Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Thank you, Okechukwu Nzelu, for this wonderful and sincere tribute. I'm truly humbled. You write and write, for yourself, in your quiet room, and lo and behold, what you have written means something to someone else. It's a miracle, this writing business. I'm so moved by the magic of it tonight. Thanks, Michael Schmidt, for publishing THE PILLOW BOOK in the PN Review. Thanks, Kenny Leck and Math Paper Press, for publishing it in book form. And thanks, Keisuke Tsubono, for translating it into Japanese, and Matthew Chozick, for publishing the bilingual edition under Awai Books.

Thanks, everyone, for celebrating my new book "Steep Tea" with me last night at Book Culture. The trains were acting up, the night was cold, but you came, some traveling for more than an hour, at least one person whom I know of walking 24 UWS blocks because of Sabbath. Your presence made the event special. Thank you, Cody and the team at Book Culture, for hosting the launch. A big thank-you to Simpson from Chomp Chomp for sponsoring the delicious reception. Thank you, Doug and Chris, for bringing the food to the reading. Thank you, Raj, for the Tiger Beer sponsorship. And thank you, Meiko, for helping with the reception. It was wonderful to hear Cindy Arrieu-King again. Thank you, Cindy, for coming in from Philly to read with me. Your poems are beautiful and brave. They confront the horrors of our contemporary world, not in some far-off war-torn country, but right here among our daily struggles. Softness, you remind us, is a form of kindness. Your soft touch is born of grea...

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 ...

Flying to the UK tonight to launch my new Carcanet book of poems. Bittersweet feeling, actually. 12 years ago, when I was deciding between moving to the UK or the US, I plumped for the latter because it was terra incognito to me. It felt right to start a new life in a country completely new to me. The US has since given me so much. The encouragement and opportunity to come out as a gay man. Superb poetry teachers and exemplars. Friends and lovers. New York City. But the US has not embraced my poetry. I'm grateful to Roxanne Hoffman for publishing my first chapbook and to various fine independent journals for publishing my poems. My work had not, however, found favor with any of the big poetry journals and publishers. After years of contest submissions and payments, I decided to self-publish my books and found a great deal of satisfaction in the process and result. I'm ever so pleased, and surprised, when individuals tell me how much they like my work. Still, the niggling feel...

My collection of zuihitsu The Pillow Book has been shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. It joins five other works in the shortlis t for the category of English Poetry. The other works are Cordelia by Grace Chia, The Viewing Party by Yong Shu Hoong, Circle Line by Theophilus Kwek, Tender Delirium by Tania De Rozario and Sonnets from the Singlish by Joshua Ip. I am grateful to Michael Schmidt for first publishing the work in PN Review , and to Kenny Leck and the Math Paper Press team for publishing it as part of their Babette's Feast chapbook series. The prizewinner will be announced at the Awards Ceremony, during the Singapore Writers Festival in Singapore on November 4.

I have five poems in PN Review 205 . Also, in the issue, poems by Sinéad Morrissey, Tara Bergin, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, David C. Ward, Alex Wylie and others. Get a copy! Subscribe! I am particularly taken by Tara Bergin's poem "Looking at Lucy's Painting of the Thames at Low Tide Without Lucy Present." Its every move is a surprise, but all are united by the opinionated, offhand voice. The work of Simon Jarvis is new to me. His three short poems are sharp and evocative, especially the perfect "Colloquium." Of the reviews, I enjoy David C. Ward's take-down of William Logan's selected early poems Deception Island . Who but Logan would allow himself to be blurbed as "the most hated man in American poetry"? I agree with Sasha Dugdale's estimation of Tiina Aleman's translation of Doris Kareva (conscientious but ultimately unsuccessful), and has bought Luljeta Lleshanaku's Haywire on the strength of Dugdale's strong recommendatio...

Received my copy of New Poetries V yesterday. It's a beauty. It has a nice thick feel to it. The cover image, by Isabel Schmidt, is full of overlapping gentle things in soft colors. Beyond advocating for his poets, Michael Schmidt's preface says a number of useful things on the principles that should guide an editor or anthologist: Editors who are not promoting a movement or a group, when they tear open an envelope or click an email attachment, hope to be surprised by the shape on the page, by syntax, by the unexpected sounds a poem makes, sometimes with old, proven instruments used in new ways. They might hope to find evidence of intelligence. And they respect creative disobedience. Where there are schools they look for the truants; where there is a consensus with its levelling decorums, they edit against it. They are not looking for unschooled talent but for poetry as discovery in form and language. And the question of relevant subject-matter need arise only if it doe...

... is Lucy Tunstall's "One Day a Herd of Wild Horses Came into the Garden and Looked at My Mother." Janet Kofi-Tsekpo and I wrote about our responses on the book blog . James Womack has a piece on Sheri Benning's "The song that goes." Lucy Tunstall is very good on William Letford's "Taking a headbut." Other selections by the poets anthologized will be forthcoming, so do follow the blog, run by Evan Jones. The anthology editor, Michael Schmidt, is also quoted on the blog about the problem with "voice."

PN Review has just published my Pillow Book in Issue 198 . Reading it on the train, while lugging home my birthday present from my sister, a George Foreman Stainless Steel Open Grill, I was hit by a sharp nostalgia for Singapore, which is my past. Here parade its people: my parents, of course; Lawrence, my scout patrol leader, and a girl guide called Samantha; Elsa who sang beautifully; Yisheng who wrote The Last Boy ; the army warrant office who still cannot be named; Thomas, the willing enlistee; my first students; the critic Gwee Li Sui; Margaret. Its places also return to the mind's eye: Radin Mas Primary School; Raffles Institution, Mount Faber; my old bedroom; the Botanic Gardens; the columbarium; the weddings in Chinese restaurants; the interview room of the Public Service Commission; the passport office. The piece was suggested by Michael Schmidt, who asked me a few years ago to write a prose work about my poetry for the journal. I tried but could not write the required ...

Paul Stevens publishes my poem "The Dying and the Living," written in Yeatsian ottava rima, in response to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, in The Flea . It is one of my favorites. The verse sings feelingly, without flinching. Michael Schmidt has selected the following poems for the Carcanet anthology New Poetries V : "Attribution," "A Whole History," "The Rooms I Move In," "Study #5: After Frida Kahlo," "Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet" and ghazals from "A Lover's Recourse." All but the Kahlo poem were previously published in PN Review . Asked for a genesis statement for these poems, I wrote: Where did these poems begin? They began on a horrible afternoon when my tutor in his room at Wadham College read aloud the sentences I plagiarized from some book on Ben Jonson. They began in the backroom of a bar. They began with quotations—word, form or spirit—of Eavan Boland, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and Roland Barth...

Too tired to say much about the reading, but just want to note it on the blog. Hosted by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, at the newish Battery City Park Ferry Terminal, the event commemorated the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's discovery of the river that now carries his name. The poems were written for the occasion, and read by the poets: Eavan Boland's "The Port of New York, 1956," John Ashbery's "In One Afternoon," Toon Tellegen's "A Poem for Henry Hudson," Jorie Graham's "No Bearing and Disproportion" (an extract), Paul Muldoon's "Lines for the Quartercentenary of the Voyage of the Halve Maen ," and John Koethe's "The Great Gatsby." Michael Schmidt introduced each poet. The ferry engine, coming by at regular intervals, competed with and accompanied the voices.