Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Last Monday I finally met a Singaporean author whom I've admired for some time. Visiting from London, she is here for a month to work in her company's NYC office. At Grand Central Oyster Bar, we had a dozen oysters each. They all had beautiful names that reminded us of where they came from. The only name I remember now is Wellfleet Massachusetts, because of the Elizabeth Bishop poem . My dining companion expressed relief at the lightness of our repast, having been troubled by the size of American portions. She loves living in London as much as I do living in New York. A reason? The seasons. This is not the shutter happiness of tourists, nor the novelty of snowfall to the tropical student. We have both lived in temperate countries for years, in fact, in each other's country, if the possessive is apt here for a pair of immigrants. The seasons mark the passing of time. The markings may be highly uncomfortable—t...

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...

HS made me a copy of the revised text of the Distinguished Guest Lecture delivered at the Larkin Society AGM on 13 June 2009. In the lecture, Marion Shaw discussed Larkin's ambivalence towards Tennyson, how he at once excoriated the Laureate's silliness and envied the poet's, and his period's, "range, the colour, the self-confidence of it all" ( Required Writing , p. 182). Using Bloomian theory in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), a book Shaw describes as "slightly mad," she reads three poems by Larkin as  "corrections" of his poetic predecessor. "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" directly quotes "sweet girl-graduate" from Tennyson's The Princess . The "heavy-headed rose/ Beneath a trellis" also works within a field of Tennysonian reference, in particular that of his early English Idylls, perhaps "The Gardener's Daughter." The narrator of Tennyson's poem is a portrait painter...

Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...

obscéne / obscene Stop making a big scene about your broken heart. Put it back in your pants, the soft and weepy heart. If history is a roll-call of militant men, the lover has no place in history but his heart. I am unmoved by daily pictures of the dead. A poet sings of toads and strikes straight at my heart. A porn star has nothing on me when it comes to the business of pumping the last drop from the heart. Was Sade outrageous about a turkey and a pope? No more than fucking up a surgeon with a heart. To be a psychic, a witch doctor or a cook, I have to be well versed in matters of the heart. The obscene is a view Jee finds congenital. Between a poem’s legs is found a poet’s heart.

TLS May 30 2008 from H. R. Woudhuysen's "Bound to please": For Larkin, two sorts of books needed to be readily accessible: "Within reach of my working chair I have reference books on the right, and twelve poets on the left". No doubt some of his poets (who included Barnes, Praed, Whitman and Frost) could be found at the Fair in early or interesting editions. I first read "reference books" as Work, and "poets" as Pleasure, but realized they were Work and Work, since Larkin reaches for them from his working chair, and refers to them as if they were his hands. So, my twelve hardworking poets--in other words, huge quarries for my work--are: 1. Shakespeare 2. Milton 3. Pope 4. Keats 5. Whitman 6. Stevens 7. Yeats 8. Eliot 9. Moore 10. Auden 11. Larkin 12. Heaney *** from Zinovy Zinik's Commentary piece "Dinner party test": A major poet can be both a politician and a hermit, but major poetry is unthinkable without a major readership. ...

I have never made it quite clear to myself why poets as different as Larkin and Eliot are my gods. I like to think of them as the two platforms between which my temperament swings, or the two poles across which my life is stretched, but that does not seem to me the final word. This morning, thinking about it again while I was walking to school from the train station, I thought about Larkin's laconic lyrics of human unfulfilment, what Auden, in another context, calls, "sing of human unsuccess/ In a rapture of distress." Then I thought of one more reason why Eliot matters so much to me. He writes long poems, and Larkin does not. I want to write a long poem. I love writing lyrics, but I want to write a long poem.

I don't read many biographies because I am not curious enough about other people's lives. A very few biographies matter to me, and they matter to me because they touch my own life at crucial points. Andrew Motion's biography of Philip Larkin explained to me, before I came out as gay, that unfulfilment can be a source of artistic power; it developed that theme like a novel. In Richard Davenport-Hines' biography of Auden, I saw my own flight from country, orchestrated like an opera. And now Hilary Spurling's biography of Matisse grips me with a familiar power: in its depiction of the artist's struggles, of his wife's devotion to his art, of his artistic breakthroughs, it beguiles like a Romance.

“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth.” For half a life I followed you, Old Fart, hoping to catch the accent of your art. You cussed the dogs of boredom pissing on stones engraved with others’ names, one with your own. At tea, curling around your feet, Bitch yawned. When a friend praised your poems, Fido fawned. The dogs, and not the girls, kept you alone and dug up beds of flowers to find the bone. Now I’ve traded in my dogs for men, hung up my leash but not my ball-point pen which empties in detailing ecstasies, dancing, gold-petaled memories. Embracing this hot afternoon, I take root in fair, rotting bodies by some lake.