Tse Hao Guang (b. 1988)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Strange Chainmail Jelly
Written by Jerome Lim
Dated 20 Jun 2024
Tse Hao Guang (谢皓光) is strange.
To clarify, I do not mean here that Tse, the poet, often behaves erratically (in actual fact, quite the opposite, with a fairly reserved and proper demeanour), but rather, that his writing is strange. Take a look at this extract from the first poem of his latest collection, The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association (2022), which begins with the assertion that the titular location is real, alongside the allusive, beckoning epigraph “Please come in and touch everything” (5):
Admittedly, while extracts paint only a partial picture, this particular snippet from the poem, curiously titled “enclosing w/o blocking out it’s still transparent” (12), signals to the layman reader that they might be in unfamiliar territory. In this particular collection, the reader is immediately struck by the characteristic hypertrophic indentations of Tse’s poems, a stylistic choice he has experimented with seemingly since 2016. In 2017, Tse posted a piece titled “The moral ambiguity of compound questions” on the Singapore Poetry Writing Month Facebook collective (which reappears, edited, in Calligraphy [64]). In the comments under his post, Tse reveals certain influences behind this particular formal choice. When probed on his compositional methods by curious Facebook users, Tse remarks that “practically, I try to time the rhythm of my TAB and SPACEBAR key with my mental breaths”—a comment reminiscent of Charles Olson’s manifesto “Projective Verse”, where the modernist American poet advocated for line composition to be led “by way of the BREATH” (55)—and that he “/was/ thinking of Zambra's latest translated MCQ book” at the point of composition.
Elsewhere, in his review of Koh Jee Leong’s Steep Tea (“Everywhere”), Tse begins with an authoritative declaration on how to review poetry, presented in its original italics for further grandiosity:
In any review, the writer, not the book, is the true object of review. In any good review, the writer must first be a reader — of the book, other reviews, things the author has said about the book, previous publications — then an amnesiac — forgetting almost everything, that is, except what is necessary.
Well, while I am a firm believer that critics should not rely on poem-divorced poet-provided contextual clues to orchestrate meaning in the text or excavate the thesis of a poet’s oeuvre, I Google the work seemingly referenced by Tse’s earnest comment out of curiosity: Multiple Choice (2014) by Alejandro Zambra. Reviewing this particular collection for The Guardian, the critic Chris Power summarises its central conceit as:
each exercise begins with a piece of text the reader must rearrange or respond to, according to the provided rubric (“In exercises 25 through 36, choose the answer that puts the sentences in the best possible order to form a coherent text”).
(Review)
But turning back to the extract from Tse’s “transparent” above, Calligraphy provides no guidelines for parsing the syntactic difficulty of its imagistic fragments. The cyclic kinaesthetic image, carried by the insistent dual-repetition of “again” and alliteration in “continuous chain”, has no obvious ablative or destination; the opposing directional phrasal verbs “goes in” and “comes out” seemingly lead the reader nowhere. Yet what draws the eye is the intentionality of the enjambment: here the break in “chain / mail” (lines 17–18) and “jelly / fish” (lines 18–19) juxtaposes concrete images of two tactilely-opposite objects: one a solid, interlocking artificially-patterned vestment, and the other an organic, fluid, and delicate creature, calling back to the collection’s invitation to “touch” its pieces. Yet, lexical rearrangement yields no novel insight, using the methodology inspired by Zambra perhaps goes no further in unpacking the dense image-complexes of Calligraphy, and thus, heeding Tse’s words, is forgotten by this critic.
Yet accepting such an amnesiac fate does not sit well with me. In my further bid to make meaning, I recall the remarks by British neo-modernist poet J. H. Prynne, considered one of the most unreadably difficult poets of the contemporary era. When asked how to deal with his poetry in an interview with the Paris Review, Prynne remarked that readers “can just dangle into Google and get their answer immediately. They get wrong answers, and false trails, but they get trails” (“Interview”, 67). Re-inspired, I Google “chainmail jelly” and am amusingly rewarded with videos showcasing a Japanese-made malleable and colourful cube that can be deformed and manipulated as a fidget toy: aesthetic and strange in its visually ironic fluid-like solidity. Like Tse’s recent poems, watching these videos bring to mind what Elizabeth Bishop called “‘the suspense of strangeness’, a sense of being in a world that is at once engrossing and unpredictable” (qtd. in Riordan409). Looking back at the aposiopesis in the ending lines of “transparent” ─ “fish drip sun // light on─” (lines 19–20), I am compelled to think of Bishop’s poem “At The Fishhouses” (64–66), where the fishes and the wheelbarrows they are in are described by her as “similarly plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail” (lines 23–24). Bishop’s poem ends poignantly with the lines:
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
[. . . .]
flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.(lines 78–83)
Here Bishop presents knowledge as a continuous flow in space and time, which reminds me of “transparent”: moving “in”, “out”, and “around” in a “continuous chain” between places yet to be revealed. There is historicity and temporality imbued in this textual interaction of meaning-making, which leads me back to Power’s review of Zambra, where he remarks that “the words blend with our own impressions, memories and predilections to create something that, in its particulars, belongs only to us ... Reading Multiple Choice, we all become its author”. And this resonates with my own approach to appreciating Tse’s work.
While reviewers of Calligraphy such as Mok Zining and Shawn Hoo have understandably leapt on the obvious calligraphy metaphor of the title to explain its syntactic fluidity as “evok[ing] the brushstroke movement in certain styles of Chinese calligraphy” (Mok). I, rather than associating it with the specific traditions and stroke orders brought to mind by the associations with Chinese calligraphy (an association that Tse himself makes in “The Monthly” when he declares that the “poems in that book are meant to look like Chinese Calligraphy on the page”), find the novel three-dimensional tactile and visual aesthetic of the chainmail-jelly-cube-toy to be a better metaphor for reading Tse in general. In fact, I find out later that “transparent” references Japanese artist Ruth Asawa’s wire sculptures, which are, according to Tse, “just as much light and space as they are wire, just as much inside as outside, where surface is depth” (qtd. in Yeow).
While the language of Tse’s poetry is extravagantly patterned, it is beautifully deep and malleable. This sculptural quality, I propose, is the very conceit and enjoyment of reading Tse. This is in spite of Tse himself perhaps rejecting the idea of being identified “primarily as a formalist” (qtd. in Yeow). As Tse remarks in his reflection on translating the work of Zhou Jianing, “Language like sand might shift under my feet, but surely there was a way to carry myself across it, to make legible, to come to rest?” (“Jianning”). It is through this lens of strange lyric fluidity that I embark on the difficult task of tracing its development across Tse’s oeuvre.
The title of Tse’s first chapbook, titled hyperlinkage (2013) and published by Math Paper Press as part of their Babette’s Feast series (interestingly, adorned by a sketch of a skeletal fish on the cover), immediately foregrounds the idea of reader interaction and echoes the interlocking linkages afforded by the imagery of chainmail discussed earlier. While the poems collected here are conventional in form, the primary mode of strangeness that the reader encounters is that of referential difficulty, which may tap into Tse's erudition and intellectual curiosity cultivated during his undergraduate studies at the particular point of composition. Logically, attention should be given to the first, and titular poem, “hyperlinkage”. Here is its bold first stanza:
There is only one rule in hyper-
linkage, to wit, you do not refer to
yourself. Keeping that in mind in
this paradise of cut-and-paste is
an endless deferral. This is a poem,
not a website. Outside it is raining.(lines 1–6)
The first statement, tonally academic and demanding, seems to propose an elision of the lyric subject. Here the conceit of the hyperlink provokes the idea of “endless deferral”, a chain of “cut-and-paste”. Yet, this implied chain of mimetic dislocation seems to lead to no origin or end. But this ideal, perhaps signalled by the idyllic connotations of “paradise”, is ironically interrupted: (1) the definitional statement “This is a poem, not a website” breaks its “one rule” of no self-referencing, and (2) the idea of “endless deferral” (and one might think of the Derridean idea of différance here) is rather un-paradisal in its lack of final promise and originality. Yet, the bathetically quotidian “Outside it is raining” seems to locate the voice in a particular moment or perspective; indeed, the later lines, such as “I stroll through the nearby garden / (sky's another shade of blue now), / I book a reading room in the library” (lines 13–15) seem to turn back towards the simple Romantic-pastoral voice. Despite its futuristic title, most of the setting is divorced far away from technological modernity.
