Marc Nair (b. 1981)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Chloe Lim
Dated 9 Jan 2021
Since poetry.sg published its first critical introduction to his works in 2015, Marc Nair’s creative output has nearly quadrupled, a testament to the poet’s steady commitment to his craft. Throughout the early half of 2020, Nair could be found participating enthusiastically in SingPoWriMo 2020, posting #photohaiku on Instagram, and putting together a literary tour around ‘Uncanny Yishun’ (2020). As Nair says in a 2018 interview, “I treat (poetry) as a daily thing”. Such prolific production, experimentation, and willingness to test new possibilities appears to be part of the process that has generated timely, thoughtful work over the past thirteen years.
Nair first established himself within the Singaporean literary community as a spoken word poet and has been a key figure in the development of the spoken word scene. His poetry collections however, do not limit themselves to stage-to-page material. From travel poems to collaborative multimedia projects, Nair’s eleven collections of poetry expand outward, exploring possibilities and pushing boundaries while retaining the stage performer’s quick-witted responsiveness to evolving circumstances.
Text-Based Poetry Collections
Themes that will come to dominate Nair’s work make themselves apparent from Along the Yellow Line (2007), where we are told we will “walk down the middle of lines between identity and society, faith and science, love and fear”. The collection begins by introducing us to a personal conundrum of identity in “The Yellow Line,” where “Often, I am asked if I’m an immigrant”. The persona proceeds to defy the neat categorising impulse of Singapore’s racial definitions, writing:
Perhaps my IC should read 'Others,'
an unidentified cultural composite
walking down the yellow line (“The Yellow Line”).
This sense of occupying an outlier space continues with a flaneur-type position in “1 a.m.” Here, the persona quietly observes others: “a lone drunk,” a pair of “passing heels,” “newly-weds” and “stern-eyed cats”. Throughout the collection, there is a feeling of deep affection for the urban space and its inhabitants as they live their daily lives (“Oranges” for example revolves around a commuter mislaying his oranges on a train before the Chinese New Year). While the arrangement of poems within the book appears haphazard, they encapsulate the broad range of Nair’s themes, from the religious (in poems like “nails” and “sandals”) to experiments with concrete poetry (“scenarios”), fixed forms (“Senryu of Singapore”), and, toward the end of Along, travel poems.
These travel poems expand to occupy a full collection in Chai: Travel Poems (2010). These poems span four locations: Bali, Vietnam, the Philippines, and India. The tone is set by “Confessions of an Ambivalion,” with a personified merlion as reluctant “sentry” with fraught identity, “the lovechild of a strange coupling”. Questions of identity posed by the introspective observer continue throughout the collection, reflecting on what he sees (in poems like “Snapshots of Dong Xuan Market” and “Legong”), while considering its relevance to the self (“Love Graffiti in Catba Cave” comes to mind). There is sometimes a tendency for travel writing to be indulgent and narcissistic, but Nair carefully avoids this with an ironic self-awareness of the traveller-tourist’s position in the societies he visits. In particular, the section on the Philippines takes on a political edge as the speaker muses on the economic inequalities between Singapore and the countries he visits. In “Roads” for example:
On streets of dust, white-robed nurses throng
to the LRT after school. Soon they will ride
subways in London and Singapore (“Roads”).
Travel in Chai refuses to succumb to hedonistic travel escapism (underscored by poems like “The Frenchman on the Road to Sagada” and “Conversations with Marcus,” which feature characters who leave all traces of home behind for the exotic unknown), but rather uses travel to pick apart threads of what it means to be Singaporean, to call several cultures home. This culminates in the final section, “India: between flight and longing,” where Nair recounts his experiences of travelling “in the land of my fathers” (“Chai”), and negotiating the strange yet familiar. As Chris Mooney-Singh summarises in the afterword: “Nair reveals sharp insights with a distinct voice willing also to look askance at times at the traveller within [ . . . ] This book however, is an unsentimental, yet appreciative look at Asia by a resident Asian searching out his own origins”.
