Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Thanks, Akshita Nanda, for the feature in Singapore's Straits Times: Poet Koh Jee Leong Had to Leave Singapore to Engage with It  Shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize for English poetry last November, Jee Leong Koh says he ironically found his voice only after leaving the country in 2003 to study in the United States. He lives in Manhattan with his partner, teaching in a private school, but continues to engage with Singapore in his critically acclaimed verse. Take the collection Steep Tea, to be published in July by UK publisher Carcanet Press. It is partly Koh's response to women poets such as Ireland's Eavan Boland or American Rachael Briggs, who co-wrote the titular poem as a call-and-response Japanese "renga" form. The collection also includes Koh's reactions and thoughts on Singaporean icons such as the old KTM Railway Station at Tanjong Pagar and poet Lee Tzu Pheng's well-known and much-discussed poem about life here, My Country A...

when the sun drops another view of fuji-san holding up the feet In PN Review 220, a celebration of Eavan Boland. Many tributes, from Sapphire, Mark Doty, Paula Meehan, Tara Bergin, Colm Tóibín, Yusef Kommunyakaa, and Sandra M. Gilbert, among others. I have a small piece that looks at Boland's sense of humor in "The Fire in Our Neighborhood."

Saw the book in Powerhouse Arena last Sunday when we were wandering around Dumbo, GH, WL, TB and me, bought it and started reading it immediately. It forms an interesting companion to this Irish woman poet's body of poetry. Again and again Boland returns to her memory of being a young wife and mother in a new suburb outside of Dublin in the 1970s, when violence in the North unsettled life in the South. "Domestic Violence," which ends the first section of biographical essays, records especially succinctly Boland's forceful attempt to subvert the received poetic tradition in order to make room for, and give significance to, the domestic poem. The second section titled "Maps" consists of critical pieces on women poets who gave her help and direction in questioning the tradition that she loves. There are essays here on Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Plath, Edna St, Vincent Millay, Denise Levertov, Anne Bradstreet, Gwendolyn Brooks and...

Umbrella , a journal of poetry and related prose, celebrates its fifth anniversary with a special showcase of Carmine Street Metrics poetry. I have a poem in it. Congrats, Kate Bernadette Benedict, on five good years. Thanks, Patricia Carragon, for first publishing the poem "The Children and the Swans" in the Brownstone Poets Anthology . Thanks, Eric, for asking me to read for Carmine Street.

The body of an ageing woman Is a memory —Eavan Boland, “Anna Liffey” The first fluency has left me. Sex has acquired history. I grow afraid of repeating myself unknowingly. Love, new man, old enemy, you enclose me with your mouth. Go slowly.

The Old Wallet he cannot see from the surface of a wealth he cannot keep --Eavan Boland, “Making Money” Pocket of pockets, my old wallet keeps the likenesses of long dead Presidents, credit card, coins, stamps, memberships, but not a photograph of love. My reason? I thought that the mind is a fitter place for images of illimitable grace. The old wallet will do for society but soul resides not in skin but in me. Yet now I see the mind exchanges love so easily for venom and forgets the daily accumulation of its debts and bad seasons it is a veteran of. So I am asking for a photograph, Love, on love’s behalf.— *

A Whole History In the morning they were both found dead      Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. --Eavan Boland, “Quarantine” The floor is cold with the coming winter.      I pull on white socks and sit down before the blackout window to think about our separation closing in. We have a history longer than the two years      that fitted like a shirt. You learned a long time ago to enjoy ironing. I always had someone ironing shirts for me. But we go further back than birth, to furtive       park encounters, coded glances, tapping on bathroom walls, ways of staying warm and white in winter. Yesterday a young friend said it’s wrong      to expose children to a gay wedding. The chill hit me again. Rage spread like blood over my clean shirt. I cannot wash it off. You are no longer willing.      In the closet the shirt, part remi...

Attribution I speak with the forked tongue of colony. --Eavan Boland, “The Mother Tongue” My grandfather said life was better under the British. He was a man who begrudged his words but he did say this. I was born after the British left. They left an alphabet book in my house, the same one they left at school. I was good in English. I was the only one in class who knew “bedridden” does not mean lazy. I was so good in English they sent me to England where I proved my grandfather right until I was almost sent down for plagiarism I knew was wrong and did not know was wrong, since where I came from everyone plagiarized. I learned to attribute everything I wrote. It is not easy. Sometimes I cannot find out who first wrote the words I wrote. Sometimes I think I wrote the words I wrote with such delight. Often the words I write have confusing origins and none can tell what belongs to the British, my grandfather or me. *

What the River Says The body is a source. Nothing more. --Eavan Boland, “Anna Liffey” I too compare my life frequently to a river, small hidden beginning, final dissolution, body charged with a name but always changing. It is a place to live by, to keep a few chickens or raise a city famous for its graceful bridges, if one cares for good eating or reaching across. On mornings when the rear courtyard is stony, how enjoyable to walk to the water and hear its gossip about the young lovers parting upriver. The annual swelling is a power for great evil but also a pregnancy. It carries boats and people. For explorers, there is a chance of a waterfall. Sinners, those hybrid creatures, like centaurs, may drive their reluctant horses into the flood and experience total absolution in an instant. So, if my body is a river, I won’t dismiss it as a source and nothing more. It is a source of my voice but it is also my voice: that is what the river says on its way to the ...