One year after hyperlinkage was published, Tse graduated from his Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in 2014. And perhaps nested within the titular poem’s ‘obviously poetic’ language (with its insistent imagery of blue skies, breezes, rain, gardens, and Eden) of the titular poem, is Tse’s nascent deliberation on the grand epistemological question of “what is poetry?”. The influential theorist Veronica Forrest-Thomson, in her treatise Poetic Artifice (1978), argues that the “central paradox of poetry” is that its:
continuity in language─the relation between poetic discourse and other kinds of discourse which directly imply a world─requires discontinuity, a dislocation that occurs when one passes from the latter to the former
(27)
Now, this is a rather complex hypothesis, but I will attempt to distil it in simpler terms. Writers try to create an illusion of continuity between readers’ and their world, allowing readers to make connections and imagine the scene or lyric moment that the poem aims to depict. Yet, in order to achieve artistic insight, they have to intentionally distort, or even create realities. For example, Tse’s line “Outside it is raining” (line 6) seems to reference a particular rainy day, but the rainy day it ‘references’ differs from, for example, a factual newspaper weather report. Poetic discourse requires readerly and writerly traversal between one phenomenological world to another: in short, it is as if one is navigating through a digital hyperlink from one website to another or as Tse questions, “speak[ing] in hyperlink” (line 19).
This brings to mind Derrida’s contradiction presented in Demeure: “I cannot say, according to common sense, should not be able to say: I die or I am dead ... this ‘I am’ ... is both present and part of a past perfect” (46). This utterance “I am dead” is a distortion of reality only possible in the realm of poetic discourse, and it is one the debuting Tse boldly takes advantage of, with poems such as “Speaking on Behalf of Yong Vui Kong” (15): the subject being a Malaysian who was sentenced to death in Singapore for drug trafficking (his sentence later being reduced to life imprisonment). In this poem, Tse, speaking in the voice of the convict, declares, “I’m looking / forward to rebirth [...] I am / content [...] I am content [...] I am filled” (lines 14–15, 18–19, 23, 44). There are some tangential political inclinations at work in hyperlinkage, such as in the subsequent poem, where he references the Palestinian conflict and adopts the voice of a gentile in “Ghazal of the Gentile” declaring “The peace that we speak, inviting the Arab and Jew alike ─ / the sin ─ of our city? ─ is sending out blame to Israel” (19, lines 11–12).
But ultimately, in the words of poet Keston Sutherland (“White Review”) ─
there really is a significant material difference between writing poetry and being a politically effective agent in the world ... Poetry with a restricted and small circulation whose specific temporality of self-disclosure ... can hardly seem like the most effective form of direct political intervention.
─ hyperlinkage, like almost every other young poetry collection, fails to transform its wisps of political threads into agency (disclaimer: this is not to say these poems aren’t of quality). Perhaps one may even ask what gives Tse, rather dislocated from such concerns, the right to voice the thoughts of the convict, or the gentile, or in a series of three poems later (44–49), the voice of “Mrs. T.”, presumably a domestic wife? Here is an anxious double-agency at play, made clear in another in a series of three poems revolving around the perspective of “Twofer” (glossed by Tse as “two for one” [60]), who declares in “Twofer’s Island” (38–40) that he is “I’m ‘Asiatic’, ‘feminist’, ‘discontent’ (line 44). Subsequently, “Twofer’s Account” (41–43), the poem perhaps most close to the digital conceit connoted by the chapbook’s title, seems to be a heavily found poem, with ample references to Twitter (now known as X) conversations by New York Times Book Critic @criticmichiko (possibly a parody account) interspersed with Jack Kerouac’s “American Haiku”.
