Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 I had a lovely, wide-ranging conversation about my book SNOW AT 5 PM with poet Indran Amirthanayagam. Originally from Sri Lanka, which Indran still calls by its older name Ceylon, Indran is a naturalized American who used to work in the diplomatic corp. His own poetry is powerfully influenced by Whitman, O'Hara, and Lorca. 

 SNOW AT 5 PM receives a really engaged and engaging review in French on Amazon! (English translation follows.) Snow at 5 M est sans doute la fiction la plus intéressante que j’ai pu lire depuis très longtemps. Mais est-il possible de parler de fiction ? C’est bien plus que cela. Le dernier ouvrage de Jee Leong Koh est assez inclassable. C’est de la poésie en premier lieu mais c’est aussi un livre engagé notamment contre les discriminations (raciales, sociétales, basées sur le genre, etc.) et un regard très incisif sur la société américaine depuis les années 40 jusqu’à 2066. Oui, il faut mentionner que ce livre est également une œuvre d’anticipation aux tonalités dystopiques. Si les haïkus sont superbes, si les sujets abordés sont sérieux, il n’en est pas moins que l’auteur ne néglige pas l’humour, y compris l’auto-dérision, et certains passages sont pour le moins croustillants. L’originalité demeure en ce que Jee Leong Koh s’imagine avoir découvert une liasse de 107 haïkus légère...

 A thrill to be read so enthusiastically and preceptively by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, one of the three judges of the Singapore Literature Prize English fiction category. She made her thoughts public on her FB page after the award ceremony was over. She has really good things to say too about my fellow nominees, Cyril Wong and Mallika Naguran. "The Singapore Book Council celebration of the 2022 Prize winners for various genres in different languages was yesterday (Thurday), so I no longer feel bound to discreet silence as one of the three judges for the English Fiction Award. I wrote up my enthusiasm for three of the 33 novels and short story collections mailed to me, and include them here, to share with their readers! "Jee Leong Koh’s Snow at 5 P.M.: Translations of an Insignificant Japanese Poet Jee Leong Koh’s Snow at 5 P.M. may be Singapore first global novel. It is multi-genre, with 107 haiku introducing many of the prose passages. Set chiefly in contemporary Manhattan, with...

I'm very happy to share with you that an excerpt from my hybrid work of fiction Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an Insignificant Japanese Poet is featured at Poetry Daily today! I hope you will enjoy reading it. Poet and literary critic Vivek Narayanan comments very kindly: "Koh’s work in some moments can seem disarmingly simple, even if always rigorous in its language, lighting on the ordinary, but as you delve further it reveals a rich intelligence, omnivorous and cosmopolitan in its influences, balancing its interests in high and low, the cerebral and the bodily, the experimental and the straight, narrative and ellipsis." ( read the rest of his commentary ) If you'd like to get hold of the book, please consider getting it from Bookshop , as the online store shares its profits with independent bookstores. Or ask your local bookstore for it. Friends in Singapore, I hope to be back and see you next summer.

Co-organized by COMPASS, the graduate student association of the Comparative Lit Dept at the University of Georgia, Athens, and the Wilson Center for Humanities and Arts, my lecture-and-reading "Translation as a Literary Trope" was held online on March 25, 2020. I spoke about my relationship to Singapore's (neo)colonial linguistic policies, my encounter with American poets and poetry, and the development of my hybrid work, Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet. Thanks, Aruni Kashyap, for suggesting that I visit and, Subrahleena Deka, for organizing the event.

Gregory Woods reviewed Snow at 5 PM on his Facebook page : Yesterday, I finished reading Jee Leong Koh’s “Snow at 5 PM” (2020), a book so intriguing I immediately read it for a second time. Himself a fine critic and an even finer poet, Koh splices these two modes together to write a fine, funny, fascinating novel. The 107 haiku of an unnamed “insignificant Japanese poet”, not necessarily Japanese, possibly Japanese-American, “insignificant” only by an insignificant metric, found in the fireplace of a New York apartment, are translated in 2016 into English by the gay Singaporean poet Jee Leong Koh, a New York resident, not necessarily their translator, possibly their author, who then loses the originals. In 2066, the Jewish Japanese-Korean-American gay trans man Sam Fujimoto-Mayer, grandson of a Holocaust survivor, produces a comprehensive edition of the translations, with commentary on each and all, dismissing previous commentators, often as fascists, along the way. Rosemarie binte Sul...

