Samuel Lee (b. 1992)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
The Epic of Everyday Life
Written by Jerome Lim
Dated 1 Mar 2023
In an analogy presented in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), William Empson remarks that when viewed from far away, one cannot tell if a blur in the distance is either a wall or the sea. He likens this disorienting experience to the reading of poetry:
The reading of a new poet, or of any poetry at all, fills many readers with a sense of mere embarrassment and discomfort, like that of not knowing, and wanting to know, whether it is a wall or the sea. (p. 239–240)
In the case of Samuel Lee’s debut collection of poetry (2016)—which won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018—one cannot easily (and metaphorically) pigeonhole its multivarious poems into the formal familiarity of “a wall” or the nebulous diffidence of “the sea”. Certainly, this Empsonian sense of discomforting uncertainty carries over to its readers: amongst others, “Jake” remarks in his Goodreads review that reading Lee’s collection gave him a “sense of ambiguity about possible futures and career paths … a fitting (in)conclusion to (my reading) of the Ten Year Series ” (2017).
While this claim of heterogeneity could be made for many poetic debuts, it is of particular interest here due to the collection’s rather quotidian title, which I have deigned reveal until now. At first glance, what we do know is that Lee’s collection, adorned with the plain, abstract geometry characteristic of the Ten Year Series books, is certainly not what it professes itself to be: A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore. If we were to read the collection’s blurb, which goes—
… a 19th century reference book … that fell into a tropical swamp and was rescued, then lovingly restored, by a nice lady in curlers. Caked in organic matter too dense to scrub off, the pages of Samuel Lee's debut collection reveal visions and premonitions of a city filled with characters engaged in their own private sorrows … (2016, blurb).
—it would be unlikely that readers, if presented with a list of possible titles afterwards, would pick out the actual one on their first try. True to misleading form, “CuriousBookReviewer” shared that despite the collection’s “tantalising” and “intriguing title”, they “felt [Lee’s poems] didn't evoke strong emotion or fire up much supermarket allusions or fruity thoughts ...” (Goodreads, 2017).
Indeed, Supermarkets is perhaps not a collection to pick up if one is looking for poignant, heart-wrenching poems or grocery discount codes. Amidst the smattering of historical and intellectual references that pepper these poems, what makes Lee’s poetry one to look out for is his underlying commitment to cataloguing the artifice of ordinary experience. This can be seen in “Rupture of Fruit Through a Plastic Bag”, where the persona narrates “A minor crisis on the moving bus” (2016, p. 6) in which the public bus brakes at a red light abruptly:
See the oranges tumble down the aisle,
the orange scent, their orange sound
See Madam Lee falling down!
Her newly-purchased fruit were grown on trees
in California, …a smiling cartoon orange waving from the side of a box
saying Hello and Goodbye, not unlike the ones that now
have to be washed more thoroughly
before she peels them for her dinner partyAnyway, she is helped up by boys and girls … (2016, p. 6)
Here the focus falls not mainly on the natural passage of the event, relegated to narrational afterthought by the discourse marker “Anyway”, but remains disproportionately static on the box of oranges: their origin, packaging, and intended purpose. Rather than mount the lyric illusion of reader-as-witness, the end-rhymes and repetition of “orange” within this freeze-frame betray the poem as locus of artifice. Linguistically, this is further emphasised by the insistent series of imperatives (“See … See”), which makes present the narrator-poet as commanding intermediary between reader and event. Lee’s penchant for imperatives can also be seen in poems such as “Fever Dream” (2016, p. 25), which starts out as strange conscious recount (“I’ve decided / to hang from the ceiling / in a bloated way”) and segues into a series of imperatives (“Oil me … Find me … Find … Wear it … Wear it … Sleep … Drive … Spill … Curse the days”). The effect on the reader is that of being directed and inserted into the poem.
Yet, as Language poet Charles Bernstein writes in his poem “Dysraphism” (1983), “I felt the abridgement / of imperatives, the wave of detours … All lit up and no / place to go”, Lee’s frequent persona-led direction seems to lead nowhere specific. The utterances in “Birthday Dinner” (2016, p. 42) may allude to a particular personal experience (“today / I am a sinking ferry”) but ultimately is dominated by a series of imperatives (“Sit silent with candles in your mind … Eat”)—the titular birthday dinner of the poem becomes that which is generically catalogued rather than being a specific event witnessed. Hence, instead of positioning poems as the privileged (and sometimes narcissistic) event of lyric disclosure, Lee shatters this illusion by privileging common everyday experience in dialectical opposition to the specific individual experience.