Reflections on place and identity continue logically in Nair’s third collection, Postal Code (2013). Postal Code is:
arranged into five sections; poems about Singapore, faith, love, loss and endings. These themes help to create a sense of a larger narrative, and coalesces with the title, which is also about longing for a place that goes beyond the typical recourse to home, and reflects on finding a sense of belonging wherever one is. (Nair, 2013)
The collection is politically-minded and bold, starting with “How to Make Paper,” with said paper being a metaphor for the lives rendered as two-dimensional numbers by the 2013 Population White Paper. Postal Code struggles with the desire to name home, to find a “code” by which one can be known and found, thwarted by the realisation that questions of identity find different answers depending on who is asking. The first section of Postal Code deals with quintessentially Singaporean moments, from “Mas Selamat” to the Orchard Road floods in “Selling the Floods” and the electric energy around the 2011 General Election (“Umbrellas”). As a collection, it is the natural sequel to Along. The poems on faith for example, articulate an alternative perspective to the question of religion first raised in Along. Poems like “Eden Towers” reflect on materialistic aspirations as a form of religion, where “Paradise is not a road or a song; it is this/ brazen condominium”. These poems, compared to “nails” or “sandals” are less overtly connected to worship, complicating the relationship of the individual to the desire for higher meaning. That said, Postal Code, like Along, arcs outward from Singapore to travel poetry written elsewhere, and finally to subdued meditations on the ageing family and what is left behind with the passing of time. The collection reaches its conclusion that perhaps “a sense of belonging” might be best derived from accumulated memory, and shared moments of connection with country, loved ones, and the god you call your own.
Two years after Postal Code, readers are treated to The Poet of Unlove (2015), eighteen longer spoken word pieces taken from Nair’s various performances. Of the eighteen, one can locate recorded performances of at least seven of them online. While the poems on their own rely on inspired ideas to entertain and provoke thought, being able to watch the performances truly enhances the reading-viewing experience. “O Holy Torrent,” for example, a hymnic depiction of devotion practised at the Church of Kopimism, reads well on its own. The speaker parodies a preacher, exhorting “All those who hold that copying information / Is a sacred virtue of file sharing” to listen to his message extolling the virtues of “Ctrl-C” and “Ctrl-V”. The premise itself is absurd, even more gleefully so when you realise that the Church of Kopimism is real. The reader’s glee at discovering new knowledge about Kopimism is only enhanced by viewing the performance (2015), complete with Nair’s resonant, deep voice singing the hymn, “O holy torrent”. Nair’s pastor-persona comes truly to life with the performance of the poem, naturally leading the audience to obediently repeat “the seeders’ prayer”. Through performance, the spoken word stage becomes a pulpit, the audience a type of congregation, sharing in and co-creating the humour of the poem, thereby making it complete. Such poems demonstrate the spoken word poet at his best. Even without a performed rendition however, other poems like “Pacifist Ocean” make for moving reading, with the Pacific Ocean personified, lamenting pollution, explaining that despite its great power, “I never signed up for this war”. In the magazine Mackerel (2015), the poem is paired with beautiful photographs raising awareness for the conservation group, The Dorsal Effect. By doing so, the poem further demonstrates the potential of Nair’s more politically-minded poems, infused with a clear message, reaching from the stage and into the larger community. The Poet of Unlove provides a strong sense of Nair’s strengths as an experienced, award-winning spoken word poet, particularly for those who have not yet or who cannot access the live performances.
Animal City as Turning Point
It is around 2014 that Nair’s poetry begins to take on a new and distinct shape. He becomes more focused on collaborative, genre-bending work that transcends the confines of a specific medium. Evidence of this was clear before, in Chai, for example, where Nair’s band, Neon and Wonder, released an accompanying digital spoken word album. However, collaboration across art forms becomes more explicitly foregrounded in Animal City (2014). A children’s book featuring animals familiar to Singaporeans, Animal City is collaborative in two ways—it features illustrations by Vanessa Chan and is accompanied by Neon and Wonder’s music. The presentation of poetry in Animal City therefore is what another reviewer calls, “defamiliarising”, in which children’s poems are placed next to “street-art type illustrations,” to render poetry appreciation a a multi-sensory experience. More importantly however, Animal City is fun, and not just for children, but also for adults. Take for example, the poem “Spidey-San” featuring a Japanese spider-chef whose “long legs flash like chopsticks” before wrapping his insect-customers up, “with apologies” and “swallow(ing) them whole like sushi”. Innocuous, mundane imagery, like a spider catching an insect in its web, take on larger-than-life, exciting dimensions through the personification of common animals. Pigeons take on competitive pooping in “Pigeon Pooping Contest,” and crows grumble in a Nighthawks style “Crow Bar”. This is poetry as few other Singaporean artists had and have done, and marks an exciting turn in Nair’s oeuvre.
