Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Very pleased to be one of the 21 poets in this zuihitsu portfolio , edited by Dana Isokawa and published in the Asian American Writers' Workshop's magazine The Margins. Asked for a note to accompany my three zuihitsu, I wrote this: "I was introduced to the zuihitsu in a workshop on Japanese poetic forms taught by Kimiko Hahn and immediately fell in love with it. How fresh Sei Shōnagon sounds across the centuries! What is the secret to such eternal freshness? Trained in traditional Western forms, I was looking to expand my repertoire by looking again to the East, and what I found was not so much a form as a voice. Sure, Sei Shōnagon is a privileged snob, as a literary friend pointed out with a sniff, but I love to put on her beautiful robe, rub some precious rouge on my cheeks, burn a fine incense stick, and wait for my lover to arrive in the night."

A stimulating selection of zuihitsu, the Japanese essay form that is, as aptly characterized by the editor Steven D. Carter, the anti-method method. Deploying a broad definition of zuihitsu, Carter includes not only the canonical such as The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon and Yoshida No Kenko's Essays in Idleness , but also haikai prose by Matsuo Basho and Natsume Seibi, and some tales of the unusual. Four qualities unite this diverse collection of prose: the writing is personal and casual, instead of formal and scholarly; the subject matter is not restricted but includes anything that occurs to the writer; the writing aims to entertain and impress; the purely fictional is excluded. The selection of works is generous also in terms of the time period covered, from the Heian period to the twentieth century. I'm particularly pleased to make the acquaintance of Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) in "Jeweled Comb Basket"; Tachibana Nankei (1753-1805) in "Idle Chats Beneath a ...

Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons  (2001) is a polemic against the wrong direction that Japan has taken in in the closing decades of the last century. The charge sheet looks serious. Excessive construction is destroying the environment. Bureaucrats are enriching themselves at the expense of national interest. The country is piling up its national debt but losing its technological edge. Schools are teaching rote-learning and social conformity. Culture has degenerated into manga and anime, plastic flower-arrangement and context-less architecture. The unremittingly bleak picture makes me doubt that I visited the same country last summer that the author is describing. Still, I remember things in retrospect that fit with Kerr's picture. The Kamo River in Kyoto was barricaded on both sides by concrete embankment. Pachinko parlors contributed to the noise pollution in Shinjuku in Tokyo, where we stayed. Manga took up more than half of the shelves of the bookshop in one train station. The cu...

Received my copies of The Pillow Book from Kenny Leck last week. The chapbook, fifteenth in the Babette's Feast series published by Math Paper Press, looks lovely with its cream-colored paper and clean design. I like the stack of syrup-covered pancakes on the cover very much. The illustration is done by Anna Sai. The image refers to one particular section of the book where a very nice man made pancakes for me after we spent a night together. Food, sex, New York City and other delights are very much the subjects of the book. I hope the writing retains the delicacy of Sei Shōnagon but also joins with it a kind of voraciousness. That one can have both a big appetite and a fine palate. The book is available from Books Actually bookstore in Singapore. Unfortunately it is not available on-line. I will be selling copies at the Brooklyn Book Festival tomorrow. Find the book at Table 100, Poets Wear Prada.

I thought I was done with my pillow book, but it is not done with me. I could replace the weakest link. Which one is it? The cartoons I loved xxx The cartoons I loved to trace were Conan the Barbarian, wrists lashed with ropes to his ankles, and Flash Gordon, heaving under chains. Superhuman strength against unbreakable restraint. xxx Matt tied to his bed, that was the first time I was hard enough to penetrate. xxx To make Wolverine, the adamantine has to go in. *

Here's the final poem of my pillow book, to make up the mystical number of thirty-three: 33. I mark my place in books xxx I mark my place in books with bits of trash. A bus ticket in Great Expectations . A grocery receipt in Beyond Good and Evil . In The Ambassadors an old postcard from Singapore. It occurs to me this morning while shelving my books that I mark my place in men with bits of my body. My dick in Todd. Big toe in Doug. Eric, whom I thought I was done with, has my left elbow. The beautiful boy last night who did not give his name has all of my fingers holding him open. *

