mind fodder

From What, How Well, Why? by Michael Schmidt, StAnza Lecture, March 2006

"Surely we can, without necessarily being academic, but using imagination... put a little distance between ourselves as writers, demand a little less solidarity, a little less local backslapping, more debate and engagement, at the same time giving the reader less of a condescending embrace? Down with the poetry cheerleaders, I say! Readers don’t need to be talked down to, some do not need to be sold on poetry. It’s possible to become impatient with the mundane sense of freedom that some writers are content to seek, the tackiness and short take of much of our reading culture, the condescension of our performance culture."


That is why QLRS is there on the sidebar of this blog: because it is a journal with the sort of literary integrity that is so very necessary if the standard of writing in Singapore (or, indeed, anywhere) is to improve. It takes a whole lot of humility, generosity, and intelligence for a literary journal to publish negative critiques and reviews of its own editors' work. But, surely, this is the only way forward. That is why i respect people like Hsien Min and Cyril - because they know that art transcends the ego, and because they live out that belief in the way they practise their art.

Down with niceness, i say!

i've been going on about this for some time, but i think it bears repeating: no one owes our artists (in the widest sense of the word) a living. Once an artist puts up a work for public consumption, he must be prepared to have that work critically appraised and judged on its own merits, without consideration for the artist as a person. What this means is that it doesn't matter if William Hung is a really sweet person. It doesn't even matter if he's given his absolute best. To claim that it does make a difference is a stance for the moral education teacher to take, but it is not acceptable for artists to fall back on things like their personal nice-ness, or even their utmost effort, as an excuse for bad art. Not in my book, at least.

So, yes. We must expect and demand the very best from our artists. And they must be prepared to give it. It's really that simple.
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cry to be found

So i've discovered a new old band, Del Amitri - the Scotts boys who came up with such gems as 'Roll To Me' and the deeply depressing 'Always the Last to Know' with its ironic stinger of an ending. The first song on Hatful of Rain, their 'best of' album from 1998, is a jaunty, sexy little number called 'Cry To Be Found'. With its slightly edgy guitar riffs, it would make a perfect sonic backdrop for a film set in London or New York. i can imagine the female protagonist walking through the streets of London on a sunny summer's day, dressed in jeans and a black (or perhaps white) cotton top, the sort that's loose-fitting and billowing. Walking past the souvenir shops and restaurants near the British Museum, along Tottenham Court Road with its funky furniture shops, then Charing Cross Road with its many tempting bookshops, through Soho with its restaurants and theatres and porn shops, across (the now apparently pigeon-free) Trafalger Square, then across the Thames to the South Bank with its buskers, artists, cyclists and roller-bladers...
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new york, new york

i asked in the previous post what it is about this place that makes people leave.

Well, perhaps one answer is, the lack of places like this:

The Cornelia Street Cafe, New York City.

i wanna go to New York!!!
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fishing for answers

A couple of months back i was questioning the place of literature in general, and poetry in particular, in a world where so much requires real, practical action that the imaginary gardens created by the poetic enterprise seem, by comparison, hopelessly irrelevant.

i still haven't found the answer to that question. There probably isn't any single satisfactory answer, anyway. But what i have found is a new online poetry journal that is so damned good that reading it leaves me almost breathlessly believing in poetry again. Best of all, it's helmed by a Singaporean. (Ok so i'm a crazy flag-waving nationalist patriot. So sue me.)

Cyril Wong's Softblow is an inspiration in so many ways. In the first place, there is the sheer quality of the work on the site, every word placed just exactly right, each poem a carefully crafted gem quietly shining its many-faceted truth. Then there's the passion and the drive that lies behind every piece of work, and behind the journal itself. (Nothing inspires me more than seeing passion and drive bear fruit.) And of course the fact that it's all run by a fellow Singaporean just shows that this place need not be a cultural desert-island, and that there are people who are willing to work their butts off to build something of a lasting city in the Singaporean arts scene.

So vive la cyril wong! You go, girl! :)

Here's something from the journal by the first Singaporean poet to catch my wandering literary eye in those lean, heart-hungry, post-London years. (Alas, he too has left this place for greener pastures. What is it about this country that makes its best people so eager to leave?) This poem reminds me of the trips i used to make with my parents, way back when i was a kid, to the fishing village of Kukup in Johor. Perhaps, and this is just a tentative answer, perhaps that's one reason we need our poets: to remind us of who we were as a people, and of where we came from, and to make us reflect on where we are going.

