Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I had a lovely day. It was also the start of my spring break. In the morning, did a bit of work for Singapore Unbound/Gaudy Boy. Took a nap. Read Krystyna Dąbrowska's Tideline , yet another wonderful book of poems by another contemporary Polish poet bought at AWP from the terrific Zephyr Press. Her poetry reminded me of Cavafy and Szymborska. In the evening, GH took me to Osteria 106 where we had a delicious dinner. And then, back home, we watched two episodes of The Amazing Race and dreamed of traveling around the world.  Here's "Wooden Figure of a Hunchbacked Dignitary" by Krystyna Dąbrowska:  All his life he tried to hide the dromedary  ridge within the splendor of distinction and accolades.  He obtained all possible honors,  among them the love of a beautiful woman.  At last he climbed so high  he had the right, like a king,  to disguise himself after death in a perfect body  chiseled by a famous hand.  He could have gone on for ages...

When we arrived yesterday, the Pyramid of the Sun was covered in fog. The misty cover disappeared in the course of the morning, by the time we took our photo in front of the Pyramid of the Moon. The whole complex was truly impressive. What we did not expect was the colorful murals in the complex and surrounding residential ruins. In the murals, the liquid-shaped things coming out of mouths are speech bubbles. Can you spot the "football player"? Our guide Rogelio from With Locals was excellent. He was informative and skeptical at the same time, very unusual for a tour guide.   Back in the hotel, started watching The Witcher: Blood Origin , with Michelle Yeoh in it. Then found out on IG that Henry Cavill has been dropped from both Superman and The Witcher. When Guy joined me, we watched Glass Onion , with Daniel Craig as the detective and Edward Norton as the Meta-like CEO. Not brilliant by any means, it was worth watching.

  On Christmas Eve, visited Museo Mural Diego Rivera, and saw "Dream of a Sunday Afternoon at Alameda Central," his highly personal and political mural. Then walked through the park itself, the oldest public park in Latin America, to Constitution Square, or Zocalo. Lunch at the lovely Cafe de Tacuba. Back in hotel, watched Isi and Ossi , starring a delicious Dennis Mojen and Lisa Vicari who played the innocent rich girl well.  Late start on Christmas Day. Continued reading Duras's The Easy Life Part 2, where the female protagonist goes to the beach and falls apart. Then went to the Museo Nacional de Anthropologia. Very impressive buildings housing an impressive collection of pre-Columbian artefacts. Rainy day. Back in hotel, watched Men in Black: International starring Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson. Hemsworth in bed with an octopus-like alien, but because it's a family movie, he does not even show his butt. Then repeat-watched Lewis on Youtube with Guy: "W...

 Paid the last SUSPECT contributors for the year and balanced the books for Singapore Unbound. Took me almost the whole day. Then continued watching The Recruit on Netflx. A protagonist who is constantly jumping into the deep end of things in order to live on the edge and to prove himself. The show also shows the human fallout of such a life attitude. Then, with Guy in the evening, we watched the last episode of season 9 of Blacklist . The series keeps throwing up interesting ethical questions. The concluding two-parter poses the question: would you betray your leader if your leader is betraying the organization?  Today I have to pack for our trip to Mexico.

 On Sunday, we had friends over for a holiday brunch. It went on into the evening when our neighbor Judy joined us, and Guy and she immersed themselves in talk about the management of the building.  Yesterday, I read Monica Youn's From From. Still trying to figure out what to say about it in a review for Poetry School. Met Henry for dinner at Pisticci and had a good time as always. Hart Crane as Whitman's heir. The Communist Auden and the Christian Auden. That racism in the US cannot be explained wholly by white supremacy. Our sisters, and their attitudes to our being gay. Came home, and watched another episode of Blacklist , and then finished the first episode of The Recruit , starring a beefy Noah Centineo as a CIA lawyer and a magnetic Laura Haddock as a former CIA asset who is threatening to expose her relationship with the agency.

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.

