Song of a Reformed Headhunter

My Seven Studies for a Self Portrait has been "Received and Recommended" on the MANOA blog . Frank Stewart and Pat Matsueda, thanks for liking the book so much. The blog is a treasure of contemporary poetry, much of which is from Asia.

The wonderful poet Rachael Briggs read and recorded the entire divan of 49 ghazals that concludes my book Seven Studies for a Self Portrait . What a feat and honor! The hero of the ghazals is a man whom I dated only twice, but fell head-over-heels for. The ghazals, however, are also crowded with other lovers. In her dramatic reading, Rachael teased out a great variety of tones and moods. Find a comfy seat. The whole reading takes only 1 hour, 12 minutes and 43 seconds. Let Rachael Briggs take you through "A Lover's Recourse." https://dl.dropboxusercontent. com/u/17337066/A%20Lover%27s% 20Recourse.mp3

On Lambda Literary , David Eye reviews Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality , edited by Kevin Simmonds: ... There is more forgiveness and wisdom in these pages than anger or cynicism. Parents and preachers are pardoned. Even Ted Haggard, the evangelical pastor who hired male prostitutes and used meth, receives patience and understanding (and a voice) in Jee Leong Koh’s “The Cretan.”  Eye makes the interesting suggestion that the poetic strategies of the anthology may fall into three kinds: rewriting, re-inventing and reifying. Read more .

Steve Fellner recommends my book to readers and critics. Hear him, you all! O ne of the most ambitious and overlooked book of this year is Jee Leong Koh’s  Seven Studies for a Self Portrait .  Even though presumably autobiographical, don’t expect any mushy confessions here.   As good as anything I’ve read this year, Koh’s poems are curiously distant... but in an enticing and exciting way.... [ more ]

I take my reviewers seriously. I take them seriously because I really like to know how my poetry impinges on an informed and acute sensibility. I take them seriously because I want to know the faults and limitations of my writing, and so learn how to write better. A negative review is more useful to me than a fulsome, ignorant one. What follows is my attempt to read a review carefully in order to understand its reservations and learn from it. It is also, of course, a piece of self-justification, but I hope it is not merely that. Carol Chan does not like Seven Studies for a Self Portrait . For her the book "unfolds like a series of scientific experiments that don't quite take off." By "experiments" she means to indict me for being overly intellectual: "He frequently makes the wrong bet, falling in love with the idea of a poem, the idea of art." To support her contention, she quotes in full "Bulb" from the sequence "What We Call Vegetab...

Eshuneutics' seven-part review of Seven Studies for a Self Portrait  gives itself away: it examines the poetry with generous attention, and reveals the reviewer's own disposition. Here is a man who is highly critical of any weak versions of what it means to be a gay poet, just as he is of any limited interpretation of the context and influences of a work of poetry. He calls for forceful expression and broad sympathy in writing and reviewing. Sincerity, that supposedly discredited Romantic criterion, is bolstered by knowledge and judgment, and so becomes hard-earned authority. Parts One , Two , Three , Four , Five , Six and Seven .

Eshuneutics is writing a seven-part review of Seven Studies for a Self Portrait , and has posted Parts 1 to 3 so far . Part 1 examines the significance of the collection as a book of gay poetry. Its emphasis on my attempt to "give style" to disparate experiences is completely accurate. Part 2 is a more philosophical meditation on the spiritual ethos of the book. Part 3 reads the opening title sequence closely for its poetic strategy and music. The on-going review looks set to complement Nicholas Liu's QLRS review very nicely.

I think Nick has written an excellent review , not merely because he admires my book, and therefore shows good taste, but because he displays the informed and critical sympathy that a reviewer should have. Koh Jee Leong's fine, if uneven, first book ( Equal to the Earth , 2009) demonstrated at once his capacity for restraint and his willingness to sacrifice good taste in the service of a larger aesthetic aim. Sensibility and spirit have now crystallised into a mission, and Koh doesn't care who knows it. Or rather, he cares very much indeed. Not since kensai's ill-fated Maiden (2002) has a collection of Singapore poetry in English wanted to matter as much as does Seven Studies for a Self Portrait . Beginning with its summative, triply-alliterative title and its somewhat over-literal cover (seven photographs of the poet!), the book advertises its project loudly, erects its own museum placard. To top it off, Koh selects an opening quotation from Nietszche's Thus Spoke Z...

