Ho Poh Fun (1946-2018)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Ann Ang
Dated 20 Jan 2025
“katong,” the title poem of Ho’s debut collection, is one of her better-known poems. When it was first published in 1994, its quiet mourning of a “land-locked” Marine Parade, where land reclamation had driven away egg-laying sea turtles, probably received a muted response from the go-getting, globalising society of Singapore. The past was unattainable, and hence irrelevant. But the closing lines of “katong” strikingly reverse the order of past and present through Ho’s fluid and compact syntax. Instead of the highway rising across where the sea used to be, what is “held in memory” is “the beach – now marine parade road” and “the sea—across which the east coast parkway / now runs—where women bathe in sarongs.” Between the em-dashes, the past returns in present tense, in the final image of “slender-limbed children / riding the waves in chortles.”
Ho’s verse has attained an undeniable relevance at a moment when urgent questions are being asked about environmental degradation and the costs of limitless economic growth. The nation is no longer a single, homogenous entity at the cross-winds of international trade; our curiosity now springs from a deeply locational attention to specific neighbourhoods, for people, and for things grown and made with care. Though some might be tempted to dismiss such efforts as “artisan,” “kitsch” or “vintage,” the granularity of remembrance produces understandings and knowledges that are embodied, material, cultural and ecological. This is not to say that Ho’s treatment of the nation and ethnic identities was entirely free of the constraints of her time. But her work’s apprehension of non-human perspectives—plant life, animal life, built-life—remains prescient.
Though Ho never considered herself the equal of her mentor Arthur Yap, her employment of extended adjectival clauses, an objectivist distancing, and typographical lower-case and word-play bears comparison. However, where Yap tended towards “suppression of the intimate self, masking it behind externals of landscape, narrative and drama” , Ho’s marshalling of textural, biological and architectural externals is itself expressive of human predicaments and sharply-felt emotions. Her writing accrues a mode of attention neither sentimental nor cursory, but ontologically charged in its mutual imbrication of natural and human-made materiality. A poem like “this morning the sky,” in which riotous dawn colours come to stand as a proxy for a sharply existential anxiety, can be considered representative:
i had heard of beaks pecking up a sky
or had it paled to a shade
reflecting an emptiness
hope grown hysterical
to the last worn flutter of lash?i had seen the ground open to take men in
this morning the sky
fragmented into an uneven grey
gave no reply
as alwaysweaving silence upon silence upon silence
Dropping the article “a,” the question to ask is not who, or whose eyelashes, but how “i” comes to stand for a hope that persists against the mundanity of crisis. The surreal image of predatory beaks “pecking up a sky” and the ground opening to devour men, invokes the prophetic tone of modernist influences such as The Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot.
Some of Ho’s most powerful poems chart a somatic iconography of feminine experience, where the textures and contours of the female body—its urges and its cycles—are expressed through its turning outwards of hidden anatomies, and rendering of what would be ordinarily invisible through the extended symbolism of botanical cycles. Visually, this resembles a Cubist painting where three-dimensional space is rendered on an omniscient two-dimensional plane. “biological” brings together the “toll” that “plants need bear” in flowers with the woman’s menstrual cycle in the declaration “each month I bleed.” Sundered from any social frame or reference to motherhood, the poem expresses how beyond “the need to submit embrace endure,” the feminine is most elemental in “this starting over and over.” At once cyclical and enduring, Ho conveys a vision of being that refuses “a life spent treading water.”
Taking Katong as a whole, Ho’s poems progress from more personal meditations on neighbourhood encounters to ostensibly more public poems, though she never veers far from subjectivising outward forms with an observational intensity. Writing about “Voice and Authority in English Poetry from Singapore,” Rajeev Patke observes that authority “resides in the poet’s capacity to persuade us that what is evinced from the things (and situations) of the world is their true being”. This requires the poet to first transcend distinctiveness and individuation, towards the archetypal voice—something that Ho often achieves by obviating verb phrases and lyrical tone in favour of a charged animus of scene and image. Her collection also contains one of the lesser-known Merlion poems in Singapore’s poetic tradition. Titled “human resource,” Ho’s cuttingly imagistic rendition dubs the legendary creature as “born of myth / and getting by truth,” continuously drinking it all in its watery reflection, even as the workers of Singapore “court whirlpools / to drown disillusion / quicksand to the neck.” “thoughtscapes singapore” is Ho’s longest poem and most ambitious: an epic survey expressing no small amount of disaffection for how the technocratic island-state had become “an instrument of precision” in manufacturing community. Its closing section is a fictional interview with a youth of the twenty-first century who has “learnt well the lesson / that work is good for the soul” in a time “when discretion / is better than valour.”
While Ho was certainly read as a woman poet and anthologised in numerous publications, she has not yet been allocated a firm place in the Singapore poetic tradition. Writing between the pioneer voices of Edwin Thumboo, Lee Tzu Pheng and Arthur Yap; and the poets of nineties, such as Felix Cheong, and Grace, her work bears a complex relationship to the priorities of national formation, and the more critical approaches adopted by later poets.
Works cited
Lim, Shirley. "Arthur Yap: Two Mothers in a Hdb Playground." Critical Engagements: Singapore Poems in Focus. Ed. Singh, Kirpal. Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1986. 25-30. Print.
Patke, Rajeev. “Voice and Authority in English Poetry from Singapore”, in Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature, ed. Kirpal Singh, (Singapore: Ethos Books, 1998), 88.
