/ FEATURED POETS

/ FOREWORD

Written by Jerome Lim
Dated 23 Dec 2020

Theophilus Kwek begins his commentary on his revised poem “Field Trip”: “As the years go, we leave our younger selves behind, gain new ‘ears and eyes’”. Aptly, in this seven-poet edition of Track Changes, it is striking that the word “eyes” features in five of the poems. The two exceptions—Kirpal Singh’s “Invitation” and Shelly Bryant’s “Cyborg Chimera”—are not far off: Singh’s poem begins with “Four months and we had not seen each other” (1), and Bryant’s has its titular beast’s “two heads exchange a glance” (2).

Now, this is by no means an astonishing coincidence for the ages. In fact, in an NTU study on the academic dataset pompously named Corpus of the Canon of Western Literature (or, Yet Another Gathering of White Men), “eye” was the twelfth-most frequent root word, occurring 73,388 times (Green, 2017, p. 290). Perhaps a similar study on the yet-to-be-constructed corpus of Singaporean poetry would yield similar results (or not).

Nevertheless, it is an interesting starting point, and we turn to look at the “eyes” in ArunDitha’s revised “The Twisted Root of My Heart”. Interestingly, the external gaze in the original ending—“There I will forgive / every time your eyes saw me // but I was not there” (13–15)—which forecloses the absence of the visual subject, is now completely elided in the revised poem. In this way, its lyric power now emerges from the private interior “where the caves of my memory collapse” to the natural order, “becom[ing] dirt which births a new tree” (14–15), opening up the horizon of human remembrance beyond the ambit of individual, often visual, memory.

The gaze in Eric Tinsay Valles’ original “War of the Worlds at the Biennale” reflects more quotidian experiences such as “Glaring through glass at an air-conditioned alley” (9). Here the eyes are opaque windows to the beholder’s annoyance: “If irked by complaints of their strangeness / Their red-flame eyes do not show it” (4–5). Valles’ revised poem, “War of the Worlds at Cochrane Lodge II”, deftly relocates the bespectacled persona’s squinting gaze to a migrant workers’ dormitory. The red-flame eyes, once sternly opaque, are now fragile panes, “try[ing] hard not to show / that they have been up all-night crying” (5–6). This is mirrored by the fragile glass of the original solidifying into a “shield at an air-conditioned ward” (9).

As Valles remarks, “the striving for images to gather together the traces of an original experience of trauma is a dilemma for the poet”. How can one ever adequately capture the trauma in the eyes of others through one’s own? Theophilus Kwek’s revised “Morning at Dachau”, now titled “Field Trip”, perhaps captures this dilemma. In looking back at the youthful persona of the original, Kwek recasts him as naïve, “caught in the glare of what remains” (10). The neat conclusion of the original, “that little is saved of what lived first” (20), is now disrupted, as the weighty question of history now  “flings itself at our ears and eyes” like gravel (19).

Reacting against injustice, Marylyn Tan’s “Urgent Announcement: The Revolution Goes Viral” is a powerful call to action. The vivid metaphor of “our fire-exit eyes lined black and yellow” (15) transforms the eyes’ roles as passive receivers to outlets for the agency of “flammable” hearts, “convincing ourselves / of a way out” (11, 16–17). These flames perhaps find their parallel in Shelley Bryant’s fearsome portrait of the “Cyborg Chimera”, whose tail “swishes in fiery heat” and scales “puls[e] with yellow light” (4–6). Yet, Bryant’s reworked poem paints the Cyborg Chimera as fallible being slain by (perhaps the cyborg-analogue of) Bellerophon on Pegasus. To this end, the most intriguing addition by Bryant is the line in which the Chimera’s two heads exchange a brief glance—a powerfully humanising gesture in a being doubly-Othered as machine and monster.

The visuality of lyric longing finds its quiet articulation in Kirpal Singh’s “Invitations”. Here, sight becomes poor substitute for meaningful connection, as the persona plainly declares “you did not ask about me.” (7). This theme of connection fully unfolds in the poem’s paratext: the backstory that Kirpal provides about the poem’s genesis, tracing his nascent relationships with Edwin Thumboo and Maurice Baker, amongst other poet-peers. 

