Song of a Reformed Headhunter

At Gatwick South Terminal waiting for my Norwegian Airlines plane to Madrid. Last night's reading at the London Review Bookshop must rank as one of the more memorable ones. Tickets were sold out and the bookshop packed with about 80 people. Michael Schmidt spoke about the net of PN Review/Carcanet that welcomes all schools of fish. The first to read, I had a slight sore throat and so paused a couple of times, but carried on like the National Service-trained soldier that I am. The most enjoyable moment for me was to refer briefly to the banning of Lee Tzu Pheng's poem "My Country and My People" from the airwaves because it was deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about nation-building. It was a pleasure to hear the four contributors to New Poetries VI, Rebecca Watts, Joey Connolly-Wright, Vahni Capildeo, and John Clegg. Get the anthology to hear the most exciting poetic voices now in the UK. After the reading, I met Richard Price and enjoyed talking to him. Also spoke ...

Five poems in STEEP TEA take for their epigraph a quotation of Anne Lee Tzu Pheng, who is widely considered to be the foremost woman poet of Singapore. Her "Neanderthal Bone Flute: A Discovery" meditates on the invention of art, in the form of the bone flute. "To see for the first time a thing other / than the mire of food," she wonders, and simultaneously criticizes Singapore's immigrant obsession with material wealth. My poem "Useless" imagines the first bone flautist to be a woman who discovers belatedly how long her ex-lover was sleeping with her replacement before breaking up with her. Lee is best known for her 1976 poem "My Country and My People," which was banned from the national airwaves for reasons that are unclear, but may have something to do with the poem's ambivalence towards Singapore's nation-building project. For me, such ambivalence is a vital attitude that is sorely missing from other more straightforwardly ...

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...

All three poems have epigraphs from Lee Tzu Pheng. Alvin Pang was the Consulting Editor for this issue of the Australian journal Axon . 

Hong Kong some curio of the change             Tzu Pheng Lee, “Prospect of a Drowning” We found it among the small antique shops in the Soho district of Hong Kong. Below Mao posters and beside porcelain Michael J. stood at smart attention a terracotta soldier, an officer of some rank, the height of my hand. Factory plaster has been painted a gritty grey and in the hair pulled back to show a broad forehead, in the protective vest, in the folds of his sleeves and in the creases of his shoes, a brown as fine and light as sand as if he has just been dug up from a centuries-old grave. It was a lovely copy, meticulous, affordable, but we were searching for a Mao statuette for Ty and Di. The only keepsake I wanted was not photos or knickknacks but memories. You urged me to get it. You knew better than to keep me to my words when my hands returned to weigh the sold...

In Japanese, “longing for springtime” I feel as a weight almost too heavy to bear             Tzu Pheng Lee, “Seki Shun” In your last picture of me, I was carrying a machine-gun, a reluctant 22-year-old recruit. Now, at 42, I am more likely to chaperone a martini amongst a different troop. I prefer the martini but I want that strong young man. for Debbie, on reconnecting after 20 years

Singapore as One-Night Stand/One-Night Stand as Singapore the heart/can sometimes be troublesome      Lee Tzu Pheng, “Singapore River” I pull out of him. Short trip but I have seen all the sights worth seeing.

Recognition a duck that would not lay / and a runt of a papaya tree      Tzu Pheng Lee, “My Country and My People” Did you grow a bean plant as a school science project, noting carefully in a jotter book the stages of growth that a dark-green textbook taught? They did not say, the books, what to do with a full-grown bean plant, and so I reluctantly threw it down the rubbish chute, feeling bad at the thought of leaves squelched with gum, hair, chicken bones, the slender white stalk bent. Did you dig a hole in the schoolyard secretly and plant an orange pip, then watch the soil keep quiet? Did you keep chicks (all the children did) as if you were back in a village? After accidentally stepping on one to death, did you give away the other chick because someone told you that it would die if it were alone? Did you hear that, or did you, my Country- woman, hear another say, no one dies of loneliness? Or did you hear both voices sometimes in ...

Reversi, Also Called Othello  no matter how many turns/you make       Tzu Pheng Lee, “Tough, Love” Flip over a black lie to white. Flip coffee in a diner mug. Flip 1st sight. Flip a coin. Flip girls and boys. Flip and then flip back black light. White noise. Flip dark hair on pale shins. Flip a treasured negative. Flip a safety pin.