Song of a Reformed Headhunter

We have a new video for Singapore Unbound! Thanks to Eunice Lau. The video captures our history and past accomplishments and looks forward to our future directions and plans. Take a look!

  My name is on the book cover, but the book is in fact written by many hands. My grateful thanks to the many Singaporeans in America who shared their stories with me and gave me permission to write them up in verse. Here it is, a book about us: SAMPLE AND LOOP: A SIMPLE HISTORY OF SINGAPOREANS IN AMERICA. "Based on personal interviews, these poems together tell a part of the story of the migration of Singaporeans to the United States of America. Sample and Loop traces the nonlinear, multidimensional, and surprising trajectory of lived experience in musical verse. Here are the Ceramicist, the Pediatrician, the Scenic Designer, the Chef, the Porn Star, and a host of other migrant-pilgrims sharing the tales of their lives even as they continue to make those lives in a country not of their birth. By narrating their discoveries, troubles, hopes, and sorrows, they refract a powerful beam of light on both countries and compose a wayward music for the road." All sale proceeds go t...

 With Henry, I saw New York City Ballet danced Balanchine's "Serenade," "Orpheus," and "Theme and Variations" last Tuesday. Balanchine's gift was for composition, color, and rhythm, and not for narrative, as the overly literal "Orpheus." Sara Mearns was outstanding in "Serenade." In "Theme and Variations," Megan Fairchild was lovely, and so was her partner Anthony Huxley, although he was not tall or strong enough to swing her effortlessly with one arm. 

 "Departing significantly from his earlier collection Steep Tea, Jee Leong Koh’s latest work, Inspector Inspector, is an elegiac, yet witty and bold exploration of history, exile and Asian queer identities. Through various forms and narrative, the reader is invited into a variety of spaces: the personal or the intimate, queer spaces of the lover; the everyday for the diasporic community drawing from interviews with Singaporeans living in America; and the elegiac poems in memory of the speaker’s late father."  Thanks, Jennifer Wong, for this lovely review of INSPECTOR INSPECTOR. 

Hard on the heels of the election of former Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam to the Presidency of Singapore came the outrageous sentencing of rapper Subhas Nair to six weeks’ imprisonment for attempting to “promote ill will” between different races in Singapore. His crimes? Making four social-media posts that called attention to the different responses of the authorities and the media to wrongdoing by perpetrators of different races. Subhas is not alone in feeling angry and frustrated about systemic racism in Singapore. More than half (56.2%) of respondents in a 2021 survey on race relations felt that racism was an important problem—this was an increase of almost 10 percentage points from the 46.3% response in the 2016 survey. During his run for the Presidency, Tharman spoke about the racism he experienced while growing up as a brown child. When he returned home from sports on public buses, there were fellow commuters who would not sit beside him. It was also not uncommon that ...

  The most valuable essays here are "To Die One's Own Death" and "In Extremis" on Simone Weil. The first argues persuasively, to my mind, that Freud's concept of the death drive arose from the death of his most loved daughter Sophie Halberstadt-Freud due to the 'Spanish' flu. That theoretical innovation led to, in Rose's words, "a considerable downgrade in the status of the drives of self-preservation and mastery that were key to his earlier topography of the mind, as they are all now seen to be working in the service of the organism's need to follow the path to its own death," or as Freud puts it in  Beyond the Pleasure Principle , "The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion." Rose applies this insight to our experience of callous and careless death during the COVID pandemic and derives an ethical guide: we should work for a fairer world where people are enabled not only to live free and fulfilling lives, but also...

 A brilliant reading of Freud's Moses and Monotheism by the late Edward Said. It originates as a talk given at the Freud Museum in London. After Said's talk, Jacqueline Rose responded, and her response was fittingly included in the Verso book. Said concludes: "Freud's uneasy relationship with the orthodoxy of his own community is very much a part of the complex of ideas so well described by Deutscher, who forgets to mention what I think is an essential component of it: its irremediably diasporic, unhoused character. This is a subject which George Steiner has celebrated with great elan for many years. But I would want to quality Deutscher by saying that this needn't be seen only as a Jewish characteristic; in our age of vast population transfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants, it can also be identified in the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside of his or her community. This is now ...