Photography and Poetry
Animal City is followed by Spomenik (2016), Nair’s first foray into a collection of poems that are in conversation with photographs. These poems and photographs are written and taken by Nair while on a trip through the Balkans. “Spomenik” is the Croatian word for monument, specifically a type of monument built after WWII in what was once Yugoslavia. In the Preface to Spomenik, Nair explains:
Commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites of WWII battles or where concentration camps once stood, spomeniks are gigantic symbols of uncertain origin, built during the height of Brutalism, deliberately ambiguous in their construction to be neutral to both perpetrators and victims of the war.
Perhaps it is a question of timing, but further research in recent years on the history and construction of spomeniks tells the English-speaking reader that “There was no specific call or commission by Tito or the Yugoslav government for monumental sculptures, nor for abstract ones, nor were they all Second World War memorials as such” (Hatherley, 2016). A thorough database of Spomeniks was also created in 2016, cataloguing these monuments with specific anti-fascist histories. Spomeniks are far from “ambiguous”, “neutral” or mysterious, a premise that Spomenik relies on in order to succeed as a collection. Knowing this, the reader may find it difficult to engage with the poetry, observing instead the traveller’s lack of understanding as he struggles to understand the foreign. Where travel in Chai surfaced questions of identity with an awareness of Asia’s political dynamics, Spomenik slides into the indulgent with a central conflict that exoticises the “mystery” of Eastern European symbols.
Arguably, it is not the responsibility of the travel writer / poet to capture an entirely accurate sense of a place foreign to himself. Spomenik’s contradictions are also quite possibly a function of poetry inspired by a country further afield. It is indeed harder to cross language and cultural barriers to truly understand the deep pain and conflict experienced by people of the Balkans. There are even moments in the collection where awareness of this unbridgeable gap makes for poignant poetry. Yet, poems such as “Benchwarmers,'' paired with a picture of a man asleep on a bench (What can we really know about him? Are we privy to his moment of rest?), can come off as presumptuous, given the traveller’s imperfect knowledge of the vulnerable, observed other. Andrea Yew references Sontag in her review of Spomenik, particularly the potential of the photograph to be an “incitement to reverie” (2016). What she does not mention however, is Sontag’s view on the pitfalls of photography, that “there is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera” (1977). While not all travel poetry must be ethical, the history of the Balkans is fraught with immense tension and trauma that persists even today. Accordingly, the photographer-poet should tread carefully and precisely around the subject.
Such issues however, are not present in Vital Possessions (Ethos Books, 2019). Written following Nair’s 2015 writing residency at Gardens by the Bay, “the poems question what we hold as vital amid ceaseless consumption and our urban existence”. The collection initially seems to be focused on the natural world, with poems such as “Olive,” addressing a thousand-year-old Spanish olive tree in the Flower Dome, and “עגור (Agur),” where cranes announce in the first person:
we are more than a backdrop of
leaping fish or frangible seashells
on the mud-flats (“עגור (Agur)”)
Ultimately, however, the poems are preoccupied with human concerns, intersecting as they do at times with other species in a “cyborg-like overlap” (Gallagher, 2020) much like the Gardens that inspire several of the poems. Nature remains firmly as a tool to interrogate human concerns, such as in the striking “Ghazal of Our Hive,” where worker-humans are compared to worker bees:
We arc about on overtime, wing to cheek,
pollinating paper trails pledged to our hive (“Ghazal of Our Hive”).
The repetitive quality of the radif (the refrain repeated at the end of both lines in the first stanza, and at the end of every couplet), “our hive,” creates a thematically consistent sense of routine and restriction. Vital Possessions does not make any impassioned plea for the actions we must take in the anthropocene, as Toh Wen Li’s comprehensive review notices, but the poems themselves are contemplative, making use of photography as well, “giving rise to a rather fruitful cross-pollination of ideas” (2018).