I made a small change to the title, and it has made all the difference. 32. All Things xxxxx All things diminish as they grow older, a friend of many years said last week. Even the expanding universe must contract. This morning, as I am boiling water to make coffee, his words come back to me, as sure as before, but smaller, because the whistling of the kettle takes up space. The steam was not so long ago a patch of snow. Love is what life boils into. *

31. Hybrid Things xxx Not only India but Japan. Think, for a moment, of Zen. *

30. Things that Quicken the Pulse xxx Hurricane warning. Running the hand through a man’s thick hair. Merino wool cardigan. A wave of flamingoes taking to the air. Coming on Matisse’s Red Studio . The thought of an approaching quarrel. The restaurant door opens, and lets in a draught. *

29. John Stahle is dead Talk. Fleshy jowls. Boys with ambition to publish. A call on Craigslist for cultivated homos. Moved with dad all over Europe from base to military base. Separate checks. Blowing his bench-pressing boyfriend. The Gnostic Gospels. It is a perfect scandal, he says, that for the lack of funds MoMA blocks off a whole level in its last renovation. *

28. The old Chinese poets xxx The old Chinese poets composed a shi after walking just a few short steps. The closest I have come to this was to write a lousy sestina in my head after walking up and down the Bronxville park bounded on one side by train tracks and the other by a motorway. xxx Walking in a cemetery is charming when there is light. In the summer the headstones can still be scanned at eight, or even nine o’clock. In the fall the leaves litter the graves and give them a melancholic look of being forsaken. In the winter the bare branches bring out the grittiness of the stones. In the spring, when the trees put on their freshest green and the birds are almost intelligible, the cemetery turns into a sculpture garden, like the Tuileries. xxx I also love to walk around a city. San Francisco with Winston. Amsterdam with Tim. New York. xxx It is comforting to walk along a familiar path. The mind returns from observing, deciding, and judging to itself. It is like wandering out...

27. Japanese Things xxx Tamagotchi. The highest standard of living in Asia. xxx A third language offered in secondary school, besides French and German. xxx Comics illustrating love between men, created by women for women. xxx Hugging pillow, also called a Dutch wife. xxx His cock still inside me, the man answered a call from his mother in Tokyo. xxx Suicidal sects. Asymmetry. xxx After the Japanese occupied Singapore, they purged the island. Among the men shot at Changi Beach were donors to the China Relief Fund, men with tattoos, and Hainanese. The death toll is claimed by some to be 100 000. The Japanese claims 5 000. The truth is buried in between. xxx The Red and White Song Competition. Akina Nakamori. *

26. The Public Service Commission xxx They have seen us all, these six men who interview the brightest in Singapore to decide on scholarships. Civil servants, military officers, and business leaders, they could have sat in that formidable row for thirty years, just as we, alone on the other side of the long table, are in a certain sense interchangeable. The idea does not diminish them or us. xxx But I am asking their support for changing me. I am asking for the Lee Kuan Yew Scholarship to become a poet. I explain it is time to develop more than factories, battalions and public housing, it is time to develop a language of our own. xxx They are not impressed. They can see through me. They know that I will quit Singapore for the States, that I am a queer one. xxx What they cannot see is that working in a rented room in Queens I write by the light of Singapore, a tall fluorescent streetlamp with its cloud of flying insects. Rallying my troops with Matisse’s fighting words—to be a forc...