  One of the effects of  the July 2023 scandals  that hit the Singapore government is the state’s loss of control over the narrative around the upcoming Presidential Election. The Elected Presidency, an invention of the governing party, has come  under strong fire  for being a flawed institution that was created out of political maneuvering and expediency. Instead of uniting the country’s people behind a ceremonial but vital figurehead, it has been struck by the lightning of political dissent and division. On state-controlled media, the ruling party’s candidate Tharman Shanmugaratnam attempts to burnish his independent (and dare we say it, populist) credentials by describing himself as  a former student activist , an irony not lost on activists persecuted by the state. This blatant attempt to appeal to the younger and more politically conscious generation only throws up questions about Tharman’s complicity with past and present state persecution. ...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  My father died five years ago. Yesterday was his death anniversary. Five years seems wrong. It feels both too long and too short. In this state of unmooring, one becomes time's orphan, just as moving from Singapore to New York made me an orphan of place. I have lived in New York as a foster child for 20 years. 20 years seems wrong too, for the same reason. Yesterday I tried to recall the exact day I landed in JFK airport and took the bus to Grand Central Station, in order to board the train to Sarah Lawrence College, where I was to learn how to write, but I could not remember. What I remembered was sitting across from an older Jewish man on the train. He told me he was a jeweler who opened his own shop. Tonight, 20 years after I came to this city to see if I would be any good as a poet, I am having dinner with a younger Singaporean poet and her mom. She is here to pursue further training in the craft of wri...

Portuguese poet Florbela Espanca (1894-1930), in her life and work, reminds me quite a bit of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The disadvantaged background giving rise to huge literary ambitions. The New Woman of early 20th century. Loving the sonnet form for its combination of control and ecstasy. The sustained aesthetics of late Romanticism and early Modernism. Her frequent use of exclamations is off-putting to my ear, but the deployment of ellipses gives her sonnets a rare quality of inarticulateness before the ineffable.

All four essays originated as lectures. Morris gives a clear and eloquent explanation of his Socialism in the essays "Useful Work versus Useless Toil" and "How I Became a Socialist." The former lays interesting stress on the wastefulness of Capitalism, a useful counterpoint to how capitalist production is often seen as as the most efficient use of resources. The essay also links the hopes of labor to the hope for a Socialist future in a rhetorically useful move.  "What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing?  "It is threefold, I think—hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having; product worth having by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all of us to be conscious of it while we are at work; not a mere habit, the loss of which we shall feel as a fidgety man ...

 From "A Morality Based on Misfortune: The Plague " (1947): Camus's example shows how one may start out from a revolt-based morality and slide back quickly into a depressed one. This is because a morality founded upon passion, upon an irreducible part of ourselves, is often accompanied by bad conscience: how are we to avoid feeling guilty, certain as we are that we are concealing the face of Caligula within ourselves? No one is in any doubt, the power associated with the unleashing of passion is a fearsome danger for possible life . What is ordinarily missed is that the even is not then the product of passion, but of power. Even in Caligula one could not say that the evil was profound, since his capricious acts rapidly destroy his power—and he knows it. Evil is what is done by the SS in the concentration camps; it is what acquires power by killing and, by killing, increases the power of the regime it serves. One cannot even say exactly that evil lies in power (otherwise t...

  I will be reading from Inspector2 on Friday, July 7, 7.30-8.30 pm, at Kinokuniya Main Store in Singapore. Jamie Foo will moderate the Q&A. Join us!

Singapore Unbound and Mekong Review are jointly organizing the first-ever independent media fair in Singapore. With interesting exhibition booths and exciting speaker events, the fair is free and open to the public. Donations welcomed. Join the conversation!   Fair Exhibition (2.00-6.30 pm, 6th floor)  Ethos Books  Function 8  Gaudy Boy Press  Jom  Kontinentalist  Lepak Conversations  Meantime Magazine  Mekong Review  New Naratif  Singapore Climate Rally  Wake Up Singapore  and more!  Open Forum: Why Do We Need an Independent Media? (2.30-4.00 pm, Ruby Room, 5th floor)   What kinds of activities does the term “media” cover? What is meant by the term “independent”? If the media are to be independent, who exercises oversight? What are the sources of their authority and validity? What about objectivity or evenhandedness?  Panelists: Ariffin Sha (Wake Up Singapore), Loh Pei Ying (Head and Co-Fo...

Pleased to share with you that my book of poems Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times in the UK and a Finalist by the Lambda Literary Awards in the US, is included in Exact Editions' Reading List for LGBTQ+ Pride Month this year. Exact Editions is a digital publishing company based in London. Follow the link and you can read a sample of my book online and, if you like it well enough, purchase an e-copy.   