Thus, Lee’s readers are not simply observing the veridical “private sorrows” of his poems’ “characters” (2016, blurb), but through reading these poems, identify connections with their own quotidian experiences. In an interview with QLRS (2020), Lee remarks that “all our experience is structured by a fundamental discrepancy between how others see us and the thing that we designate ‘self-knowledge’”. “Advice”, a poem that appears somewhere mid-way through Supermarkets, begins with the declaration “I’ve only ever been adjacent to love”. Addressing the reader as “Friend”, the persona advises them to “Build a machine to manage your grieving” (2016, p. 31). Yet, despite this imperative veneer of expertise, the ending stanza alludes to its limits:
Friend, I’ve only ever been beside myself once,
when I noticed the wires so frayed they
shimmered in the wind like a field of wheat.I cannot tell you how to grow your own roses
only that you should begin when the air is
warm and dewy, and soft enough to heal a wound. (2016, p. 31)
Juxtaposed expertly, the “wires” of the constructed grief machine metamorphosise into a pastoral image of a “shimmer[ing] field of wheat”, and eventually idyllic allusion to the potential of blooming roses. A similar conceit is explored in “Poem Machines” (2016, p. 22), where the persona declares the poem as a “soft machine”. In its ending lines the paradoxical pastoral-machine image complex is also invoked: “There, next to the orchids, / the thought of soft machinery doing the thinking” (p. 24). Despite the lyric imagery, the self-reflexive persona admits his failure to realise the roses for the reader—a metaphor for the healing process. Poetry may merely affect, not effect. Indeed, as the persona in “Poem Machines” remarks, the lyric subject is “smooth where the eye of language / is unrelenting in its attention, rough otherwise” (p. 24)—poetry tends to the lyrical and the epic, not the veridical. Certainly, while the concept of a field guide connotes expertise and guidance, to give advice is to be ever “adjacent”; to “reference” is to merely allude rather than make true. There lies the difficulty of being “beside myself” in self-inquiry: as objective self-observer rather than subject of experience. Like machine and nature, the two accounts must necessarily dichotomise.
This then, is perhaps the central paradox behind the collection’s title. The quotidian experience, perfectly captured by the metaphor of grocery shopping at a supermarket, is by nature banal and undramatic. As “Hands”, the last poem in Supermarkets ends, “Blank pages, printed grain, a barcode—that’s it” (2016, p. 51). Despite this banality, we narrate meaning into our own lived experiences, declare ourselves at its artificial centre in some epic of everyday life. As the epigraph, quoted from Allen Ginsberg’s “Supermarket in California”, declares: “I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd” (2016, epigraph). What Supermarkets does is not a field guide to advise readers on to live your own private lives, but it simply calls attention to the ways the quotidian may turn out pleasingly absurd.
The philosopher Theodor Adorno, referenced by Lee multiple times in Supermarkets, famously articulated that “art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth” (Minima Moralia, 1951, p. 222). And as Lee writes in “Yet Another City”—
A taut but shifting horizon of neutral colours—
…………………………………………………
The child entertains herself with a game of neutrality—
if a square can be filled, it will be neutralised; if not, her hands
will keep to themselves, squaring the circles. The game
of closed eyes, willing another half-imagined world. (2016, p. 48)
—reading Lee is to appreciate that magically imaginative sense of ambiguity in making meaning of and from the everyday, embracing the neutral, perhaps child-like point of possibility where the distant horizon can be both wall and sea.
Works cited
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. New York: Verso, 2005.
Bernstein, Charles. “Dysraphism”. Sulfur 8 (1983): 39.
“CuriousBookReviewer”. “Community Review of A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore”. Goodreads, 20 June 2017, goodreads.com/review/show/2031275119?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1.
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. 1930. New York: New Directions.
“Jake”. “Community Review of A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore”. Goodreads, 11 Oct 2017, goodreads.com/review/show/1952965117?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1.
Kai Chai, Yeow. Proust Questionnaire: 17 questions with Samuel Lee. QLRS 19 (1 Jan 2021), qlrs.com/interview.asp?id=1528.
Lee, Samuel. A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore. 2016. Singapore: Math Paper Press.
