Arthur Yap (1943–2006)
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is much too enough
Written by Tse Hao Guang
Dated 30 Aug 2023
I first read The Collected Poems of Arthur Yap in 2014, rereading it the very next year as part of my editorial work for poetry.sg. Hoping to select poems for it that were not the usual ann siang or hdb playground, I ended up settling on the four you can still see on Yap's poetry.sg entry today, though I couldn't give you a very rigorous reason why. For this little project I naturally returned to the Collected for inspiration and was surprised by something I had missed in the preface. Jenny Yap and Irving Goh say: "Some readers might well remember that commonplace also included a series of Arthur's paintings titled black and white. We did intend to reproduce them here. However, we no longer have the complete series, and therefore decided to leave them out."
One of the four poems I had picked, "conceptual art", is about the way a removed painting makes a mark precisely because of its absence, and it is in that sense that the omission of the twelve black and whites belatedly but resoundingly announced itself. One wonders why not just ring up some elder poet and scan the paintings in their copy of the book. Or indeed why people with access to the book did not also have access to the "published paintings" within it. Or what Yap might have felt about all this. Well, this last wondering is somewhat answered by "conceptual art". And of course it is a poem from commonplace.
Andrew Howdle, writing on the Leeds poems of commonplace for Singapore Unbound, observes that the removed paintings display a "recurring window motif". Perhaps Yap wanted readers to ultimately see through or past them to the things outside, be they his text-based poetry or perhaps, as Howdle says, the numerous windows of Leeds. I order a copy of commonplace from an American used book website, coughing up the money reluctantly. It won't come for some time, and so I write the poem below not having actually seen these black and whites, but, like "conceptual art", having their removal imprinted on the gallery walls of my mind.
•
black & white
is much too enough
we'd prefer
if things were written
down in exactly
just those two
colourscontrast helps
when crossing
any street
when dancingcore properties of glass?
of charcoal?
of editing?I grab a drink &
look out
the window
with my fingers