I reviewed Monica Youn's new book FROM FROM for The Poetry School in the UK. "From From, Monica Youn’s fourth book of poems, is a striking departure from her first three books. Instead of addressing race obliquely and occasionally, From From confronts it full-on, from beginning to end. Interviewed in Bomb magazine, Youn explained, ‘I always felt I had permission to talk about race, but I wanted to figure out a way to write about race that would ring true to me.’ The child of Korean immigrants, Youn trains her incisive intelligence and considerable lyrical gift on her experience growing up in Texas and living in New York as a racial minority. The result is a volume of poems that is deeply heartfelt yet bracingly suspicious, exploratory and accomplished...." If you're in NYC and would like to hear Monica Youn read, please consider coming to this fun Happy Hour jointly organized by the NY Public Library and Singapore Unbound on Friday, May 26, 5.30-7.30 pm, on a midtown...

Nothing extra, nothing wasted, that's how good this novella is. Met the novelist and her son at the launch of the Archipelago Books translation (by Jessica Moore) in a beautiful brownstone home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. 

 "The alienated patient, in search for and in need of an idol, finds the analyst and usually endows him with the qualities of his father and mother as the two powerful persons he knew as a child. Thus the content of transference is usually related to infantile patterns while its intensity is the result of the patient's alienation. Needless to add that the transference phenomenon is not restricted to the analytic situation. It is to be found in all forms of idolization of authority figures, in political, religious, and social life." (53) "Just as our sense develop and become human senses in the process of their productive relatedness to nature, our relatedness to man, says Marx, becomes human relatedness in the act of loving. "Let us assume man to be man , and his relation to the world to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc. If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically inclined person; if you wish to influence...

My review of Jenny Xie's The Rupture Tense has just been published in the TLS this week. I liked the book very much, and I had a great deal of pleasure in saying so.

 SNOW AT 5 PM receives a really engaged and engaging review in French on Amazon! (English translation follows.) Snow at 5 M est sans doute la fiction la plus intéressante que j’ai pu lire depuis très longtemps. Mais est-il possible de parler de fiction ? C’est bien plus que cela. Le dernier ouvrage de Jee Leong Koh est assez inclassable. C’est de la poésie en premier lieu mais c’est aussi un livre engagé notamment contre les discriminations (raciales, sociétales, basées sur le genre, etc.) et un regard très incisif sur la société américaine depuis les années 40 jusqu’à 2066. Oui, il faut mentionner que ce livre est également une œuvre d’anticipation aux tonalités dystopiques. Si les haïkus sont superbes, si les sujets abordés sont sérieux, il n’en est pas moins que l’auteur ne néglige pas l’humour, y compris l’auto-dérision, et certains passages sont pour le moins croustillants. L’originalité demeure en ce que Jee Leong Koh s’imagine avoir découvert une liasse de 107 haïkus légère...

This hybrid memoir offers many pleasures and insights, but I will return to it for poetic prose passages such as this one about migration:  "I had once thought life here would be divided into before and after. It's not like that at all. Rather, it is what is now and what is yet going to happen. Whatever is "now" includes the so-called past, no matter across which border. Forgive me—it turned out that I like being an emigree, just as like the 30th of a long month: it seems to be over, but look, there is still the 31st."

A restless intelligence drives the plotting and thinking in this collection of stories and essays, many of which are about the author's love affair with Hong Kong, where she grew up. The writing is laced with a wry humor and, more surprising, a tender sympathy for the young, particularly young Hongkongers who have to live with the political and social changes that have befallen on their city. There is next-to-no sloganeering in Xu Xi's writing, but plenty of hard-earned insight into what it means to be a transnational and ethnically Chinese writer, born in Indonesia, grown up in Hong Kong, and thereafter gone back and forth between Hong Kong and the United States.

I had a lovely day. It was also the start of my spring break. In the morning, did a bit of work for Singapore Unbound/Gaudy Boy. Took a nap. Read Krystyna Dąbrowska's Tideline , yet another wonderful book of poems by another contemporary Polish poet bought at AWP from the terrific Zephyr Press. Her poetry reminded me of Cavafy and Szymborska. In the evening, GH took me to Osteria 106 where we had a delicious dinner. And then, back home, we watched two episodes of The Amazing Race and dreamed of traveling around the world.  Here's "Wooden Figure of a Hunchbacked Dignitary" by Krystyna Dąbrowska:  All his life he tried to hide the dromedary  ridge within the splendor of distinction and accolades.  He obtained all possible honors,  among them the love of a beautiful woman.  At last he climbed so high  he had the right, like a king,  to disguise himself after death in a perfect body  chiseled by a famous hand.  He could have gone on for ages...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   In Capital, Volume One , Karl Marx shows that capitalism is the thief of time. In pursuit of ever-greater profits, capitalism increases either the working hours or the productivity of those hours in order to cream off the surplus value from the wages paid to workers for maintaining bare life. Individual capitalists cannot help doing so if their business is to stay afloat in the market competition. Since capitalism is pretty much the global mode of production now, national economies cannot escape the logic either. If they cannot exploit their own citizens due to labor laws, they will exploit vulnerable migrant children .  Written in the 1950s, when the American postwar economy was supposedly booming, the play A Raisin in the Sun , by Lorraine Hansberry, revolves ostensibly around a Black family's difficulties in purchasing and owning a house in a white Chicago neighborhood. Yet, to put the emphasi...