Freke Räihä reviews Seven Studies for a Self Portrait for Tidningen Kulturen , a Swedish magazine of culture. The review, in English , is strongly impressionistic. Some of its phrasing, as in "nakedness amplified," is as salty as it describes the poetry to be.

I will be reading on June 16 (Thursday) at the Singapore launch of  Seven Studies for a Self Portrait , organized by the independent bookstore, Books Actually. Details are here on the Facebook event page . Kenny Leck, Karen Wai and Renee Ting are masterminding the event. I'm really looking forward to reading at home.

This morning spills over, with gratitude. For friends who generously hosted parties for my new book, HS last Sunday at her apartment on the UWS, and VM and JF last night at their Sunnyside house. They prepared huge amounts of food, made everyone, old friends and new, feel so welcomed, and spoke kindly about my work before I read. For the friends who took time out too, to attend the parties, I am thankful. I am especially grateful to those who attended the last party for Equal to the Earth , and then came back for more. A number told me that they now own two or all three of my books. Beyond all else, I am grateful to be read. On both occasions, as I read the title sequence from Seven Studies for a Self Portrait, I was acutely aware of the violence and grief in the poems. I was reawakened to them, perhaps, by the violence and grief that I know have visited a number of people in the room. I had entertained the thought of not reading the Frida Kahlo poem, for fear that it would touch to...

My new book of poems Seven Studies for a Self Portrait is now available on Amazon . Whoopee-whoop-whoop! Cough, cough. You can read a description of it, and a poem, about Frida Kahlo, on the Bench Press website . I switched from Lulu to Amazon CreateSpace, and the transition from one print-on-demand to another was quite painless. By paying an annual subscription, I could sell my book on Amazon, and so distribute my book that way. I have my author page up as well, with my bio and bibliography. During the printing stage, my book designer was able to contact Help Desk by phone, in order to get some design parameters right. She uploaded the files easily, and I received the proofs punctually too. Now to see how the book sells and reviews.

Stephanie Bart-Horvath, who designed my new book of poems, art directed and designed Dave the Potter , which just won the Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scot King Illustration awards for 2011. Congrats, Steph! This achievement follows last year's 2010 Pura Belpré Award for Book Fiesta , which she also art directed and designed. I am lucky to have such a fine designer for Seven Studies for a Self Portrait .

Thomas Fucaloro read from his new book at Cornelia Street Cafe last evening. inheriting craziness is like a soft halo of light , published by Three Rooms Press, collects poems about family, love and the commercialization of modern life, and their persistent tone is comical self-deflation. The speaker in them almost always manages to be bathetic and pathetic at once. The main poetic strategy is one of juxtaposition, of different registers, images and situations. Thomas is a very likable reader, and his poems make plain their desperation to please. This desperation is a source of the poems' strength, but it is also a cause of their weakness. They are made to give a big pay-off only at the end, but occasionally the ending does not deliver. The last poem he read last night "Tom and Jerry" delivered in his quite inimitable manner. What seemed to be a poem about sexual appetite wound up to be a poem about self-division. It is refreshing to approach existential angst through t...

TLS October 23 2009 I had not read Laura Cumming's book A Face to the World  when I wrote my poem "Seven Studies for a Self-Portrait." Reading Elizabeth Lowry's review of the book, I am amazed by the connections and coincidences between Cumming's Durer and mine . The divine in the human is exactly the theme not only of the Durer study of my "Seven Studies," but also of my next book, to be titled the same as its opening sequence. The book will begin with the Christ-like Durer, and end with a ghazal sequence, in which the last ghazal compares me to God: "Jee, the unlikely initial for God." According to Cumming, Durer also painted his self-portrait based on his trademark initial, A. The initial A also begins and ends a sequence in my book called "I Am My Names," in which A stands for Anonymous. Furthermore, Lowry points out that Durer's finger in the self-portrait says, "Ecce Homo." That is, of course, also Nietzsche...