Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Singapore Unbound is pleased to announce three awards for the best undergraduate critical essays on Singapore and other literatures this year. Each winner receives USD250 and publication in our journal  SUSPECT . The awards are generously funded by Professor Koh Tai Ann (Nanyang Technological University) We're grateful to literary scholar Weihsin Gui (University of California, Riverside) for reading the submissions and making the selection. He gives his comments below, first on all the submissions and then on the individual winners.  “The essays submitted for this award are all to be commended for the depth of their textual analyses and the breadth of their engagement with various cultural and literary theories. I can envision all eight essays, after undergoing peer review and varying degrees of revision and expansion, being published in academic journals. I encourage the authors to consider doing...

Grateful to my well-wishers on Facebook: Thank you for your birthday wishes! I had a terrific Day. Guy gave me a special breakfast treat - pastry and special coffee - and presented me with a chic striped shirt and neat blue jacket. Better still, he went in late for work! Then I worked on new posts for my arts website Singapore Poetry, before having a simple lunch of soup and cheese sandwich. After lunch, I started reading THE NEW VILLAGE, a collection of poems by Chinese-language poet Wong Yoon Wah, translated by Ho Lian Geok and Ng Yi-sheng. So much to learn about Singapore! For dinner, Guy took me to one of my favorite restaurants in New York, Commerce, on, you guess it, Commerce Street. I had a tasty Toscana and Guy an even tastier Rhone wine. My duck was delicious, just two thick slices, cooked just right, pink and crispy in the right places. Guy had a very flavorful curry with root vegetables. Then we had a couple of drinks at Monster Bar, before heading home. I feel very lucky....

I was one of three poets (with Ng Yi-Sheng and Grace Chia) roped in to offer comments on the first manuscripts of 6 new Singapore poets.The session was part of a manuscript bootcamp organized by the indefatigable Joshua Ip. It was a pleasure to engage with the work of Amanda Chong, Daryl Lim, David Wong, Jennifer Anne Champion, Samuel Lee, and Tse Hao Guang, and to have an open and collegial discussion about poetry. The poets will receive much feedback from different people over the weekend, some of it conflicting, some of it confusing, but at the end of the day, we must be our own toughest critics, if we are going to write the kind of poetry that will stand the test of time. Thanks, Josh, for organizing this working group. Thanks too to Sarah for opening your home to us.

The essay appears in Volume II of Sharing Borders: Studies in Contemporary Singaporean-Malaysia Literature , itself a part of the series Writing Asia: The Literatures in Englishes . In the essay, instead of rehashing the tired discourse of nationalism in the poetry of earlier Singaporean poets, Gwee focuses on younger poets who published their first books in 1997 and later. Relatively free from the control of both State and University, these poets put out, with the help of independent publishers, a series of works that have re-energized Singaporean writing. A chronology: 1997 - Alvin Pang's Testing the Silence , Aaron Lee's A Visitation of Sunlight , and Yong Shu Hoong's Isaac . 1998 - Grace Chia's Womango , Alfian Sa'at's One Fierce Hour , Felix Cheong's Temptation and Other Poems , Damien Sin's Saints, Sinners and Singaporeans and Gwee's Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? 1999 - Felix Cheong's I Watch the Stars Go Out , Daren Shiau's ...