But it is in Topaz Winters’ revised “Cherry Blossoms” that the visuality of lyric longing takes centre-stage. With vivid, delicate metaphors, Winters paints the lyric subject through the persona’s yearning gaze, who confesses “i want to be the honeysuckle in her eyes” (16). Here the honeysuckle is at once both “beautiful” and “terrifying”: a subset of the persona’s “wildflower epiphany” in which the aesthetic transience of natural things—best represented by the titular cherry blossom—is haunted by the spectre of endings (14, 17–18). Like what Emmanuel’s poem alludes to, this spectre perhaps haunts all lyric poetry in its never-ending attempt to mark the vehemence of momentary feeling: sentiment that rises day after day and regrows season after season, emerging from the caves of memory into “the poetry of sunrise” (Winters 12).

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Following Edition 1 and Edition 2, Edition 3 of Track Changes marks the completion of our very first feature on poetry.sg. To get twenty established poets to not only revise their own pieces—some published decades ago—but also to write an accompanying commentary is no mean feat. Special thanks goes to Joshua Ip to carrying this ambitious idea to term, and to Daryl Yam for the gorgeous design. Moving forward, as we continue reworking the site, more features will certainly be birthed, as Ip puts it in the foreword to Edition 1, “bawling and bloody, onto the face of the internet”. 

/ FEATURED POETS

/ FOREWORD

Written by Joshua Ip
Dated 30 Jul 2020

Reading this edition of Track Changes, where we ask poets from poetry.sg to revise works they had previously published, I was struck by a faded memory of a story from my primary school Chinese teacher, Mr Cai, on the etymology of “推敲”, loosely translated to “deliberate”, to “scrutinise”, or to “weigh”.

Decaying the compound word, the two component characters respectively mean to “push” and to “knock”: something you would do to a door, rather than to an idea. But here’s the whole story—there was once a poet named Jia Dao, who fell on rough times (possibly due to his obsession with the minutiae of poetry) and was spending time as a monk. He came up with the couplet, “鸟宿池边树，僧推月下门”: “a bird rests in the tree by the pool, a monk pushes the door beneath the moon”. Shortly after, he became obsessed with the idea of replacing “推” (push) with “敲” (knock), changing the line to “a monk knocks on the door beneath the moon”. So our mad poet goes back and forth between pushing and knocking for an entire afternoon, and when it comes time to meet his friend, he hops on his donkey, but continues to make pushing and knocking motions with his hands while mumbling “推” and “敲” for the entire trip.

Halfway, Jia Dao runs into a magistrate, Han Yu, out on procession. In fact, he literally runs into the procession because he’s still 推/敲-ing rather than watching where he’s going. When quizzed by Han Yu on his bizarre behaviour, he blurts out his poetic dilemma. Han Yu, a poet himself, admires Jia’s dedication to craft, and ventures that “敲” is superior. The two head back together, discussing poetry, and become fast friends. And so this editorial headache, “推敲” ,enters the lexicon as a term for weighty deliberation.

Unsurprisingly, the jury is still out whether “推” or “敲” was the better poetic choice. Zhu Guangqian’s perspective is that “推” might seem a more rash, disruptive action, but it implies that the monk is returning from a walk under the moon, and pushes open the door that he shut himself, being the only person in the entire abbey. In this atmosphere of solitude, his walking out to appreciate the moon at his own will and returning at his own leisure shows a certain character and refinement. Whereas “敲” lacks the cool loneliness implied by “推”, and besides, it would disturb the aforementioned bird sleeping in the tree by the pool…

Whereas Zhou Zhengpu takes the opposed attitude that the monk is Jia Du himself, and he was on a late night visit to a fellow hermit, Li Ning, and had to knock to meet his friend. Equally importantly, the open-syllable “敲” is more resonant and bright as opposed to the more closed-mouthed “推”, and works better in the sonic context of the line…

My Chinese isn’t strong enough for me to actually venture an opinion on this. But that was the amount of historical discussion that poets invested into a choice between two words. Us contemporary poets might only aspire to this level of epic nerdery—but that doesn’t mean we don’t try. 

In Edition #2 of Track Changes, we bring you another six poets revisiting their craft. Angeline Yap originally wrote her piece in 1980, and revised it for thirty years before publication in 2010. 40 years after its original penning and 10 years after publication, she works through 8 variations for this exercise.  Desmond Kon reworked a series of cinquains into a prose piece—you might expect this to be as simple as removing all the line breaks, but there’s far more involved. Marc Nair’s revision tracks his own Ouroborean evolution through religion, with the last line of his decades-old poem now becoming the first. And literary pioneer Robert Yeo reflects on a poem that has journeyed from his twenties through to his eighties, in an intimate series of in-line notations. Tan Lixin’s poems have aged barely a decade, but nearly a half-life in her case, and she identifies the specific maturations of thought that have accompanied this passage of time. And we end with the godfather of the twin cinema, Yeow Kai Chai, exploring his signature form – resetting a reel of old footage to run, bicameral, into a re-envisioned future. We hope you enjoy our second deep dive into the world of self-editing.

