Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Chloe is a good friend and poet. Her second book PERFORATED marks an advance over her first VIABLE. The strengths of the first are still present in the second: an intimate but unassuming voice, an observant tenderness towards self and others, the willingness to broach difficult subjects. In the second book, the personal references widen out into the world. The Italian touchstones are handled with greater range and depth. My favorites in this regard are the opening poem "Pantheon," which ends distinctively yet inclusively in the way an Italian dialect "relies on the plural/ second person, voi," and the poem "Etruscan Bronzes," concludes soberly about the transience of youth: These bronze figures, from their height of youth, artist's hand concealed by the smoothing of time, gaze upon a far-off horizon long buried.

An attractive quality of these poems is the outsider's constant searching for self and form. "Mirror" is not only the title of one of Zhang Zao's most famous poems but also a recurring trope in his oeuvre. Thoroughly grounded in both Chinese and European literature, he seeks "a new tension and melting point," as Bei Dao wrote in his personal recollection of the author, included in this book. How successful are his sonnet sequences, "Kafka to Felice" and "Dialogue with Tsvetaeva"? The Chinese originals strike as too full of words and ideas, and so lack the pressure cooker of the sonnet form. The free-verse experiments are more interesting, often ranging and strange. One has the great title "Song a Wall Driller and the Ultimate Ear," but the poem, in fact, pages 179 to 186, are missing from my edition.  The poem I like best is called "Fly." It has something of John Donne's playful eroticism, but also the concision I ...

Portuguese poet Florbela Espanca (1894-1930), in her life and work, reminds me quite a bit of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The disadvantaged background giving rise to huge literary ambitions. The New Woman of early 20th century. Loving the sonnet form for its combination of control and ecstasy. The sustained aesthetics of late Romanticism and early Modernism. Her frequent use of exclamations is off-putting to my ear, but the deployment of ellipses gives her sonnets a rare quality of inarticulateness before the ineffable.

My review of Jenny Xie's The Rupture Tense has just been published in the TLS this week. I liked the book very much, and I had a great deal of pleasure in saying so.

Five of my "Ungovernable Bodies" poems have just appeared in Five Dials, a literary magazine published by Hamish Hamilton, together with work by K. Busatto, Helon Habila, Annie Katchinska, Mattie Lubchansky, Ben Miller, Tommi Parrish, and Binyavanga Wainaina. The issue is themed Unfettered Joy and Freedom. You can download the pdf for free here , and read about my shenanigans with Leroy, Carlos, Brian, Antonio, and Antonio again. Yesterday, flew with Guy into Mexico City. Five-and-a-half hour flight.  Checked into Galleria Plaza Hotel at Reforma. Met Tim for dinner at a Japanese restaurant, Wanwan Sakaba, and then got a drink at NeonSoulRave. Cute boys, but we were too tired to wait for the drag show to start at 10 pm. We are here until Tuesday. 

On Thursday, went back to school one more time before winter break. Took a final look at the school literary magazine The Beaver, put together by the student co-editors. The funny thing is that many of the poems and stories were written for my classes. Perhaps this is because I kept forwarding the call for submissions to my classes, and they responded. I love Twyla's feminist take on Circe and Jasmine's very Marianne Moore-like poem about a cat making itself comfortable in a damaged stone fountain. When home, started watching the Netflix TV series Dirty Lines, about two very different brothers who started a phone sex company together. One of them is a closeted gay.  Yesterday, had a productive Zoom meeting with Kim and Isabel about the SUSPECT anthology. Then a young Singaporean theater producer stayed with us for a night. In the evening Guy and I went to Peter's for his Dressing Up the Christmas Tree party. Had a nice chat with the Chinese Will (there were two Will's a...

 Read Louise Gluck's The Triumph of Achilles for the first time yesterday to prepare for Poetry Seminar. Here are the famous short lyrics, "Mock Orange" and "Hawk's Shadow" that capture the Gluckian mythos and tone. I found the poetic sequences less convincing, as if length dilutes the typical intensity of her work. "The End of the World" is the most achieved sequence, I think, but otherwise she had not yet found the way to write long poems.  Watched Enola Holmes 2. Entertaining. Not done with it, as GH switched to another episode of Blacklist. After, we watched another episode of Smiley. Carlos Cuevas is endearing. The sexiness he projects is charmingly innocent and kind, unlike the sexiness of Henry Cavill in Enola.