 Started reading Gramsci's Prison Notebooks on Sunday. It will be a long reading assignment. It is already giving me ideas. Such as re-start the diary on this blog. Had an interesting discussion with my XIs yesterday that went from incest to family structure to capitalism. China Mieville's book on the Communist Manifesto was still very fresh on my mind so I was able to give crisp answers to the students' questions. In the evening, started watching Edge of Seventeen (1998), starring Chris Stafford, but was whisked away by GH to Italy when we finished watching the TV series Hotel Portolino (2022) with a winsome Oliver Dench as a traumatized survivor of WWI. 

Friday night—watched first 3 episodes of the series Atlanta . Good script but uneven acting. GH hated it. The black body as brute and brutalized, as tender and tenderness. Saturday night—Gina Apostol read from INSURRECTO for Second Saturdays. She began a little unsteadily, as I've seen her do at other readings, and then she settled into it and delivered a passionate voicing of the many characters in her novel. The novel restores my faith in the literary form, in its capacity to revisit the atrocities of history and not merely to recount them, but to re-view them. The colonizer is in me just as I am in my colonizer. There is an essential mystery to the large-scale horrors of history, just as there is to final act of the suicide. Sunday—The Met's "Epic Abstraction" show was a big disappointment. After two gigantic rooms of Pollocks and Rothkos, one of this and one of that, in a misguided attempt to show the influence of Abstract Expressionism beyond American shores ...

Hawaii My myth too—home, the underworld, an ancestor who returns as a sea turtle when he is not the naval officer who died at Pearl Harbor. From the school, which trained the black president, my aumakua took the name of Steve McGarrett. Hawaii Five-O  was sometimes shot in Singapore, do you know? How do you know a man would die for you if you don’t sleep with him first? Under another trademark, he took up with me in New York where we were happy-unhappy for two years until he was recalled to the spirit world, reappearing under the world-class surf a shark.

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.

I've not been recording the movies I had watched. Shame on me. Last weekend, two interesting ones, well worth recording. 2015 Truth , directed by James Vanderbilt, is, as imdb has it, "Newsroom drama detailing the 2004 CBS 60 Minutes report investigating then-President George W. Bush's military service, and the subsequent firestorm of criticism that cost anchor Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes their careers." Cate Blanchett was terrific as Mary Mapes, as was Robert Redford as Dan Rather. That was Friday, and on Sunday, we were completely charmed by Shaun Evans's cerebral and isolated Inspector Morse in made-for-TV Masterpiece Mystery's Endeavor,  written by Inspector Lewis creator and Inspector Morse writer Russell Lewis. * Pale daffodils poor wandering things the souls of emperors

Richard Eyre directed the BBC TV production of Chekov's "The Cherry Orchard" (1981). I watched it over three nights, straining to hear the often-muffled sound. The poor sound might have to do with the age of the DVD. Using a version written by Trevor Griffiths, the production seemed overly English. As Madame Ranevsky, Judi Dench was affecting in certain scenes, as when she debated with herself whether to return to her Parisian lover, but was otherwise unconvincing as a Russian aristocrat who had to sell her family estate, including the famous cherry orchard. More likely was the performance of Bill Paterson as Lopakhin, the eventual buyer of the estate. The character was the richest of the lot. Upwardly mobile, commercially-minded, he gloried in the purchase of the land on which his father had worked as a serf. Anton Lesser was also very fine as the "eternal" student Peter Trofimov. * Over the last two weekends we watched two gay movies about adopting a child...

Just returned from a visit to GH's friends who have lived for ten years in Woodstock, in upstate New York. We took the Trailways bus from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to Kingston. T and D picked us up, and drove to lunch at a small restaurant in Phoenicia. After not finishing the short (!) stack of pancakes--buttermilk, blueberry, pumpkin--we looked into the small local library and a few curiosity shops, before driving to the Kaasterskill Falls, painted famously by Thomas Cole. GH and I left T at what we thought was the Falls and hiked along the river. Not realizing that the Falls was ahead of us, we turned round after a while, and came back to the waiting car. Photo by GH T and D's house was a treasure trove set in a landscape of riches. Every inch of wall and floor and countertop held or was covered with painting, photograph, carpet or sculpture. There were kitschy worker dolls from Mao's era. A home-made chandelier of branches draped with Christmas lights preside...

