Goh Poh Seng (1936–2010)
FEATURES / DEAD POETS’ SOCIETY
Written by David Wong Hsien Ming
Dated 31 Oct 2023
It is at best reductive (and at worst wholly inaccurate) to think of Goh Poh Seng as a rebel figure in Singapore’s history, but as a teenager there was little reason to look beyond the widely reported, near-mythical story of his work to bring David Bowie into Singapore for a gig in 1983. But insistence is not the same thing as resistance, and can be gentler, savvier than the latter; this is what I found spending time with his voice over the years. One could be tempted to call his commitment to a cause stubbornness, but his work and life trajectory was far too mobile to call it that.
In poems such as “Bird With One Wing” and “The Girl from Ermita”, he dug his heels in and stuck it out when it came to certain images, themes, issues. He also seemed equally decisive in calling it a day or acknowledging when the sun rose or set on a thing, as when he undercuts the latter poem’s casual conversation fragments with undertones referencing Manila’s underbelly, before pulling the curtain fully open in the poem’s last stanza.
I sought to play with these impressions in responding with work of my own. Goh’s struggles with Parkinson’s also reminded me of my grandmother and her Alzheimer’s, and in many ways the struggle against the limits or whims of the body reminded me of the sort of insistence-resignation duality one must have when doing any sort of civil discourse or cultural work. As Hidhir Razak notes in the concluding remarks to poetry.sg’s critical introduction on Goh, there is a certain deliberateness in seeking out joy in his work and with this piece I sought to refract these slivers of light through my own lens.
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For the body when it behaves as a conflicted technocrat
Quarry we're meant to fill
with ghosts that stick to the story
vein for vein, real scene-chewers,
tune of the year for bubble-wrapped men
that keep life hedged in kerbside,
also where melamine clacks tally what is owed
at the story's end & we pay
with demonstrations of faith
—though what qualifies
flies out of roof slats
& dies after finding an audience.Example: offer eyes that stay the course as a man falls
casino balcony to garden bed,
like a meteor who, meeting air
for the first time since birth, burns
& returns to the innocence of a skipped pebble
—& next time get told there should've been grief
or at least the tearing of nails against its scaffolds,
the same we arrive at searching the shores of the island landfill
for old consolations buried in orphaned sand.
Not the grief but the nails,
its pearlescence ready to tell what dirt is.