/ FEATURED POETS

/ FOREWORD

Written by Joshua Ip
Dated 19 Jun 2020

poetry.sg has gone through many changes since it dropped, bawling and bloody, onto the face of the internet in 2015. We have added new waves of writers, including multiple pre-independence writers whose work is hard to find outside of libraries. We have continued to record new videos for the site and its Youtube channel of writers reading their work, including proxy readings for deceased writers. We also included our first wave of Malay-language poets from 2017 under the hand of Annaliza Bakri, and have recently begun work on Sinophone poets with the help of Zhou Decheng and Tan Chee Lay. (We have yet to find suitable language editors to bring Tamil-language poetry and poetry in other languages to the site, and we can only afford to fund a certain number of new developments at a time, but please contact us if you are willing and able and we will make the budget work.) And most recently, we have turned over an all-new team of editors, with heavy representation from NIE educators.

One feature that has been on the to-do-list for poetry.sg almost since its inception has been, well, features. Various generations of editors have debated at length whether poetry.sg should be an archive / database akin to the Yellow Pages, or something closer to a periodical, with regular feature articles and interviews to attract and engage new readers. These are of course not mutually exclusive – we recognize that poetry.sg was always intended to fulfil the functions of an archive, all the way from its fetal pre-conception as the Singapore Poetry Archive (SPARK) under Jen Crawford’s team from NTU. But every now and then, with no commitment to a regular schedule, we may push out a batch of feature articles to activate the site, and if nothing else, to demonstrate that plenty of the poets on poetry.sg are alive (!) and still writing.

Hence we present our first feature: a project engaging with the idea of editing poems. Few will disagree that poetry can be improved by editing. But it’s rare to be able to share a “track changes” view of the editorial process, to observe different versions of the same text side by side and see how it developed – and going even further, to read comments from the poets explaining their own edits, whether as in-line annotations or exegeses after the fact. We believe that this review function will cater not only to writers as part of their journey through craft, but also frequent or infrequent readers of poetry – we hope that knowing how the sausage is made will not turn you off from taking the next bite, but instead offer a deeper appreciation of the mouth-feel of each poetic morsel.

So a couple of months ago, an invitation was sent out to twenty-ish poets featured in poetry.sg to edit a previously published piece and to write an explanation that detailed how and why. A mind-boggling variety of responses came back, which we have divided into three batches for your moderated consumption. Leading off the first batch, Eddie Tay compares not only two versions of the same poem, but also another poem from the same collection with the earlier poem for effect. Felix Cheong shares the transpositions and modulations required when writing in a different key – a musical one. Heng Siok Tian stretches her architectural creativity while conducting renovations within the tight confines of the sonnet form, with its multiple load-bearing walls. Koh Jee Leong boasts the highest exegesis-to-edit ratio by a significant lead (you’ll have to read the piece). Playing no favorites, Loh Guan Liang bifurcates and re-cinematographs the titular poem from his debut collection, “Transparent Strangers”. Pooja Nansi also went back to remember and then dismember a poem from her first collection (which will pass the age of consent this September!). And Toh Hsien Min’s “Recomposing ‘Decomposing’” is the most composed of them all, tracking with handwritten annotations the poet’s rigorous process – a rare treat for the seven other sonnetophiles of Singapore 🙋‍♂️.

We fiddled around with any number of punny titles (Not The Last Word? Edits Inc.? Revisionaries? I Eat My Own Words?) before Tse Hao Guang proposed “Track Changes”, which the team thought accurately captured the detail of the ubiquitous MS Word reviewing pane (and associated homonym), with its versions and markup and commentary. To point to a loose end, the missing function is the comments thread – all these edits are just a single person’s opinion, and the entirely compromised person who wrote the original poem, at that. We welcome you to interject your thoughts, opinions, or even recommended edits of your own into the comments thread (or at least a comments thread, as poetry.sg doesn’t have one…), as a poem can be more than a statement, albeit a revised one – it can be a conversation.

Editor’s Note: To read this foreword in all its original, tracked changes glory, click here.