The Scriptures But I was Ceres then and I knew winter was in store for every leaf --Eavan Boland, “Pomegranates” Because my father has no story to bequeath his son, I make up stories to live by. I am the Dragon Prince who falls into forbidden love and so is banished from the palace of the sea. On days when the sun brandishes its magic swords I journey to the West as wily Monkey God to fetch the Scriptures, fighting demons on the way. From my right ear I draw my tiny magic pole and whip the fox spirit with a springy cane or else, expanding the prod to a temple pillar, crush a snake demon with the majesty of heaven. How powerful I feel then, how abject my foes, how full of light the rounded world, a bursting peach, until the ring my father set around my head tightens and digs into my flesh, my skull. I roll and tumble through the seven worlds but not the ring. All of my reach contracts into a burning hole. I cry, “Mercy!” and hear the fox squeal in my ears, and hi...

One Humor From where I stand the sea is just a rumour. --Eavan Boland, “Our Origins Are in the Sea” In medieval theories of medicine, one humor escaped the logic of the lovely charts. From where I stand the sea is just a rumor. I love the way the year cycles into summer, the sun characteristic as the parts, in medieval theories of medicine, of humor. But from the times, closely watched, swells a tumor and the tide of recrimination starts. From where I stand the sea is just a rumor. Damn the homosexual. Blame the consumer. Fault the degeneration of the arts or medieval theories of medicine. Ill humor. Fear grows like barnacles on baby boomers while the young sails resent the ancient farts. From where I stand the sea is just a rumor. We hold to different memories of summer as yellow bile possess our yellow hearts. In medieval theories of medicine, one humor, from where I stand to see, was just a rumor. *

The Rooms I Move In the bay windbreak, the laburnum hang fire, feel the ache of things ending in the jasmine darkening early --Eavan Boland, “The Rooms of Other Women Poets” I have moved in the rooms of other women poets and, seeing African violets, checked if they needed water, careful not to disturb the stolen time in the chairs, the swivel leather seat, the one with a high cane back. The desks, if there was one, were bright with circumstance cast by an Anglepoise lamp, crooked, articulate. The window might look out on an old monastery but the door opened its ear to a cry or a creak. Such rooms I moved in when I move between the men thick with desire they thrust into another’s hand, before your face I offer the flower of my mouth, red in the red light but also out of the red light, a wild hibiscus impossible to label chaste if my red mouth is not so chastened by my need. *

Too tired to say much about the reading, but just want to note it on the blog. Hosted by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, at the newish Battery City Park Ferry Terminal, the event commemorated the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's discovery of the river that now carries his name. The poems were written for the occasion, and read by the poets: Eavan Boland's "The Port of New York, 1956," John Ashbery's "In One Afternoon," Toon Tellegen's "A Poem for Henry Hudson," Jorie Graham's "No Bearing and Disproportion" (an extract), Paul Muldoon's "Lines for the Quartercentenary of the Voyage of the Halve Maen ," and John Koethe's "The Great Gatsby." Michael Schmidt introduced each poet. The ferry engine, coming by at regular intervals, competed with and accompanied the voices.

Violence in the poem “Object Lessons” is depicted on the husband’s coffee mug: a hunting scene with dogs, hawks, picnic linen and pitches, a wild rabbit, a thrush, and a lady smiling as the huntsman kisses her. Violence is also literal here, not just pictorial. With a “shiver/ of presentiment,” the couple found the broken pieces of the mug—pieces of the sparrow hawk and the huntsman’s kisses—on the floorboards they had sworn “to sand down and seal/ with varnish.” The description of the mug evokes Keats’s Grecian urn, an allusion strengthened by the repeated references to the picnic pitches. But the poet not only breaks the mold here, she also shows the immediate, human surroundings of the aestheticised mug/urn: the rough, unvarnished floorboards of a new house. The next poem “On the Gift of The Birds of America by John James Audubon” is, aptly, an elegy. The bird book speaks to the poet of “the celebration of an element/ which absence has revealed”; the creatures of the air remind the...