Singapore is such a young country. And i'm not just referring to our relatively short history as an independent state. At a fundamental level, this is no country for old men. Our belief in progress as an unmitigated good is not just enshrined in our national pledge, it is borne out in our ever-changing urban landscape, our almost-relentless drive to obliterate any memory of the our less-than-glamorous past as an island of kampongs and kelongs. What gives, when men and women are torn from their way of life and forced to adapt to a world that may be changing too fast for their liking? Do they, like the speaker's father in this poem, find themselves lost in a contemporary culture alien to their natures? And what are we to make of these people? Do we chide or even deride them as losers, condemn them for their inability to move on and seize change by the throat and throttle it into submission? Or do we feel a guilty sympathy - the sort we feel when we pass by a beggar on the street?

Or do we write about them?

[Edit: ok, maybe i should moderate my earlier rapturous response and say that, now i have read more of Softblow, i think the work there is rather uneven in quality. There's some pretty bad stuff there that makes me think i can write poetry too. Cyril, you need to do more QC!]


Kelong

My father hands me over the sampan’s dipping bow
to the boatman’s leathery hands sitting me in the stern;
he eases beside me and you know he is in his element.
The boat is turned, the engine gunned
and off we go over the thumping waves.

My heart heaves as the hull leaps and dips
from choppy swell to swell, and for the first time
I taste the sea, the spun salt spume spraying
our faces, the last light gilding my father’s frame,
his image spectral almost, hovering.

His eyes are fixed on the distance, buoyant, free
from debts, going for the big catch. The kelong
bobs into view, a fishing outpost staked out
like an oil rig with huts and walkways,
all stakes, stilts and slats cane-lashed

and trussed naillessly to farm
the sea. The boatman slows his craft
along the landing stage, cuts the outboard
and tosses up a rope to berth. I am relayed
by tremendous fisher hands to the dipping raft

of sun-warmed boards, trailing my father
on trembling legs up the timber planks
to the kelong compound, my head reeling
from the lurching waters
tilting the horizon end to end.

My father carries me into the hut
where I sit and find equilibrium
on a floating world of water and air.
The smell of salted fish everywhere
and through the gaps of the worn timber floor

you can see the threadwork of the tossing tides
and imagine the kelong’s legs stretching
miles to the ocean bed. You feel the pulse, the tug
of the depths at the kelong frame and wonder
if it will hold. Out in the dazzle

my father is talking fish talk with the kelong men
and I see him for the first time
at home, as he is not on dry land,
at the helm of his life for once, the water
a safe distance from horses and drink.

Later I learn to trust the aerial walkways,
fit my tread to the swaying sense of things,
the planks bending but holding firm with each step
and I am walking on water, a weekend
of buoyancy with my father in the watery realm.

After a dinner of fried trevally and rice,
a Conradian moment when the owner tells
how last monsoon a storm blew this way
and lashed the kelong till it groaned and keened
and came undone. How he held to a steadfast

stake and lived to tell the tale. The voices
bob and fade above the lapping waves
and I fall into tidal sleep, the moon
dragging shoals of light across
the kaleidoscopic aquarium.

The kelong is hovering in a realm
neither water nor land, loosened
like a runaway zeppelin from the ocean’s dream,
trawling nets through currents awash
with stars. I keep still beside my father,

afraid any small step may capsize
the moment, halt the slow drift to a place
that is neither up nor down, present nor past,
the certain sensation between father and son
that each lives and stays in the other.

In the middle of the dream I wake
to my father’s tug and we are out
on the platform, the hurricane lamps
illuminating a theatre of catch and haul
while the sea watches in the dark.

The nets are reeled in, like a retiarius
ceiling, and there is a heaven of fish
heaving, thrashing scales, and mouths
agape in hosannas of death, all winched
and dropped on the floodlit deck.

The men fall to their fish business,
wading with buckets through the gleaming bounty
picking prawns, squid, whitebait and trevally
all kicking, the deck thrumming with last gasps;
only the jellyfish are flung back to the source.

In the morning my father shows me
a starfish and some seahorses, souvenirs
I deposit back home in a pail of water.
For weeks I will them to move,
loosed on the currents of my five-year-

old mind. They disappear like my father
into a sea where all the lost things are.
In my dream I cast about for the word
that will reel in the sea hoard in one haul:
starfish, seahorses, and my father.


Boey Kim Cheng
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from the heart of one's bottom

The time has come, the Walrus said, to rant of many things.

Well, just one thing really. Here goes.