Generative interaction between photography and poetry in Nair’s work achieves significant breakthrough in Sightlines with Tsen-Waye Tay (2019). A collaborative project, Sightlines features poetry written in response to black-and-white images shot on film by Tay. What is most exciting to a loyal reader of Nair’s work is that:
These are notes on passing through diverse places with an unnamed female traveler, who is both photographer and protagonist. The poems are a commentary on her perspectives, allowing the reader a sideways glance at moments that are written with and against the image.
The creation of the “unnamed protagonist,” an anonymous persona that is the combined creation of the poet and photographer’s work, as well as the reader’s reactions, is entirely new in Nair’s oeuvre. Where the poet or photographer’s identity was previously crucial in the construction of themes and perspective in the text-based poetry collections, or in Spomenik and Vital Possessions, here we have a narrative that is free from identifying tags. The poetry cannot be read without the attendant photographs. In poems like “Sweet” for example, a photograph of a young girl sitting on a sea-side wall is overlaid with text that tells us that:
She decided to speak to the girl
Maybe it was the word on the wall
That left a saccharine tint in her eyes. (“Sweet”)
The reader’s attention is then brought to the lower third of the photograph, where the word “Sweet” is inscribed on the wall. The reader / viewer then is led to imagine this anonymous protagonist sitting next to the photographed girl, the story unfolding in a liminal space in the reader’s mind. The locations of the photographs are not revealed within the collection either, and are only listed at the very end of the collection, leaving the reader / viewer free to make meaning. Sightlines in this way becomes more than its parts, worth returning to repeatedly as an example of what Nair can achieve outside of the spoken word world, entering into the visual text and collaborating with artists practising varied crafts.
Collaboration and Connections
Throughout Nair’s works, there remains an underlying concern with using experimentation and collaborative work to broaden the possibilities of communication and enhance the reach of one's art. Intersection with Nicola Anthony (2017), for example, features Nair’s text side by side with Anthony’s art work. 24 poems and 33 pieces of art respond to three locations: Kyauktada, Yangon, the City Wall in London, and Kampung Gelam, Singapore. Nair details this process of collaboration as highly dialogic—the artwork responds to the poems, and the poems, being modified, in turn respond to the artwork. It is not entirely clear why these three specific locales were chosen, but the work calls to mind the intense interconnectedness of our modern world, between metropoles, artists, and artforms.
Ultimately, experimentation and collaboration serve to challenge the boundaries of what poetry can do, with the effect of bringing new readers to poetry as well. As Nair comments in a 2018 interview on the topic of accessibility:
As to whether I make my art accessible, perhaps it’s also the art form and I think poetry is just not accessible in the way a mural is. It’s just the nature of the art form. If people hear “poetry”, they shut down. And that’s already a stumbling block. So if you don’t call it poetry, maybe?
And so we have the visually resplendent Auguries of Modern Innocence (2018) where the poetry is only half the point, surrounded as it is by ten of Singapore’s leading graphic and comic illustrators. A modern response to William Blake’s early 19th-century “Auguries of Innocence,” the long poem mirrors Blake’s form while ominously offering “a series of portents” of the 21st century’s common ills, including political turmoil, displaced populations, narcissism, and environmental degradation. While the text itself is impressive, and generally scans according to Blake’s iambic tetrameter, what compels the reader to linger over the pages is the vibrant, detailed illustrations. It is perhaps ironic then, that while engaging with the profound details of the original Auguries, as well as its meter and rhyme, one is drawn in by the images of Nair’s rendition instead, much like the oft-lamented modern internet user with a short attention span. That being said, where the general public may find Blake inaccessible, or an unfamiliar name, Auguries of Modern Innocence makes the topically apocalyptic “Auguries of Innocence” relevant and readable for anyone, while foregrounding questions of the paradoxes that persist over centuries in periods of tumultuous change.
Much like in Auguries, groundbreaking group partnership and collaboration continue to be apparent in work like Handbook of Daily Movement (2019), which manifests itself in the form of a poetry-dance film, a live performance, and a chapbook. Such genre-bending works that establish networks across the often disparate literary, dance, and music communities of Singapore is uniquely Nair’s domain, which hopefully will find even more exciting new ground in time to come.