DUMBO held a three-day arts festival over the last weekend. GH and I caught the last day of it, on Sunday. In two open studios, sponsored by Triangle Arts, the artists painted the human figure with thick strokes but thin vision. In another studio, above the winning Galapagos Art Space, pop culture was given the tired old spin. There was a painting of a billboard advertising a beach vacation. In an open coffin lined with red satin, two silent boom boxes. The art we saw looked like the fag end of once-vital artistic styles. The photographic shows were more interesting. The winners of a competition whose name I cannot remember showed a real eye for an interesting subject, and the technique for rendering it. One black rectangle was slashed by a white arm stretched out from the right edge of the photo. Another photo showed a black boy, on the cusp of adolescence, looking pensive in his baseball cap, one hand holding the controls of a video game in his room. My favorite juxtaposes young me...

A message from George Spencer, who hosts the Poetry Thin Air Cable Show. I'm on it on July 22. Poets, Friends of Poetry Thin Air, Tune in to our Poetry Thin Air Cable Show early Wednesday 12:30am to 1:00am (eastern time) for great interviews with George Spencer and guest poets, plus sharp video work by Mitch Corber. This July 22, we feature Miriam Stanley and Jee Leong Koh. The show will be aired on MNN/Manhattan Neighborhood Network's Channel 67. Note: if you live outside Manhattan, or do but can't get MNN Ch 67, get the live internet stream of the show by following the instructions below. PC USERS (2 steps)...... 1. Download Windows Media Player here http://www.windowsmedia.com/download 2. Click on your channel 67 stream, here http://www.mnn.org/sites/mnn.org/files/streams/ch67.asx MAC USERS (4 steps)...... 1. Download Windows Media Player here http://www.windowsmedia.com/download 2. Download Flip4Mac Player for QuickTime viewing http://www.microsoft.com/windows/wind...

Apology: The network lost the DVD and so did not broadcast the program. My apologies to everyone who tried to catch the show. I will let you know if I have a new date.  * I am reading my poetry on the Poetry Thin Air Cable Show, revived by George Spencer and Mitch Corber. The program will be broadcast on Manhattan Neighborhood Network Channel 67, this Wednesday between 12:30-1:00 AM (EST). If you don't get MNN Ch 67, don't worry. You can get the internet stream by following the instructions below. PC USERS 1. Download Windows Media Player here 2. Click on your channel 67 stream, here MAC USERS 1. Download Windows Media Player here 2. Download Flip4Mac Player for QuickTime viewing here 3. Also download VLC media player from this page 4. Now, click on your channel 67 stream, here Note: Try it now, or well before the show starts. P.S. Any connection problems, email Mitch Corber Tuesday evening 9–11 pm (thinairvideo@earthlink.net). He will offer 1-on-1 phone support, so leave him ...

Just finished watching the last episode of "The Jewel in the Crown," the fourteen-part serial produced by Granada Studios and first broadcast on British independent TV in January 1984. Based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet , published between 1966 and 1975, the serial focuses on the last days of British rule in India. Peter McLuskie gives here the interesting context of the serial's broadcast and subsequent role in the debate over the deregulation of television in the late 1980's.  Following a commentator on the serial, McLuskie describes "The Jewel in the Crown" as the least nostalgic and most troubled of the cycle of productions in the early '80's that looked back to the glories of the British Raj. The trouble, writes McLuskie, "may have less to do with the serial's overt politics and more to do with its form and style." This is an interesting statement, but it is also potentially a misleading one, for it implies that style is separa...

Someone suggested I ask people record themselves reading my poems or make videos of them, for posting on Youtube, Facebook and my book blog. I think it would be really interesting to get other people's take on the poems. I will call them Retakes. No prizes, just the joy of making. So if you are interested, send your Retakes to jeeleong.koh@gmail.com. My new book of poems, and the details on Retakes, can be found here .  * Last night, I read my poems for the thin air cable show that George Spencer and Mitch Corber are reviving. I've been interviewed for radio before, but not TV. The interview took place in George's apartment in the Village. While waiting for our turn, Eric, Miriam and I sat in the kitchen chatting about David Lynch and John Waters, and downing red wine. When it was my turn, I went to the living room where the lights and camera had been set up.  First time meeting Mitch. He read me a fine poem about a woman, using the Shakespearean metaphor of accounting, wi...