These particular references are all collected neatly in a four-page long set of Notes (59–62), in which young Tse painstakingly lists out all the references made in his poems for his readers. But in doing so, in network-theoretical terms, the free network of possible poetic references is simplified into a bipartite graph; in non-mathematical terms, it is as if each glossed phrase is declaring to the curious reader, in the poet’s voice, ‘this is the exact reference I was thinking of’. And this brings to mind words from Hamid Roslan, another Singaporean poet, from the launch of his dense, perplexing collection parsetreeforestfire, where he remarks “we do too much explaining what happens in this country. We need to stop doing that. Stop explaining ourselves” (“crazy”).
Going back to the titular poem “hyperlinkage” (13–14), the lines “This freedom— / now any word may be a sign for any / thing—disturbs me” (lines 9–13) may very well project Tse’s anxiety to explain his ‘hyperlinks’ and ground his poetic discourse in reality. But there is a sense of keen self-awareness, where instead of speaking in hyperlink, the persona can only poorly declare “I can only say a name” (line 20): to name is to fix and locate an identity. Indeed, the poignant alliterative final image of the poem is one of the inescapable loneliness of the digital condition, “like a touch typist alone / in a room, again, again, and again” (lines 23–24). After all, what can poets do to transform reality beyond being ‘twofers’ “sometimes sounding like an ozone breeze” (14, lines 21–22) and linking one thought to another in language?
Despite the disparate threads that often characterise debut collections (here we have travel, art, mythology, literature, internet lingo), there are in hyperlinkage the beginnings of chainmail links being forged: flashes of brilliant imagery and the intricate interlocking of language-worlds that would characterise Tse’s later collections. In a biography provided by Tse on the Poetry Pacific blog in 2015, Tse declares that he “is working on a full-length collection, tentatively titled Belonging”. One might surmise that Tse is referring to the manuscript that would become his second collection, Deeds of Light (2015), shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize. Based on its (possible) tentative title, it is perhaps one that centres around placemaking and self-identity. Indeed, Tse himself admits this fact in an interview with “The Monthly”, where he remarks that in Deeds he “was trying to understand the question of writing in the city, in this case Singapore ... How does a city inform or shape what it is you write about”?
But even without this particular ‘poet-provided explanation’, the reader would certainly notice the smattering of Singaporean references in the poems’ titles in Deeds. These, referencing dishes like “Bak Kut Teh” (13), places such as “Unlike Bukit Ho Swee” (29), “East Coast Park” (30), “Pasir Ris” (34), and even the ubiquitous local experience of “All The Sounds of Mynahs” (15), are distinct from the more abstract titles of hyperlinkage (with perhaps, the exception of “Sunset at Clarke Quay” [hyperlinkage 15]). One particular poem in Deeds that may strike the reader in this regard is “Gongs, Alarm” (9), whose first stanza is partly reproduced here:
I am from the high rise bomb shelter.
From the Speak Good Singlish Movement, red as plum,
where the joyful grammarian worms. I am from nameless
noodle stalls with frowny uncles, from palm copy-paste
plantations, from the ice-stoking wilds of Torontonian
suburbs. I am from the strut and peck of hao gong
ming [. . .](lines 1–7)
Here, while certain lines may read hyperbolic, the perspective is clear and realist. Mostly gone is the pretence of the ‘twofer speaking on behalf’ of poetic subject that plagued hyperlinkage, and despite the critic’s impulse to not conflate persona and poet, the first-person declarative references to Tse’s maternal Malaysian ancestry in the catchy plosive-alliterative phrase “palm copy-paste / plantations” (lines 4–5), paternal Canadian and Hong Konger roots in “the ice-stoking wilds of Torontonian / suburbs” and “noodle stalls with frowny uncles” (lines 3–6), as well as distinctive references to the Singaporean educational experience—which land clear as day on me, a Chinese Singaporean in the same age bracket as Tse—possibly locate this poem as born out of an evolving attempt to be truly confessional. The setting presented here is no longer of idealised gardens and reading rooms, but tangibly (to this reader) real places.