“You share yourself, you grow larger,” Nair responds to Tan Kaiyi’s question on why he collaborates with other artists so extensively (2019). This response speaks of a generosity and open-mindedness that characterises not just the later collaborative works of Nair’s oeuvre, but also the personal and social themes of the poetic works. As a poet that does not restrict himself to poetry, but instead explores the possibility of making art in performance, music, photography, and more, Nair frees poetry from the confines of the page into new possibilities of representing and communicating. It is not enough to read his work. One should also watch and listen to them wherever possible. Ultimately, we find in Nair’s work a deep love for his craft, for Singapore, and for its creative community. Poetry is as vital to this poet as any primary need (Tan, 2019):
I don’t know if it’s about achieving—like I must publish twenty books. At the end of my career, I want to be able to say I kept on experimenting and trying new things, trying to find answers. Whether I succeed or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s more important to just keep thinking and keep making.
Works cited
“Animal City — A review”. Marc Nair. October 21, 2014. Web.
Author Learning Centre. “Marc Nair on His Collaboration with Nicola Anthony on Their Book, Intersection”. Author Learning Centre Youtube Channel. August 24, 2018. Web.
Gallagher, Nashua. “[Review] “Enhancing the Sum of its Parts: Marc Nair’s Vital Possessions”. Cha Journal. January 1, 2020. Web.
Hatherley, Owen. “Concrete clickbait: next time you share a spomenik photo, think about what it means”. The Calvert Journal. November 29, 2016. Web.
“Marc Nair, Creative Extraordinaire”. Interviewing Some Poets. November 10, 2018. Web.
“Marc Nair: Poetry has always been my first love”. Kitaab. 29 December, 2012. Web.
Nair, Marc. Along the Yellow Line. Singapore: Word Forward, 2007.
–––. Chai: Travel Poems. Singapore: Red Wheelbarrow, 2010.
–––. Handbook of Daily Movement. Self-published, 2019.
–––. “I want to smoke a poem” TEDxSingapore. December 13, 2015. Web.
–––. “Marc Nair’s Index Post”. SingPoWriMo, Facebook. May 1, 2020. Web.
–––. Postal Code. Singapore: Red Wheelbarrow, 2010.
–––. Spomenik. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2016.
–––. The Poet of Unlove. Singapore: Red Wheelbarrow, 2015.
–––. Vital Possessions. Singapore: Ethos books, 2018.
–––. “Uncanny Yishun”. Marc Nair. February 21, 2020. Web.
Nair, Marc, and Nicola Anthony. Intersection with Nicola Anthony. Self-published, 2017.
Nair, Marc, and Vanessa Chan. Animal City. Illustrated by Vanessa Chan. Singapore: Red Wheelbarrow, 2014.
Nair, Marc and Neon & Wonder. Animal City Sounds. Digital Album. Neon & Wonder Bandcamp. August 23, 2014. Web.
Nair, Marc and Neon & Wonder. Chai: Travel Poems. Digital Album. Neon & Wonder Bandcamp. April 20, 2012. Web.
Nair, Marc and Tsen-Waye Tay. Sightlines with Tsen-Waye Tay. Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2019.
Nair, Marc and various artists. Auguries of Modern Innocence. Self-published, 2018.
Ng Yi-Sheng. “Marc Nair / Intro”. poetry.sg. November 4, 2015. Web.
Niebyl, Donald. Spomenik Database. 2016. Web.
SIX-SIX News. “Spoken Word Icon Marc Nair: If He's A Hipster & On His New Poetry Spomenik”. SIX-SIX News Youtube Channel. March 8, 2016. Web.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin Books. 1977.
Tan, Kaiyi. “How Performance Drives Marc Nair’s Art”. Kitaab. November 5, 2019. Web.
“The Pacifist Ocean”. Mackerel. 4 June, 2015. Web.
Toh Wen Li. “Book review: Marc Nair's Vital Possessions”. The Straits Times. November 5, 2018. Web.
Yew, Andrea. “Review of Marc Nair’s Spomenik”. The Arts House. 2016. Web.