The graveyard scenes were moving and alive with personalities, but the telling of the Lincoln narrative through real and fictional excerpts falls somewhat flat for me.

Wow! My book is reviewed in this week's TLS, and Jaya Savige seems to like INSPECTOR INSPECTOR very much. I'm especially pleased and grateful that he came to this book after reading STEEP TEA ("majestic"!), CONNOR & SEAL ("capacious imagination"!), and SNOW AT 5 PM ("hefty"?!?). I will shut up now and bask.

 One of those books that made me wish that I had discovered them earlier in my own education. Walter Rodney's Decolonial Marxism is descriptively subtitled "Essays from the Pan-African Revolution." For once the publisher's blurb on the back cover describes the book's contents accurately:  Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean, and in Africa. He not only witnessed a Pan-African and socialist internationalism; in his efforts to build mass organisations, catalyse rebellious ferment, and theorize an anti-colonial path to self-emancipation, he can be counted among its prime authors. Decolonial Marxism records such a life by collecting previously unbound essays written during the world-turning days of Black revolution. In drawing together pieces in which Rodney elaborates on the nexus of race and class, offers his ref...

Here's a thoughtful and perceptive  review of Inspector Inspector, by Al Lim: "Inspector Inspector is a haunting meditation on death and desire through a father's voice and legacy. Jee Leong Koh's second book at Carcanet Press intersperses several sequences – palinodes written in his dead father Koh Dut Say's voice, gratitude to his poetry mentors, poems based on his sex diaries in New York City, inspections during the Covid-19 pandemic, and life interviews with diasporic Singaporeans. The collection ends with a eulogy – a response to his father's death."

 The four novels in this Grove book are The Square , Moderato Cantabile , 10.30 on a Summer Night , and The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas . It is marvelous how Duras conjures up a poetic intensity from very simple situations. The paraphrasable plot is laughably simple, but the patterning of language and incident is masterly. There are intensifiers deployed—a limited time and place, the intoxication of alcohol, the murder of one's lover, music, a storm—but all woven in so naturally that they seem to come from within the characters, rather than without. The man and the girl would find their way to the park bench one afternoon because they are who they are. The method is to bypass psychology to aim straight for the formal, and intense, emotion.

So grateful for H. L. Hix's clarifying review of INSPECTOR INSPECTOR in Stride Magazine. He found the throughline in all the poetic sequences of the book. I will be reading his final paragraph again and again with much joy and satisfaction.  "The phrases in Inspector Inspector, themselves all carefully chosen, do not reduce to one refrain, but they do reinforce certain thematic concerns, most prominently the will that applies to all the persons in the book (father, son, lovers, Singaporeans…), and into which I take the reader to be invited: let us remain alive to one another."   If you'd like to get Inspector2:  US: Bookshop.org UK: Carcanet

Does anyone here remember downelink.com? Granddaddy of Grindr? Wrote a poem about it. And a poem about recycling Roy Lichenstein. Two "Ungovernable Bodies" published at A Gathering of the Tribes (AGOTT). Thanks, Danny Shot, for accepting the poems.

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I was reading Walter Rodney's essay "The Historical Roots of African Underdevelopment" in  Decolonial Marxism  when I came across this passage: "Central and South American gold and silver played a crucial role in meeting the need for coin in the expanding capitalist money economy, while African gold was also significant in this respect. African gold helped the Portuguese to finance further navigations around the Cape of Good Hope and into Asia; it was the main source for the Dutch mint in the seventeenth century (which helped to secure Amsterdam as the financial capital of Europe in that period); and it is no coincidence that when the English struck a new gold coin in 1663 they called it the 'guinea'."  "What is a guinea?" a student in my seventh-grade English class asked recently. We had just read that the rich old lady Miss Havisham was giving the young Pip twenty-five...