Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The gift of being read by someone who has followed your work from the very start. Thanks, Andrew , for this lovely review. "Jee Leong Koh’s latest book feels like a work that has been waiting to hatch for many years. It is a new departure, Koh has never repeated a concept, but it is, at the same time, a book that brings to focus two longstanding concerns. The first of these is poetic and the second of these is personal. "Ever since Payday Loans (2007), Koh has been asking a question about poetry: does a poet learn best by inhabiting a set form or by wandering from one form to another? Is life a contained house like Dickinson or an open road like Bishop? The toing and froing can be seen in Payday Loans , a sonnet series, Equal to the Earth (2009), a variety of forms, then back to a series of ghazals in Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (2011). In Connor and Seal , the two threads interweave: Part One adopts highly varied forms; Part 2 adheres to a single form. The result...

"Each of the forty-six poems begin with an act of reading: the resultant creations aren't reactive fictions or attempts to better the originals. They are, to carry on with Duncan's ideas concerning poetic (gay) creation, extensions of a ground, acknowledgements of the fault-lines where poems break from."  Eshuneutics reviews  Steep Tea . 

Andrew's book of photographs and drawings of Arnold arrived last week. It's a beautiful book, a moving record not only of Arnold's life, but also of the collaboration between artist and model. From the back cover: Arnold Ziza, a model from Manchester, came to the United Kingdown as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That transition changed his life and his sense of self. This book is a biography in images, a record of his outer and inner changes from late boyhood to early manhood.  Produced with both imagination and passion, it's a gift that I cherish.

My very good friend Andrew Howdle, who works from Leeds, UK, has a beautiful portfolio of photographs and drawings out at Dimension Magazine . Titled cannily "The ART of Modeling," the work is as much about seeing the model Arnold Aziza as showing him off. "Arrival," a professional-looking fashion shot, reminds us of the various meanings of the key word in the title: "Model (N) a new system of seeing (1593); an exemplar (1693); a person drawn by an artist (1873); (V) to wear clothes for a fashion display (1904). The work looks better than much of what GH and I saw in Chelsea during our gallery hop yesterday. Alexander and Bonin showed the "Airmail Paintings" of Eugenio Dittborn, a Chilean artist. According to the press release, the collages on lightweight fabrics that could be folded and mailed to friends circumvented the constraints of working under Pinochet's dictatorship. The format was formally and politically resonant but the collages t...

Andrew Howdle has been a keen reader of my poetry for a number of years. His review of my book Equal to the Earth is informed by his intimate knowledge of my work as well as by our regular correspondence. If I suggest that his review is so far the best reading of my book, I do so not because he is highly complimentary, but because he reads it with high intelligence and broad sympathy. He is sensitive to the various ways technique contributes to emotion, and so neither is discussed in isolation or, worse, as if they are contradictory. Instead, he explains both the vision and the viscera of the work.

What little I have learned about hermeticism, I have learned it from Eshuneutics' blog. He has written about Equal to the Earth in three separate posts, each highlighting a different hermetical aspect of my writing, by looking at an individual poem. His post Sea reads that image in the book and in the poem "Fire Island." Androgyne interprets my poem "Brother" rightly against Plato's Symposium . Mermen looks at the poem of the same name, contrasting its use of hermetical imagery with Simon Lowy's.

"Central to Notes on Thought and Vision is HD’s belief in the over-mind, a “jellyfish” state, a kind of lens which allows vision. This is complimented by another lens, the love-mind." Read more .