Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . "Art can activate the inert," I heard the Singaporean theater artist Ong Keng Sen say in his keynote lecture for last weekend's 6th biennial Singapore Literature Festival in NYC. "It can activate what is latent, what is potential." This is one of many gems that I will carry with me after the festival. Another is the story that  Ajoomma  writer-director He Shuming told about joining a group tour from Singapore to Korea to research the aunties for his film. Hearing that he was single, the ajoommas wanted to match him with their daughters, but on learning that he was a filmmaker, they stopped.  The stories were both funny and sobering. Filmmaker Dev Benegal shared his memory of sitting besides a famous film editor for four whole years in order to learn how to direct. Author and curator Simon Wu explained his urgent and joyful discovery of forgotten Asian American artists in NYC. Theater-mak...

 I had a lovely, wide-ranging conversation about my book SNOW AT 5 PM with poet Indran Amirthanayagam. Originally from Sri Lanka, which Indran still calls by its older name Ceylon, Indran is a naturalized American who used to work in the diplomatic corp. His own poetry is powerfully influenced by Whitman, O'Hara, and Lorca.