 Started writing a new series of poems tentatively titled "Inspector Inspector." The Ghost Bus   The bus goes past us, and then stops a full length ahead. An inspector, blue-uniformed, hops off, and the bus takes off. It is not our bus. The next bus stops for us, but also stops a full-length before my bus-stop. There is no reason for it, as the bus lane in front of it is blank, as blank as the white spaces between words. There is no reason for my bus to stop there. I walk down the length of my morning bus, and I walk down the length of the ghost bus, wondering how many ghost people are riding it to a ghost destination that I know nothing of. The lights change just in time for me to cross the road, and I look down the full length of the ghost bus, seeing no one, but my morning driver who is looking, I imagine, back at me. It is the first year of the pandemic.   * SNOW AT 5 PM has a French fan! His review on Amazon , translated from French into E...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Thank you for buying books from our imprint Gaudy Boy in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Gaudy Boy donated our sales proceeds from June through August to Voices of Community Activists & Leaders (VOCAL-NY). Together we raised $500, including two outright donations. Led by Black and brown people, VOCAL-NY is a statewide grassroots membership organization that builds power among low-income people directly impacted by HIV/AIDS, the drug war, mass incarceration, and homelessness. The organization has active chapters in New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, and Westchester County. We're pleased to support its community organizing, leadership development, advocacy, direct services, and direct action. Do check out VOCAL-NY's tremendous work for disadvantaged communities. I don't do this often but I will toot my own horn. My first hybrid work of fiction Snow at 5 PM:...

The wolf-man is a simplistic reduction of our myriad selves. "Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands." Reading this passage helped me discover the meaning of the oscillating gun in my fiction manuscript SNOW AT 5 PM. The truth of multiplicity comes home to Harry Haller at the climax of the Magic Theater, with all its doors leading to different versions of himself. The chess player in one room is surely a predecessor of the Magister Ludi of the glass bead game. All past, present, and future selves available to one. Not for nothing is Hesse a disciple of Nietzsche, and his eternal recurrence. For me, Hesse will always be the most miraculous and unexpected connector.  After reading Safranski's biography of Goethe, I find Goethe appearing to Harry Haller in a dream. The accusation of ...

SNOW AT 5 PM, my hybrid manuscript of haiku translations and commentary, is on a roll! It has just been longlisted for the 1st [PANK] BOOK CONTEST . This comes after it has been selected as semifinalist for the YESYES BOOKS Open Reading Period . Excerpts have also just been published in the Long Poem Magazine . The contest results will be announced in December. Wish me luck!

Worked on Snow at 5 PM from 5 am to 12:30 pm, with a break to get the paper and groceries and another break for brunch. Focused on pumping up the language and adding specific details. Went for Bikram Yoga at Yogacare. Missed only 1 of the poses. Watched the last episode of Endeavor Season Four, called "Harvest." Shaun Evans as the young constable Endeavor Morse and Roger Allam as his older colleague, Detective Inspector Fred Thursday.

Revised the Preface and the Afterword to Snow at 5 PM . Finished reading East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity by Philippe Sands, recommended by Henry Abelove. Very well researched, it reads like a detective novel.  Watched Fire Song (2015), written and directed by Adam Garnet Jones, about a gay Anishinaabe teenager living in North Ontario and trying hard to get out of his small town. Andrew Martin, who plays the protagonist Shane, is a natural actor.

I'm going to record my daily activities more faithfully on this blog. It is the main on-line repository of my memories. I've been working on Snow at 5 PM this Thanksgiving break. Yesterday GH and I had brunch with Dan Liu at Maison Harlem. He shared about the way he catalogues his images. One useful tip was to keep hi-res assets on Dropbox, which can be accessed from any device. For Thanksgiving dinner, GH and I went to Barawine. I had good mussels and a passable Sancere. Then we came home and watched Last Vegas, a 2013 comedy starring Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, and directed by Jon Turteltaub. Good script and acting. The plot is so-so. The movie confirmed our prejudice against Las Vegas.