This book consists of three sections: Object Lessons with 11 poems; Outside History , a 12-part sequence; and Distances with 12 poems. This three-section division was used for the first time in the previous book The Journey , and, like that book, the middle section gives the collection its title. The division reminds me of a triptych, with its central and flanking panels. Another similarity to The Journey lies in the opening poem. Like “I Remember,” “The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me” is a poem about Boland’s mother, and functions as a kind of invocation to the Mother Muse, most explicitly sought out in Night Feed . “The Black Lace Fan” also sets the strategy of this section Object Lessons . The fan, a gift from an ex-lover to the poet’s mother, is described in such a way as to evoke character and situation. Its “wild roses . . ./ darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly” suggests the mother’s passion. Its tortoiseshell, though it has “the reticent, clear patience of its element,”...

Charles VI of France, called the Beloved, as well as the Mad, married Isabella of Bavaria in 1385. He suffered from bouts of insanity throughout his life, howling like a wolf through his palace, refusing to bathe, and, in later years, believing that he was made from glass. “The Glass King” ends the journey of this book. It is not only about the relationship between wife and husband, it is also about the relationship between the female poet and the male poetic tradition, as the poet makes clear when she breaks into the story of Charles VI and Isabella in her own person, to “elect” her “prince, demented// in a crystal past” as “emblem// and ancestor of our lyric.” This male lyric tradition is royal in his authority, and fragile in his powers. In conceiving poetry as a beautiful crystal, he is “out of reach// of human love.” The queen-wife-lover knows she needs his hand to turn stone into lace, the way the medieval stonesmiths did. This modern stoneworker is, however, an ordinary honest w...

Four poems next about the Irish experience of immigration, another kind of journey in this book. The first two—“An Irish Childhood in England: 1951” and “Fond Memory”—make use of Boland’s own personal experience of living in postwar London as a child; the first poem ends with an anecdote about a teacher’s racism. “Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland” looks back, through the lens of art, at a nation-republic one left behind. The immigrant speaker of “The Emigrant Irish” wants to find strength in the example of earlier immigrants, to imagine how their “possessions” of hardship and fortitude may become our “power.” I like best “Fond Memory.” It first describes the London convent Boland attended as a child, wearing darned worsted, eating rationed food, playing English games, and learning how wise the Magna Carta was. When the Reverend Mother announced that the King had died, all the children cried, except for Boland. But she had to fight back tears when, back home after school, he...

Part III of the book opens with “Listen. This is the Noise of Myth.” The poem meditates on the difference between myth and life, and the consolations of myth. It begins with “the story of a man and woman” under a willow and beside a weir, near a river in a wooded clearing. They are “fictions of my purpose,” the poet reminds us in the second stanza, before evoking in sensuous detail their wintry flight through the Midlands, to get to that willow. Returning to the start of her story, the middle of theirs, the poet raises our expectations that something is about to happen: “Will we see/ hungers eased after months of hiding?/ Is there a touch of heat in that light?” Instead of fulfilling our expectations, she asks our forgiveness for setting “the truth to rights.” They never made love; there was no journey; no woodland and no river and no weir. The man and the woman were never the poet’s. Only the myth, or fiction, is hers, only “this sequence of evicted possibilities” called Invention. Le...

The long poem “The Journey” forms part two of the book. It reworks two male myths. In twenty-four quatrains, the poem rewrites Aeneas’ descent to the underworld, while the 6-quatrain envoi reframes the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The epigraph is from The Aeneid , Book VI: “Immediately cries were heard. These were the loud wailing of infant souls weeping at the very entrance-way; never had they had their share of life’s sweetness for the dark day had stolen them from their mothers’ breasts and plunged them to a death before their time. “ The poet begins the poem angry that poets waste their time on “the obvious// emblem instead of the real thing.” They write about hyssop dipped in lamb’s blood, instead of antibiotics and sulpha. She falls into a dream-like state (“not sleep, but nearly sleep, not dreaming really/ but as ready to believe”) and is visited by Sappho who guides her down to the underworld. They arrive beside a river in what seemed to be “an oppressive suburb of the dawn.” ...

As I read The Journey , I am rediscovering an old truth: good poems are those that cannot be paraphrased satisfactorily. Paraphrasing them is like reporting on the memory of one’s last conversation with someone dear. “The Wild Spray” is about the poet’s marriage: the indistinct happiness of the early days clarifying into present reality, or, as the poem puts it, “a random guess becoming a definition.” Those early days were an ironstone jug filled with long-stemmed flowers whose names the poet learned only much later: true rose, mountain rose, asparagus fern, rosemary, forsythia. The summer air had a consistency of milk. The lights on the mountain were sharp like crocuses seen through the snowfall of darkness, whereas the light on the street, the streetlamp in the rain, was a planet of tears near the whitebeam trees. __________ Reading “The Wild Spray” From Paris you brought back your first gift for me, a stainless steel wine holder, arched back in a single curve, seen from the side, an...