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Last spring, at my all-girls independent school, I taught a senior-year poetry workshop called "A Portfolio of Selves: Four Asian American Women Poets," focusing on the work of Monica Youn, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Celina Su, and Jenifer Sang Eun Park. The students responded enthusiastically and imaginatively to the variety of subject matter and style in these very different poets. I was immensely impressed by the students' eagerness to learn from these eloquent experiments in contemporary poetry. The poems written by one student, Charlotte Baker, stood out for their self-assured adoption of the means on offer to convey her very own ends. I had very little to offer her in terms of feedback. The poems were whole, or almost so. The poems were incredibly vulnerable too. They transcended the writing exercises to become genuine investments in discovery and feeling. They have now been publis...

I've been dipping into The Forgotten Keys almost every night before going to sleep, and discovering a singular historical and political sensibility in the dreamlike imagery. The opening of "The Castle (I Came to Shoot the President)": To continue the story. We made love— they seized power. And they hold it over us, those who once spit [sic] the farthest and sang the loudest, who cheated on their tests— they hold the power now. They know all about us, where we live, and have sent us bills on official letterhead. Judging from the curtains in the rear window, reports are going straight into the black desk.... Polish poet Tomasz Rózycki is a worthy successor to Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert.

Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki (born 1962) is a Polish poet. I picked up his Peregrinary , translated by Bill Johnston, at AWP, together with two other books by living Polish poets. I don't know much about the history of Poland but the country seems to possess the knack of throwing up gifted poets. Dycki, as the translator informs us that even Polish readers call him in short, is nothing at all like Zbigniew Herbert or Wisława Szymborska. He is himself. Maybe because he came from the border near Ukraine, from a town that mixes its tongues, before he moved to Warsaw, the literary and political capital. Maybe because he is bisexual. There is more anguish here, more tussling with death, than in the Polish poetries that I've read before. He writes short lyrics. Here's a complete poem, from his first book Nenia and Other Poems (1990), published at the age of 28: the women I spent nights with did not hide the fact that they spent nights with me and they were not ashamed when t...

The best of the "nature poems" is the title poem "Mosses and Lichens," with its precise yet evocative descriptions, and probing, profound human meaning. The other nature poems in the collection resort to nature a little too easily for metaphor. The best of the "character poems" are "Frankie," for its interesting use of legal language to describe a violent crime, and "Parlor Music," for its accurate depiction of a deceased aunt through the accumulation of well-chosen details. The other "character poems" are forgettable. The smaller pieces, reminiscent of haiku, usually appearing as sequences, make no great impression. The pieces after Ovid are too smooth and workmanlike: they lack personality.

Hijinks in high style. There's even a pilgrim born in Singapore, Tim Canon-Yeo, who obtained a Medieval English degree from Oxford and taught TEFL for several years in Colombia, before becoming a personal trainer and bodyguard to paranoid pop stars. Tim resides in Kent and writes a poem a day. Thanks, Larry Breiner, for the recommendation after hearing I'm writing a book of poems based on The Canterbury Tales .

Barefoot is the Collected Poems of Scottish poet Alastair Reid edited by Tom Pow. I found the book in Barnes & Nobles one evening while browsing the poetry section. The poems are skillful and reflective, sincere and nostalgic, but not terribly memorable, to be honest. The stakes in the poems are not raised very high. Gun Island is my first Amitav Ghosh. I bought it from Book Culture to support the bookstore. The novel is humane and well-plotted, although the writing slips into cliches at times. The protagonist, Deen a rare books dealer, remains a bit of a cipher. The two sections are interesting for me in different ways. The first section is set in the Sundarbans, a mangrove delta of the Ganges that I got to know from Rushdie's Midnight's Children . The second section is set in Venice, which we visited for the first time last summer. I could vouch from my personal experience that the Bengalis have been in that city for a long time: we had dinner at what looked like a ver...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  I first met Boedi Widjaja at the Dome cafe in the Singapore Art Museum. It was surprising to both of us how quickly we fell into easy conversation. Because of racial tensions in Indonesia in the early 1980's, his parents sent him and his sister to Singapore to live apart from them. He was just nine years old and he did not know a jot of English, having grown up speaking Bahasa Indonesia. Singapore was alienating and he longed for home. At our meeting, I was living away from home too, having transplanted myself from Singapore to New York. Migration is, we discovered, the keynote of my poetry and his art. Both of us are sons of Chinese diaspora who have not just settled in one new place, but having made the place home, have moved again. We are doubly displaced. As our friendship grew, so did our appreciation for each other's work. I attended his art shows in Singapore, where his intensity in live-art ...