So what's it with this idea that poetry is all about self-expression and letting it all hang out? Excuse me, we have a four-letter word for that - and it starts with 'w'. If writing is about self-indulgence, then please have the courtesy to keep it where it belongs: behind the bedroom door, between the sheets.

This probably doesn't sound very nice at all, but writing for the sole purpose of self-expression is exactly the sort of thing that has devalued poetry in the eyes of the wider reading public and that has made other people think that studying literature is a 'soft' option that has no value beyond the purely personal. It is also supremely self-centred. Think about it this way: as readers, we read poetry because we hope to get something out of the experience. (Otherwise, we might as well go watch a movie. Or fly a kite. Whatever.) If readers wanted to experience the joy of hearing people express themselves, they could just as easily sign up as volunteers with a counselling service. Any writer who has any respect for his readers must bear in mind that ultimately, he is not writing for himself alone, but for his readers. His duty (i use that word very deliberately) as a writer is to make sure he communicates his truth as effectively as he can, in a way that will make the experience a worthwhile one for the reader.

Sure, most (i hesitate to use absolutes) good writing does originate, ultimately, from the heart, in the same way that most altruistic actions originate, ultimately, from selfish motivations. (More on that some other time.) Poetry is after all about human experience, in the widest possible sense, and if the communication of that experience is to ring true, it has to be heartfelt, not contrived. But that is only the first step. After the initial emotional impetus, what distinguishes good poetry from poetry.com crap is the craft that goes into shaping those raw emotions into art and the thought that goes into making them intelligible to even total strangers. Anyone who has read enough poetry would have had the experience of reading something that

could just
as easily be
a rant!
on
an on-
line (write a line)
journal
(oh my heart, oh
my heart, oh my
heart)

or worse, that was totally impossible to understand. The response to such 'work' is, at best, a generous forgiveness, and at worst, a disdainful dismissal of the whole tribe of poets.

Poetry is an artform, and just like other artforms, requires not just passion, but also discipline, patience, and humility. No dancer would dream of going on stage simply to 'express' himself, in the same way as no professional musician would dare put on a performance without first putting in hundreds of hours of painstaking practice. They don't, because the consequences are immediately felt where it hurts the most - in the form of poor ticket sales, or even exile to some kind of artistic Siberia. (Or, if you are on American Idol, a cutting remark from Simon Cowell.) Yet, when some people-who-try-to-write-poetry are told that their poetry is not good enough, their immediate reaction is to go up in arms against the cruel critics who dare to curb their attempts at self-expression, or who cannot understand that This Poem = Me!Me!Me! and therefore deserves to be read and appreciated. (And we all know what the musical equivalents of these self-styled poets look like when they go storming out of American Idol.) Surely, since poetry is an artform, would-be poets must hone their craft and cast a critical eye on their writing, measuring it against the best and recognising that ars longa, vita brevis. A professional pianist, practising eight hours a day, may take more than a year to perfect his interpretation of a piano concerto that takes up just half an hour of the audience's time. Assuming that a good sonnet takes about 5 minutes to read and digest, a professional poet should theoretically take about 1/6 of a year (about 60 days, 8 hours per day) just revising and polishing those 14 lines until they are as flawless as is humanly possible. Or, if it takes 10 hours for a young acapella group to learn a 3-minute-long song and make it at least decent enough for public consumption, then a sonnet by a student writer should, proportionally, take him at least 10 hours to draft and edit.

Of course, i know that to tie a writer's work so mechanistically to such strict ratios is a ludicrous idea that is all too open (and rightly so) to Huxleyan ridicule. However, i do think it is important for would-be poets to accept that no one owes them a living, and that if they wish for poetry to retain (or regain) any kind of standing among the other artforms, they must first take it seriously themselves. They must realise that taking poetry seriously involves hours, days, years, of painstaking practice and unflinching self-critique. They must learn to see their work through the eyes of an intelligent, informed reader, instead of from their own ego-tinted persepctives. And they must seek out people who will tell them the truth about their work instead of filling their ears with comforting flatteries. (If they are very lucky, they will find people who are able to offer constructive critique. And with the Internet being what it is, this is not too hard to do. Try the Poetry Free-For-All for a start.)

