Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The New Yorker , Feb 2, 2015 from Alec Wilkinson's profile of Yitang Zhang "The Pursuit of Beauty": The British mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote in 1940 that mathematics is, of "all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote." Bertrand Russell called it a refuge from "the dreary exile of the actual world." Hardy believed emphatically in the precise essence of math. A mathematical proof, such as Zhang produced, "should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation," he wrote, "not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way."   * The books on his shelves have titles such as "An Introduction to Hilbert Space" and "Elliptical Curves, Modular Forms, and Fermat's Last Theorem." There are also books on modern history and on Napoleon, who fascinates him, and copies of Shakespeare, which he reads in Chinese, because it's easier than Elizabethan English. *  "Bounded Gaps Between Primes...

on my narrow chin windswept limestone cliff a fledgling beard

After keeping indoors for two days to nurse a cold, I venture out to the park newly opened since the snowstorm. Walking on snow is like walking on a beach, with the difference that I have too much clothes on. sand so white it has given up the ghost of a sea * Started talking with Alvin Pang, Joshua Ip, Jennifer Champion and Jennifer Crawford about setting up a website with the poetry archive that Jen Cr. has collected. We decided that Alvin will take care of the website, Josh the general management and fundraising, Jen Ch. the media editing and I the text editing. Everyone is pitching in, because we really want a website devoted to Singapore poetry. We are now thinking about a good name for it.

cup of black coffee before the sun is up to meet blank snow

TLS January 16 2015 from Paul Davis's review of The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick , edited by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly: In fact, Herrick was a pioneer of print authorship, as the exemplary scholarship on Hesperides in this edition confirms. It has long been recognized that Herrick was the first English poet to see a collected edition of his own verse through the press, but here we learn how closely he involved himself in the production process, perhaps even to the extent of demanding in-press corrections not only to rectify printing errors, but also as las-minute poetic refinements.   *  The various forces pressing editors towards ever more maximal feats of scholarship need to be answered by a counterbalancing impulse towards selection and concentration. Attempting to compete with online databases on the score of comprehensiveness is a fool's errand; nor should print editors be cowed into confusing comprehensiveness with objectivity. They need instead to play t...

a blizaard warning my half-year sabbatical is in effect

"[PAYDAY LOANS] is clearly the poetry of the bounced cheque, the bummed out, the delayed pay day, the day-to-day." My first book of poems reissued by Math Paper Press. 40% off at BooksActually this week only! Thanks, Tse Hao Guang, for the kind review !

After reading "The Myth of Sisyphus," I went on to read Camus's three novels one after another. The Stranger is deliberately provocative. The Plague goes beyond provocation and arrives at the realm of perfection. The Fall speaks in the ultra-subtle voice of the judge-penitent who is also the tempter. The narrator in his pleasurable anguish reminds me of the unnamed Man from Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground . All this reading leaves a very powerful impression on the mind, the chief part of which is an ethical imperative: do least harm. on a leafless twig a caterpillar of snow will change to nothing

i take the long way to see the frozen waterfall i have never left

here, a winter marvel falling water halted in mid-air

on a national holiday i sense the onset of a cold snow flurry

in the winter sky an indian arrowhead of ducks flying

the legacy of the winter sky for an orphaned time

On the subway, sitting across from me is a young man with whom I’d love to speak. book in hand skateboard between his feet yoga mat on his lap

The Stranger is deliberately provocative. Could someone kill another human being without meaning to? And when he does, how would society judge him? The Plague goes beyond provocation and arrives at the realm of perfection. It is so clear in its conception and so direct in its execution. It is everywhere intended and inevitable. It reminds me of the perfection of The Iliad and of Henry James's The Golden Bowl .

it's too cold to walk i run for the crosstown bus and miss the ducks

Guy and I put together this folio of photos and haiku in December. The photographs were taken during our visit to Japan last August. The haiku were inspired by the trip too. The folio will be available at the Rainbow Book Fair in NYC in April, and at the Brooklyn Book Fest in September. Kin Poetry Journal published six of my haiku . Thanks, Eric Norris, for inviting me to submit.

At Kitaro, my go-to Japanese restaurant, an American child stops jabbering and wails that she does not like the food. how i wish you could be sent to a corner of a bowl of soup

The absurd, according to Camus, arises from the tension between an inhuman world and our human longing to make sense of it. To kill oneself is to try to escape the absurd. Camus recommends, instead, living in lucid acknowledgement of this tension. It is not easy. In his view, existential philosophers such as Kierkegaard evade the problem by positing transcendence, or God, as beyond human reason. They abolish human reason in favor of the eternal. On the other hand, the phenomenologists such as Husserl claim to attend to the phenomena of the world but end up finding essences in them, analogous to Platonic forms, and so abolish the unknowability of the world. Instead of destroying or weakening either of the terms, Camus prefers to live fully and creatively in the gap between mind and world. For him, the figure of Sisyphus embodies this attitude of heroic futility. Unexpectedly, Camus finds a happiness in Sisyphus' plight. All of Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fa...

Thrilled to appear in the same 2015 Carcanet catalogue as Jon Silkin, Elaine Feinstein, Sujata Bhatt, David Morley, Tim Liardet, Tom Raworth, Kate Miller, Sophie Hannah, John Ashbery, Willis Barnstone, Sheri Benning, Les Murray, R.F. Langley, Muriel Spark, and Grevel Lindop.  "Singapore-born poet Jee Leong Koh's first book to be published in the UK is rich in detail of the worlds that he explores and invents as he follows his desire for an unknown other, moving tentatively, passionately, always uncertain of himself. His language is colloquial, musical, aware of the infusion of various traditions and histories. 'You go where? / I'm going from the latterly to the litany, from writs to rites.' The poems share many of the harsh and enriching circumstances that shape the imagination of a postcolonial queer writer. Taking leaves from other poets - Emilia Lanyer, Eavan Boland, Xunka' Utz'utz', Lee Tzu Pheng - Koh creates a text that is distinctively his own...

the himalayan pine a transplanted cross-dresser tucked up with needles

bits of christmas trees left behind on the sidewalk three-day-old champagne

winter rain collects in the long cracks of the road and small depressions

the topmost branches— no movement on new year’s day