Song of a Reformed Headhunter

A short essay on revising, or not, a published poem. I cogitated on "To a Young Poet." Thanks, Joshua Ip and Sing Lit Station, for inviting me to contribute my thoughts to TRACK CHANGES .

Inventive premises, bold experimentation, sly humor, political parables about the relationships between the individual and the Indonesian authorities, and between men and women. The storytelling puts an ironic distance between the storyteller and his characters, and so the reader feels his or her own distance from them too. The result, for me at least, is a sense of respect, but not of warm admiration nor of profound connection.

I've been dipping into The Forgotten Keys almost every night before going to sleep, and discovering a singular historical and political sensibility in the dreamlike imagery. The opening of "The Castle (I Came to Shoot the President)": To continue the story. We made love— they seized power. And they hold it over us, those who once spit [sic] the farthest and sang the loudest, who cheated on their tests— they hold the power now. They know all about us, where we live, and have sent us bills on official letterhead. Judging from the curtains in the rear window, reports are going straight into the black desk.... Polish poet Tomasz Rózycki is a worthy successor to Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert.

A beguiling collection of four stories, slim but not insubstantial. The storytelling is surefooted, the whimsy is put to profound questioning of religious belief—is loyalty the same as faith, asks the dog of the camel—and a sly eye is turned on human foibles and social customs. Since so much Anglophone Singaporean writing is oriented towards the West, especially now when many younger writers study creative writing in the UK and the US, it is refreshing to read a writer so at home in the English language, but with his cultural references turned towards the Malay and Arabic worlds, towards the eclectic blending of Islamic and animistic beliefs.

Singapore Unbound's Public Statement on PAP's Attack on Alfian Sa'at. Sign up for weekly newsletter here . Singapore Unbound strongly condemns the attack by Singapore's ruling party, the People's Action Party (PAP), on Singaporean author Alfian Sa'at. In a letter published on the PAP website, Member of Parliament Dr. Tan Wu Meng cherry-picks Alfian's Facebook posts and misreads his words to depict the author falsely as unpatriotic. Most pernicious is Dr. Tan's statement: "This man grew up in Singapore. Singapore gave him his education and he earns a living here. An education and a living that is denied to many minorities in the region." The suggestion that minorities should be especially grateful to Singapore teeters on racism, if it does not tip right over. Gratitude is neither here nor there. As a commentator has it, Singaporeans do not live in a feudal state, but in a modern democracy, in which citizens hold certain obligation to the stat...

Poets Al Black and Tim Conroy put me at such ease during this interview yesterday. I read poems from STEEP TEA and CONNOR & SEAL and chatted with them about writing with playfulness and prayerfulness; navigating life in major cities; the influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game ; the inspiration from Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah ; the importance of having a trusted writing group; the primacy of experience, memory, and images over objects. Get CONNOR & SEAL from my indie publisher, Sibling Rivalry .

I asked Henry Abelove who were his intellectual guiding lights in his youth, and he cited Paul Goodman. What a surprise! I found Paul Goodman at Sarah Lawrence and consumed his poetry and essays on education. After hearing HA's answer, I bought Goodman's Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals . The most striking aspect of this book is how Goodman manages to be both so logical and so imaginative. Whether he is discussing pornography, writer's block, making pacifist films, or banning cars from Manhattan, he is both persuasive and surprising. His imagination is not bounded by logic, and his logic is not softened by imagination. Some of the essays here are outdated, but the thinking behind them remains fresh and interesting. About advance-guard writing in America (and how commonsensical is the use of the English expression, instead of its pretentious French counterpart), Goodman writes as a committed writer himself: "An artists does not know that he is advance-guard, h...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  I have become obsessed with the Japanese manga series Berserk . A dark fantasy set in medieval Europe, it features a powerful but flawed protagonist called Guts. His sword the Dragon Slayer is described repeatedly thus: "That thing was too big to be a sword. Too big, too thick, too heavy and too rough. It was more like a large hunk of iron." You can see readily why this tortured hero, who fights not only the demons around him, but also the worse ones within, should draw to him teenage boys and all who have kept the wounds of male teenage-hood. In interviews, the creator of Berserk, Kentaro Miura, owns up to the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche. Of particular relevance is the German philosopher's warning, that "whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." It is a warning that is of great pertinence, as I see it, to our political moment. In...

Review of What Burns by Dale Peck (USA: Soho Press, 2019) By Jee Leong Koh Published in Singapore Unbound's SP Blog Content warning: child molestation and violent rape. This review contains spoilers. Reading Dale Peck’s story collection What Burns , I do not find an irreverent provocateur, didactic narcissist, or campy satirist, as other readers have claimed to find. Instead, I think I see the outline of a moralist, of a higher sort. These seven stories, written or published over a span of 12 years, from 1999–2010, are remarkably consistent in probing contemporary beliefs in right and wrong, good and evil. They rub the price tags off our bottled possessions and packaged fantasies to see what the labels hide. Mark Athitakis’s review in the Post wastes too much space in rehearsing Peck’s notoriety (his hatchet jobs on other writers, his attack on Pete Buttigieg) but he fastens correctly on “a prevailing theme” in Peck’s writings, “the error of refusing to see betrayal and dev...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  On social media Singaporeans are coming out in support of justice for George Floyd and other victims of racial injustice in America. An observer speculated that some of these postings are made to sock it to American finger-wagging around the world. Some to 'prove' that Singaporean 'multiculturalism' and 'pragmatism' offer a better system of governance. However, there are others who, seeing the analogies between American and Singaporean racism, are protesting the murder of George Floyd to draw attention to problems closer to home. "Racism is a global structure," as the writer of Race Tuition Centre reminds us. The same logic that undergirded the enslavement of African Americans "currently enables the exploitation of South Asian migrant labour globally." The link between racial and economic injustice has become even clearer in this pandemic. The virus has affecte...