The material is rough—an abusive, alcoholic father, one's own alcoholism that loses one's marriage and the custody of one's children, a brother's alcoholism that leads to his car crash—but the verse is smooth. Some archaisms, such as "woe" and "spears" to make the rhyme, but, more damagingly, sometimes a looseness in the middle of a poem, where the words fall into the iambs right as rain but without a ripple. Once in a while, an image holds the attention, but not often enough. The best poems here, however, are very fine, "The Way," "The Landlocked Lighthouse," and the wonderfully uncanny poem "Visiting My Own Grave."

The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 by Louise Bogan I found one truly memorable poem in the collection, a sharp observation transformed by a peculiar sensibility, a formula advocated elsewhere in the book but rarely followed. Even in this instance, the poem would have been better served if the last line has been removed. Roman Fountain Up from the bronze, I saw Water without a flaw Rush to its rest in air, Reach to its rest, and fall. Bronze of the blackest shade, An element man-made, Shaping upright the bare Clear gouts of water in air. O, as with arm and hammer, Still it is good to strive To beat out the image whole, To echo the shout and stammer When full-gushed waters, alive, Strike on the fountain's bowl After the air of summer.

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...

I have a poem, "Gaudy Boy," written after Singapore's late poet Arthur Yap, in this anthology commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of Walt Whitman and the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Besides Whitman, many poetic forebears, including Cavafy, Rimbaud, Thom Gunn, Justin Chin, James Baldwin, Garcia Lorca, Tim Dlugos, Allen Ginsberg, and Yukio Mishama, are celebrated by a good range of contemporary gay male poets. Big thanks to editor Raymond Luczak for including my poem and for putting together this celebration of the vitality of the gay male poetic tradition. You can get hold of the anthology here .

A Selected Poems, spanning 1967-1977, by the foremost Singaporean Malay poet Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, A Crackle of Flames, A Circle of Rainbow (Ethos Books) is worth the read. The poems are from two collections, the first bearing the same title, the second titled When the Butterfly Breaks its Wings . This is a fighting book of poems, passionate and plainspoken, often lambasting the New Malays for not fighting for their own dignity, culture, and history, but giving it all up instead to serve Chinese dominance in Singapore. Yet the high rhetoric often ends with a lyrical, and sometimes mysterious, image. For instance, "Poetry of Song" begins unsparingly: if what i say hurts you then that is what I intend because i like to tell stories exposing harlotry as it is right before our very eyes... and ends with: the tears of the wretched who have lost everything at dawn on the blue petals of pomegranate the call to prayers reverberates love and longing overlap and the m...

Slim pickings in a slim book featuring the work of younger Singaporean poets, edited by Marie Ee and Joy Chee, published by Math Paper Press. Most of the poems are, unsurprisingly, about family, and most of these family poems are overly sentimental and all-too-pious for my taste. How refreshing then to re-encounter the work of Cyril Wong, whose unsparing poem "Coming Out, Leaving Home" closes the anthology with a jet of cold water in the face. He is oddly placed here, however, since he has already published many books. Outstanding among the newer names are Joy Chee, whose "mother comes back as a wok" imagines anew the hoary scene of mother and daughter cooking in a kitchen, and whose "the blank space where the body used to be" deploys the surprising perspective of the dead to good effect; Ian Chung, whose pantun "Presently Absent, Absently Present" employs the recurring form not just seamlessly, but movingly; and Jerrold Yam, who writes with unch...