Otherwise, i'm afraid that poetry deserves its current place as a dying artform, and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
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waiting for a song

So hands up those of you who have found yourselves looking at your entire CD collection of almost 200 CDs of music of almost every conceivable genre except Chinese wayang and electronic noise, and realising that nothing fits, that the one song you want to listen to has not even been written yet, and that it's not going to be written by you because you cannot even begin to imagine what that song would sound like, and that there's nothing you can do, absolutely nothing, and that in the interval between the waiting and its possible but as-yet-unguaranteed fulfilment, there is nothing you can do but to catch echos of that one unwritten, unimaginable song in the ones you already know.
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papa don't preach

Father Ted. A Brit comedy series that K used to talk about back in uni - mostly because one of the characters, Father Dougal, looked like my laughing-blue-eyed (and probably gay) second-year tutor with the gentle-sharp sense of humour: we eventually christened him Dr Dougal.

Anyway, Father Ted (which i never got round to watching, by the way, because i didn't own a television set and couldn't be bothered to watch TV) is a simply hilarious take on this bunch of Catholic priests. Ted is more 'priestly' and definitely smarter, whereas Dougal is, well, you'll see from the bits of the script below.

----------------------------------------------------------

Men in Black

FATHER DOUGAL:
It's great to take a day off every now and again. It shouldn't be just work, work, work now, should it?

FATHER TED:
Yes, it's not as if everyone's gonna go and join some mad religious cult just because we go off for a picnic for a few hours.

FATHER DOUGAL:
God, Ted, I heard about those cults. Everybody dressing in black and saying our Lord is going to come back and judge us all.

FATHER TED:
No, no, Dougal that's us. That's Catholicism you're talking about there.

FATHER DOUGAL:
Oh right, right.



Meeting the Pope

FATHER DOUGAL:
I've never met a celebrity before.

FATHER TED:
You met the Pope.

FATHER DOUGAL:
Did I?

FATHER TED:
Don't you remember when we were in Rome?

FATHER DOUGAL:
That was the Pope? That fella living in the art gallery?

FATHER TED:
The Vatican, Dougal. That was the Vatican.

FATHER DOUGAL:
All the same I wouldn't say he's a celebrity like in the true sense of the word you know.

FATHER TED:
The Pope is God's representative on Earth, Dougal.

FATHER DOUGAL:
You'd think he'd be taller!



A Special Priest

FATHER DOUGAL (on television):
So, God—-does He really exist? I mean, who knows? Like, I don’t know. Personally, I don't even believe in organized religion.



And Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

FATHER DOUGAL (saying his bedtime prayers):
Our Father who art in Heaven...

FATHER TED:
Hallowed.

FATHER DOUGAL:
Hallowed be thy ...

FATHER TED:
Name.

FATHER DOUGAL:
Eh... Papa... don't... preach...

FATHER TED:
Dougal, you know you can praise God with sleep.

FATHER DOUGAL:
Can you, Ted?!

FATHER TED:
Yes, it's a way of thanking Him for a tiring day.

FATHER DOUGAL:
God, there's lots of ways you can praise God, isn't there Ted?! Like that time you told me to praise Him by, you know, just leaving the room.

FATHER TED (smiles):
That was a good one, yes.



The Life Everlasting

FATHER DOUGAL:
Do you believe in an afterlife?

FATHER TED:
Well Dougal, generally speaking, priests tend to have a very strong belief in the aterlife.

FATHER DOUGAL:
Oh, I wish I had your faith, Ted!

FATHER TED:
Dougal, how did you get into the church? Was it like, “Collect twelve crisp packets and become a priest”?



Glory Be

FATHER DOUGAL:
That's almost as mad as that thing you told me about the loaves and the fishes.

FATHER TED:
No, Dougal, that's not mad. That's when our Lord got just one or two bits of food and turned it into a whole pile of food and everyone had it for dinner.

FATHER DOUGAL:
God, He was fantastic, wasn't He?

FATHER TED:
Ah, He was brilliant.



But Seriously...

FATHER DOUGAL:
She seems to be taking the whole Catholic thing a bit seriously, Ted.

FATHER TED:
Yes, Dougal.

FATHER DOUGAL:
I mean, it's just a bit of a laugh.

FATHER TED:
Stop talking, Dougal.
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word of the week

harrow: (noun)
"agricultural implement, heavy wooden rake," c.1300, haru, from Old English hearwa, apparently related to Old Norse harfr "harrow," and perhaps connected with Old High German herbist "harvest". Also possibly from hergian.

harrow: (verb)
especially the harrowing of Hell in Christian theology, from hergian. In the figurative sense of "to wound the feelings, distress greatly" it is first attested 1602 in Shakespeare. Harrowing (adjective) "extremely distressing, painful" first recorded 1810.
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