While it is tempting to take the easy way out and read the rest of Deeds along merely the lines of national identity and the Singaporean experience, it might be more fruitful again, to return to our original thesis of strangeness. In exploring such, we turn to the epigraph and the source of the title, poet and colour psychologist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's aphorism that “colours are the deeds of light, its deeds and suffering” (Deeds, ii). Much has been made of Tse’s insistent light imagery over various reviews of Deeds ─ in fact, even echoing back to our earlier reading of “transparent” in the later Calligraphy with the garden-pathed ending lines “fish drip sun // light on─” (15, lines 19–20), but here what strikes me as more curious is the idea of ‘suffering’. Returning to, again, Veronica Forest-Thomson, who criticises poetry which simply offers a “banal comment on life” or a mere statement of the external world as it appears to be (128), she instead advocates for poetry to maintain some formal “aesthetic distance” from the reader, who is invited to “join the poet in his escape from involvement with action and suffering (which does not mean denying them)” (129). Based on its intriguing epigraph, does Tse’s Deeds enclose within its lyric language a sense of suffering, or seek to obfuscate it through its incessant big-city imagery?
For me, the former seems more apposite. The opposite of denial is acknowledgement, and Deeds signals a sort of coming-to-terms with the impossibility of reconciling complex identities. The final lines of “Gongs, Alarm” (9)—whose title perhaps invokes a loud, urgent call for attention particularly in times of emerging crisis which is seemingly at odds with the myriad of quotidian references it encloses—disrupt the persona’s confidence in claiming these variegated experiences as origin:
“[. . .] I am from a thing that spits and spits.
I am from the itch to sugar the split”.(“Gongs”, 9, lines 15–16)
These lines are powerfully resonant in terms of meaning and sound. The pleasant sibilant and assonant harmony of these lines is at once interrupted by the playfully insistent plosive consonance in “thing that”, “spits”, “the itch” and “the split”. Here, the Merlion, proud symbol of the city-state, is reduced to strange “thing that spits.” To spit is to eject forcefully from one’s body, which mirrors “itch”—the instinctual response to remove or alleviate discomfort. Interestingly, this urge however is to “sugar the split”, evoking the metaphor of sugar-coating, or making more palatable, certain divides. In such a reading, an undercurrent of division is presented deftly and formally: a subtle political commentary (especially when compared to hyperlinkage) on the occasionally superficial and almost-ritualised harmonising impulse of the Singaporean government’s efforts at espousing “Asian Values” (line 14) and placemaking.
But the phrase “sugar the split” may perhaps also, to this critic, be read self-reflexively. In The Lyric Touch, the English poet and theorist John Wilkinson (who is credited in Deeds [47] for teaching Tse creative writing at Chicago) suggests that it is “the fate of lyric poetry to feign the intimacy of the trustworthy speech act and invariably to break trust” (8). The lyric invitation to the inner world of the persona (and in Adorno’s terms, its suffering) is perhaps a form of sugar-coating the alienation between reader and poet. Extending this interpretive thread and recalling the epigraph, the most obvious ‘colour’ or sign of individual suffering is the breaking of skin to form a physical wound, and the imagery of wounds recurs sporadically in Deeds. In “Losing Count” (25–27), the lyric persona begins the first section by addressing a seemingly loved one:
[. . . .] Earnest, I barged
in once and broke your words, strung
along our silences. We groped for them
in vain, catching snatches of take this pain
and show me how ...(lines 2–6)
Like in “Going, Alarm”, Tse uses sound to great effect. Again, the smooth sibilant quality of “strung ... silences ... snatches ... show” and the inherent assonant rhyme in “vain”/“pain”, “catching”/“snatches”, and “how”/“our” is juxtaposed against the rough, plosive interruptions of “barged” and “broke”, mirroring the themes of communication breakdown and grappling with pain. Indeed, the title “Losing Count” suggests a familiar feeling of being overwhelmed, producing a contrast between the orderly nature of counting and the idea of things deteriorating, escalating in frequency, or spiralling out of control. At the end of the tripartite poem, in the final section “Baby Oil”, the “silence” is fully realised as the persona can only “imagine you”, revealing the absence of the addressed loved one and the erosion of the initial collective pronoun “we”. Here the persona invokes the failure, after “weeks ... months .... years” (27, lines 22–25) to smooth these metaphorical and physical “cracks” over, longing for the “itch” to cease. Oil and sugar, it seems, are merely temporary remedies for wounds emotional and physical.
