheveled hair. *

Marina Abramovich (Yugoslav, b. 1946) sits across from you, looking at you as you look back at her, in the atrium of the MoMA. She is sculptured in a long red dress. You are anyone who wishes to sit at the table for as long as you like. You are acutely aware that the performance piece is being recorded. And you wonder if you should switch that awareness to something else. But what? Marina Abramovich sits across from you. From the outside of "The Artist is Present," you may sit or stand at any point around the square marked out in white tape on the floor. If you look at the two sitters from the side, you are reminded of so many paintings of just that view. Two human beings seated across from each other, not touching and yet everywhere seems to touch. If you look at Marina Abramovich, she becomes the art object. Black hair tied back on beautiful gaunt head. A red triangle. You can imagine you are seated across from her, but you are not. You are outside the square. If you lo...

3. Well-organized Things xxx A dictionary. A rainforest. A supermarket. xxx A columbarium, a place to urn the dead, is organized for the convenience of the living. The Civil Service, a place to earn a living, is organized for the dead. xxx The passport office in Singapore. xxx A dragonfly. A quartz. *

2. When my parents gave up their idols xxxxx When my parents gave up their idols for Christianity, they asked a priest from the nearest temple to send the household gods off. The altars, gold calligraphy on red sheet metal, were left at the base of a rain tree. The next day they were gone. xxxxx The altar table was not so easily removed. A dour work of dark pinewood, without any charm, it had stood in the living room for as long as I could remember. We tried changing its purpose, at one time storing my trophies and plaques behind its glass. They never looked right there. After it was finally hauled away, father had to paint over the soot left by burning years of incense. xxxxx What to put in its place? My bookcase, from IKEA, sagged and leaned forward alarmingly. The corner was too small for the dining table, we rediscovered every New Year’s Eve when we sat together for my mother’s steamboat treat. Then there were no more reunion dinners when my sister and I moved to the States. My...

Last night, under the auspices of the Academy of the American Poets, three different poets read to a standing-room-only crowd. I did not know who Ed Sanders was till Gordon Gilbert explained to me the significance of rock band The Fugs. Sanders introduced himself as younger than the Beats and older than the hippies. The poems he read revolved around the Beats. One was about what he called the grand humanity of Allen Ginsberg when the latter helped, a la the Good Samaritan, a man beaten and left to die on an Indian road. Would Ginsberg have squirmed in his grave to be cast as Mother Theresa? I heard Kimiko Hahn read before but that reading did not make much of an impression on me. Perhaps I am being trained by her workshop now to hear better the movement of her Japanese-inspired poetry. This time, I was really impressed by her reading. A wide-ranging and probing intelligence dressed in a spare elegance. The endings of the poems were particularly strong. Her forthcoming book Toxic Flor...

It's National Poetry Writing Month again, and this year I am writing my own pillow book, after Sei Shonagon. 1. I miss my pillow xxxxx I miss my pillow, the long pillow held between my legs and hugged to my chest from the time I was born to when I turned thirty-three. xxxxx I have the impression that it was the same pillow although this could not be true. Perhaps it stayed the same because the slip would change. A fresh pillowslip smelled not unpleasantly of washing powder. After drying in the sun for hours, on a bamboo pole, it was hot to my thighs. I also liked the sensation of it cooling and, later at night, the sensation of warming it with the cleft of my body. xxxxx There was a dark brown pillowslip with small white squares. Another pillowslip was blue with white balloons. My favorite had the pattern of palm leaves. xxxxx Darren laughed at the pillow when he visited me in Singapore and slept in the same room. We must get you a woman , he said. Darren had light blond ha...