Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Whatever happened to politics in Singapore's English-language poetry? An enlightening essay by the inimitable Gwee Li Sui, who discusses poems by Gilbert Koh, Felix Cheong, Boey Kim Cheng, Cyril Wong, Grace Chia, Aaron Lee, Yeow Kai Chai, and me. Here's the spoiler: politics has never gone away. Essay published as part of a Singapore issue, by Zurich University of the Arts.

These are poems of an assured mastery, of a voice arriving at itself, even as it speaks of loss. Although Boey has migrated to Australia and become an Australian citizen there, he cannot help but speak of Singapore--its loss due to time, urban redevelopment, deaths in the family, and migration. Poems such as "Dinky's House of Russian Goods" and "The National Theatre, Singapore" bring lost places back to the life. Sequences such as "To Markets" and "Chinatowns" are rich with details and associations, recalled in memory. Most impressive, to my mind, is "The Disappearing Suite," which produces from a very particular life a universal music. It touches the depths sounded in Eliot's "The Four Quartets," though without the latter's religious angst. Who said that a poet's task is to make of his or her life a symbol? In "The Disappearing Suite," and more generally in Clear Brightness , Boey has succeeded in do...

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...

Judges Gwee Li Sui, Leong Liew Geok and Boey Kim Cheng awarded the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize (English poetry category) to Joshua Ip and Yong Shu Hoong. On the morning of hearing the result, I was very disappointed. While I was turning the disappointment over in my mind on my way to school, a jogger, silver-haired, in his fifties, ran past me without shoes. a sore loser i'd start writing in spanish if i can run barefoot

Order information for "Starry Island: New Writing from Singapore," the summer 2014 issue in the MANOA series of international literature published by the University of Hawai'i. Edited by Frank Stewart and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, this issue features the work of over two dozen writers and translators, including Kim Cheng Boey, Philip Jeyaretnam, Jee Leong Koh, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, O Thiam Chin, Wena Poon, Alfian Sa'at, Jeremy Tiang, Toh Hsien Min, and Cyril Wong.

On June 15 met Nick Liu and Jen Crawford at NTU's School of Humanities and Social Sciences theatrette to be video-recorded for SPARK, a soon-to-be-launched online poetry archive. It is the hope that the archive will be to Singapore poetry what Poets.org, for instance, is to the Americans. Following the format of the series, I read a poem that has influenced me, in my case, Boey Kim Cheng's "Day of No Name," talked about it, and then read a poem of mine that is related to the first. I chose to read "In His Other House." Not only does it refer to Boey's book Days of No Name , but it expresses a vision of an alternative Singapore that is implicit in Boey's writing. The poem is also further and happily linked to Boey as it has been published in Mascara , edited by Boey and Michelle Cahill. I think I said clearly what I found helpful in Boey's poem, but afterwards I wished I had said something more about the usefulness of living away from Singapor...

I knew from his poetry that Boey was a restless traveler, but I did not know how restless until I read his recently published collection of essays Between Stations (Giramondo, 2009). The essays range, with its backpacking author, from Xian in China to London, via Calcutta, Kashgar, Cairo and Alexandria. The essays and their migrant author finally settle in Australia. Despite the ground covered, the book is not so much about travel as the reasons we travel. Boey has many reasons for leaving his native Singapore but his deepest reason is to find a Singapore he has lost. Calcutta, with its street life, reminds him of Singapore in the late 60s. The crumbling colonial buildings and the waterfront of Alexandria bring back Singapore's old Esplanade. And inextricably entangled with these childhood memories is the memory of a father who abandoned the family time and again, and reappeared each time to take the son on walks around the old haunts. There are wonderful evocations of travel ...

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...

Li Sui was kind enough to send his Asiatic article to the poets he cited in it. The long scholarly discussion analyzes the relationship between some Singaporean poems and that country's restless urban flux, represented by the constant dilemma of roads. Having just motored from Santa Cruz back to San Francisco last night, I was especially taken by the contrast Li Sui alludes to between postmodernist visions of infinite roads, and Singapore's anxiety-ridden views of limits. Poems by Lee Tzu Pheng, Boey Kim Cheng, Paul Tan, Felix Cheong, Alvin Pang and Aaron Lee predict, lament, visualize, and compose those limits. One of my early poems, "Going Home from Church on Bus 197," included in  No Other City: the  Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry  (2000), is part of Gwee's discussion. Asiatic , a journal of English Language and Literature published by the International Islamic University of Malaysia, is worth looking into for itself. It publishes not only scholarly art...