As the collection progresses, the conceit of wounding carries over in the poem “Gravity on Knees” (36), which begins seemingly with a parenting aphorism “No need to cover every scrape and ache” (line 1) and ends with a semblance of acceptance and the parallel reaffirmation “No need to cover up. Every scrape and ache / and cut has crusted over” (lines 17–18). Even in deep moments of personal loss, such as the funeral and cremation depicted in the elegiac penultimate and tripartite poem “Greater Than the Sum” (40, lines 38–40), the persona acknowledges in the final sonnet-part “Cremation”:
... Everything erased
but fillings and nuts—what will hold objects
to subjects, soothe an open wound. [. . .](lines 32–34)
In the notion of holding “objects” to “subjects”, there seems a gesture towards poetry’s elegiac power. Thinking back to Derrida’s contradiction along the lines of testimony as perpetuity, could representations of the dead in poetry then enclose a possible form of immortality? This then, perhaps, is Tse’s gesture towards the strange power of poetry to offer familiar comfort. Despite the totality implied by the alliterative declaration “Everything erased”, the defiant conjunction “but” that follows the line break reveals the “fillings” and “nuts” yet still survive ─ perhaps alluding to the fragments of memory that survive in poetry, and hold the power to “soothe”.
Deeds is a more nuanced effort in dealing with the issue of ‘speaking in hyperlink’ foregrounded in Tse’s first collection: the issue that one “can only say a name” (hyperlinkage 14) to capture disparate, even contradictory identities. In such rare moments of poetic skill, the effect of pathos it can produce can feel not merely like a weak ozone breeze, but indeed something impactful and almost wounding, “sometimes like a knife wound” (hyperlinkage 14). Hence in Tse’s poems, the pursuit of formal rigour and the lyric power of the confession are not mutually exclusive.
And here we come full circle back to Calligraphy to close this discussion. In reviewing Tse’s latest collection alongside Deeds, Yap Hao Yang remarks that:
Throughout the collection, we meet several characters, but they remain enigmas: who is the oddly-named Bee Wing who is ‘in like’ with John? And who is the naive and jittery Cassandra who shouts, ‘THE WORLD WILL NEVER END [on a] roundabout’? Only the persona knows. Yet, he does not bother explaining the world he inhabits to an audience — he simply relays, with startling immediacy whatever he experiences and observes.
A younger Tse in the hyperlinkage era might have seen fit to gloss the inspirations behind Bee Wing and Cassandra (perhaps invoking the ill-fated Trojan priestess) and the multitude of allusions packed into his dense poems, such as the litany of references to Stephen Chow filmography in “two minute Buddha Jumps over the Wall” (37). In theorist’s Robert Rowland’s Smith’s On Modern Poetry, he wonders if difficult contemporary and neomodernist poets, with their deep density of references, are simply setting a "giant crossword puzzle for clever, earnest men" (160). But in Calligraphy there are no Notes to be found, and the poems are allowed to breathe as aesthetic image-complexes, more open to impressionistic interpretation.
Hence, these referents serve not as decoders for the reader, but as points of intrigue to expand the poem’s horizon of meaning. Having watched Stephen Chow’s God of Cookery before, I know that the ending lines “exploding pissing / beef balls!” (line 25) refer to the titular protagonist’s signature dish. Chow is known as a master of lowbrow, non-sequitur humour, and perhaps this allusion seems out of place in the assumed highbrow artistry of Calligraphy’s poems. Yet, Tse’s poems do not seem to rely on such allusions as small clues to a big, intellectual puzzle. Rather, in reading them, even to a great extent even when we do not know the specific allusions, their suggestive power remains. This impact is what Tse harnesses beautifully, resisting the urge to explain these allusions as he did in hyperlinkage. After all, who can deny the plosive, attention-grabbing audacity of these lines about beef balls? The entire poem feels cinematic, mirroring choreographed shots such as “this close-up tear / dripping down your cheek” (lines 18–19), without relying on specific filmographic references. It is here that the poem benefits from its hypertrophic, fragmentary form which mirror quick camera switches and bring the conceit to life. This feeling applies not just to this poem because of its particular cinematic subject matter: critic Mok Zining, remarking on her experience reading “this morning I woke up w/ a quick laugh like the sun” (Calligraphy 13), also remarks on the “cinematic effect [of] the loose visual form” which “read almost like a script or storyboard for a video poem” (Mok).
