Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Larina in the AAP forum asks: Jee, I've found in some circles that poets of a particular ethnic background are sometimes bothered by an assumption that they were influenced by other poets of that ethnic background. Do you find that you are sometimes categorized as an Asian American poet and how do you feel about that? And here is my reply: I have been sometimes categorized by publishers, editors and readers as an Asian American poet. It bothers me because that designation does not describe at all my person and my poetry. Read more .

Larina Warnock read my poem "Brother" on the Bench Press website, and liked it so much that she invited me to be the Guest Poet this month on the online discussion forum of the Academy of American Poets. She asked for a note on my poetics, and so I wrote something of my current thinking for her: A forthcoming review of my new book says, quite correctly, that my language faces three directions: Singapore, England and the USA. Loitering at the place where three roads meet, my person cannot travel down all three and be one traveler, but my poetry attempts that impossible integration, and so records the successes and failures of that attempt. The disparate elements are not just those of place, but also of time, people, idea, feeling, and what lies below feeling. If modern life has been characterized by fragmentation, I sense a new—old—desire for wholeness. Wholeness not based on discredited formulas—for salvation, community or knowledge—but on new, and renewed, forms that realiz...