25. Things Out of Place xxx A flute in a trumpet case. Red crayon slash on white linen. Sprays of heath in a plastic pail outside a deli. A cheeky boy among mourners at a wake. A beautiful man married to a woman. A Singaporean in New York City. The Singaporean in Singapore. xxx The moon in a lake. *

23. Why I moved to America and not Britain xxx When I walked in McDonalds in Welshpool, the floor sucked at my shoes. The server would rather rib his friend who came in after me than take my order. He gave me a cheeseburger when I asked for a quarter-pounder with cheese. He counted the change laboriously. The fries must have sat in the sieve for a long time for they were cold. xxx That was in 2002, when the Queen celebrated her Golden Jubilee, New Labor was losing its shine, and Nelson Mandela called Tony Blair "America's Foreign Minister." When I walked out of the joint, I had decided to go where real power resided. Since then I have discovered that the superpower does fast food badly too. That the corner where McDonalds is done the way McDonalds should be done is Singapore. 24. Things that Tilt xxx The Empire State Building in a snaphot. Rain. All the strokes of the letter W, upper or lower case. The fingers of the Bharata Natyam dancer. xxx To observe somethin...

21. After they return from field training xxx After they return from field training, before they change out of their sweat-stiff uniforms or muddy boots, the servicemen clean their M16s. They snap their rifles apart. They pull a steel brush through the barrel several times and several times more a strip of flannel held in the eye of the cleaning rod. They dismantle the bolt carrier group, the guts of the gun, to wipe the carbon off the bolt carrier. When the soot comes off, the firing pin is pure silver. Then the firearm is reassembled, the parts clicking into place. The steel body is brushed with oil and the buttstock blackened with boot polish. The rifles are restored to their racks, a chain is run through their charging handles, the showers hiss. xxx All this done with a fatigued swiftness still easy to recall now, so many years later, and so far away, sitting at my desk, writing. The speed and the exhaustion stay in the body, bright as a firing pin. 22. The Pledge xxx Scho...

20. First Things xxx The first time I entered a storytelling competition, I told the story of the greedy dog. Snapping the bone in the water, he lost the bone in the mouth. xxx The first time I fell in school, I muddied my white shorts. Terrified of looking as if I had fouled myself, I tried to clean my arse on the white walls. The stain not only stayed but spread. xxx I was thirteen the first time I published a poem. It was about looking at the rain lash the bronze back of the land. xxx The first time I fell in love, I was talking to God. After Darren prayed for me in Lee Abbey, I could hardly stay away from him. At the Lord's supper, I could hardly wait for the body of Christ to give each other the sign of the peace, when I could hold him briefly. I was twenty-one. xxx I had to bring a date for the Civil Service Dinner and so I brought a girl out for the first time. xxx The first time I saw New York was like the first time I saw Oxford, although one was more like a movie a...

I am having such trouble with my laptop. The pointer keeps blocking text and dragging it all o ver the screen. If anyone can tell me how to fix this, I'd be so grateful. 19. Happiness xxx I wrote this haiku for Kimiko's class: xxx An old man walking an old dog. xxx Rain tonight. xxx Reading it again this morning with a great deal of self-satisfaction, I remember Stevens's great poem "Description Without Place." My pleasure reddens into happiness. *

16. Mount Faber is a misnomer xxx Mount Faber is a misnomer for the hill by which I grew up. It is not even the tallest hill in Singapore. I don’t know who Faber is, but the word has always sounded delightfully like fable. xxx I went to a very small school on the hill. Radin Mas Primary School consisted of two distinct parts, the lower grades at the beginning of a long flight of stairs, the upper grades at the end. It was enough to teach one about large ambition and little achievement. xxx About the efflorescence of Singaporean poetry in the last two decades, Gwee is right. It is not the result of cultural change, certainly not because of government programs. It has sprung up like wild flowers on a hillside, and it may die without altering the landscape. The best of us still aim to become admirals of a small navy, pioneers of second-rate products, prime ministers of an island. The dreamier of us turn to poetry. xxx On every visit to Singapore, I make it a point—of what?—to walk up...

15. Hateful Things xxx Caramel in chocolate. Hot rain all year round. Cold sea in the summer. A tulip browning in the spring. Babies. Pedestrians who hog sidewalks. Commuters who hog staircases. Small talk when I have not had a drink. Squeaky voices. They are especially unbearable when they read poems. They scratch like chalk on a chalkboard going on. Dates who talk about themselves the whole time. List poems. Dogma of any kind. It is even more hateful in the mouth of an ugly man. Beet. To be contradicted. *