Returning to the development of Tse’s oeuvre, the persona who “can only say a name” (hyperlinkage 14 “hyperlinkage” line 20), whose poetic discourse occurs through the artificial and authoritative relation of the 1:1 hyperlink, now allows their poetry to breathe organically ─ not just through the negative spaces of its syntax, but also in its rich image-complexes. And this philosophical idea is best captured in the poignant ending lines of “the rind is rich in tannin & used as an astringent” (Calligraphy 19): “—what leaf or style or flower / or root wrote your name?” (lines 15–16)In this metaphor, the origin of identity is perhaps grown, not dictated. Tse alludes to such a difference in process in an interview with the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore:
I think the biggest difference between the way I wrote my poems in Deeds and Calligraphy is that in the former, I had a sense of what the structure of the poems would be even before I started writing. In the latter, I didn't. I've let lines — mine and others' — that stayed with me mutate — sometimes through free-writing, sometimes through some kind of haphazard research — into poems.
(qtd. in Yeow)
The idea of mutation again makes me imagine the mutable-patterned-chainmail-jelly, where seemingly (aesthetically-bounded) endless possibilities and variations can arise from the simple manipulation of the linked structure. A large part of this lexical openness is that Calligraphy is replete with intertextuality, from translations of Chinese poet An Qi (安琪) (translation is another area Tse is heavily invested in, and his endeavours in this area deserve another essay entirely) to the prosaic titles of his poems ─ a departure from Deeds and hyperlinkage ─ where in the same interview, he admits that “practically all my other poem titles, are from other texts” (qtd. in Yeow). One particular “free translation” (as Tse terms it in the “Acknowledgements” page) Tse tackles is An Qi’s “此刻”, translated as “this moment” (Calligraphy 23).
Recalling the comment by Tse at the start of this essay on the “light and space” of Asawa’s sculptures “where surface is depth” (qtd. in Yeow), it is here that Tse masterfully uses hypertrophic spacing to add another visual dimension to the original poem’s depiction of the descent of morning light. In An Qi’s original the phrase “慢慢” (An, line 1) is translated by Tse to “slowly //// slowly”, with the visual travel of the readers’ eye slowed by the spacing and the spreading of the sunlight down the floors of the high-rise mirrored by Tse’s layout of lines across the page. Interestingly, the directness of “一路穿过” (An, line 1) in the original is softened by Tse’s alliterative translation “threading // through” (lines 6–7). Yet we cannot be quick to assume a lyric impulse on Tse’s end to romanticise: the quirkiness in An Qi’s personification of the sunlight in the lines “阳光从树身上走了一圈 / 拉走了一群树叶” (An, lines 4–5) is almost semantically preserved as a straight gloss by Tse:
Here the image of the sunlight “pull[ing] off a herd of leaves” is more reminiscent of the directness of “一路穿过” (An, line 1), and these particular lines may perhaps appear unconventional to a reader used to the classical Romantic imagery of sunlight dancing and delicately “threading” through the leaves. Indeed, Tse comments on this difficulty in translating Chinese to English in an International Writing Programme podcast with Christopher Merill:
I think the biggest difficulty I found is that certain ways of thinking makes sense in Chinese that do not make sense in English. And so providing a straight gloss, you know, makes the English translation sound very unfluent, when actually it sounds perfectly fluent in Chinese. And so my challenge has been to decide when to change things, when to take away things to make it more fluent, or should I leave it so-called unfluent.
(Tse, qtd. in Tse and Merril)
But the strangeness afforded by this “unfluen[cy]” in translation perhaps aptly reflects the general defamiliarising and aestheticising impulse of this collection. Here I think of Tse’s poem “noises only reach me after crossing this silence” (Calligraphy 20), which begins with a plea to “advise how ... to break / up w/ your / self” (lines 1–4). Its final ten lines read:
And as much as I argue that knowing specific allusions is unnecessary in reading Tse, I cannot help but think of the poem by Wong May, “Teaching Simone Weil to Eat Pineapple”:
Alive,
Eating a pineapple
a pineapple whole
Taking a knife to it
A knife to a pineapple
a whole pineapple
Like eating a peacock
a peacock
With its ten thousand eyesAlive.
In Wong’s poem, the ostensibly pleasurable act of eating a pineapple (oddly, “a pineapple whole” [line 3]) is made strange and discomforting. The ominous symbol of the “knife” is here used to represent the artificial division of the organic, culminating in the surreal simile which invokes the grotesque “eating [of] a peacock”. This visual similarity of “pineapple” and “peacock” ─ classically, objects of patterned aesthetic appreciation ─is made consciously strange through the haunting, seraphic image of “ten thousand eyes” (line 9). This, perhaps, is an act of artistic defamiliarisation, where there seems to be a forced ‘deferral’ of conventional aesthetic judgement on the reader’s part. In simpler words, as the reader reads Wong here (or Tse, for that matter), they might be asking: is this supposed to be aesthetic? The insistent, bracketing repetition of "Alive." at the beginning and end frame this unsettling imagery around the act of consumption. As the philosopher Simone Weil, referenced in the title, theorises on beauty:
We want to get behind the beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that reflects to us our own desire for good. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a sorrowfully irritating mystery. We want to feed on it, but it is only an object we can look on; it appears to us from a certain distance. The great sorrow of human life is knowing that to look and to eat are two different operations.
(Attente de Dieu 156)
Read against this, the ultimate form of intimacy is perhaps consumption — the bliss of incorporating a desired object into our own bodies — which is also at once a destructive act. And thus lies the paradox of possession, mirroring Forrest-Thomson’s paradox of aesthetic distancing and poetic dislocation: where poetry aims to create a world simultaneously familiar to the real-world in its emotional and referential qualities, and yet, different in its aesthetic qualities. In short, think of a lyric poem versus a news report – the poem paradoxically pretends to be witness to the event written about, but also presents itself as an aesthetic object, written in a different form from the news.
Applying this idea of paradox back to Tse’s poem “silence” (Calligraphy 20), the conditional “if” presented by the persona: the enigmatic “secret” of finding “joyous” and “delicious” self-satisfaction of “being” in that which “is all that is” (lines 7─8, 13─14) seems a distant, hopeful wish. But the persona does not seem to rally or rage against this. Indeed, in the almost impossible pursuit of experiencing concurrent bliss while undergoing a division of self-identity, or breaking up with “your // self” (lines 3–4), the persona seems to wish the reader well in “then may...” (line 10), hoping that the result will “be more / probable ... peacock” rather than “delicious pineapple” (lines 11─14): that is, the preservation of the complete lyric subject without transforming or assimilating it as (although, as the persona asserts, “still” desirable [line 12]) object. Here, I read this persona’s pursuit of wholeness as simply idealistic in the laconic and perhaps ironically resigned ending anacoluthon “─this is normal” (line 15).
But the power of Tse’s poetry still persists under such impossibility of true ‘continuity of language’. Revisiting again the conceit of cremation and personal loss near the end of Deeds in “Greater Than the Sum” (40), the final poem of Calligraphy is titled “to what are we burning incense but a piece of brass?”. The absurdist title here references the act of consumption, grieving, and ritual, and the notions of “breaking / off”, “off-focus” (again a cinematographic movement) and yet still “linger[ing] in memory” (lines 1─4) recall Tse’s continued treatment of the power of poetic discourse to preserve fragments of remembrance. Yeow Kai Chai notes in his reading that this poem is “clearly a mission statement”, and one looks towards the statement-esque lines “‘the goal essence / not likeness’” (lines 5─6). And rather than pursue idealised or over-aestheticised representation of particular lyric experiences, as many young poets do, Tse, perhaps, has found his niche in beautifully patterned poems that “twiddle / the seriousness of / the present” (lines 15─17): to purposively make strange our own normal self-experiences, in order to embrace the jelly-like fluidity of the knowledge we possess ─ as Bishop says, historical, flowing, and flown. This, then, is normal.
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