/ FEATURED POETS

/ FOREWORD

Written by Iain Lim
Dated 31 Oct 2023

But you don’t really want
to hear the same old hard-luck story!
There are no new legends anymore.

from Goh Poh Seng’s “The Girl From Ermita”

When Joshua Ip invited me to pen this editorial, I was unsurprisingly hesitant. I have spent more than four years away from Singapore, and as a result of my academic interests, my attention towards our local literary practice naturally waned. To compound the problem, the theme of this feature calls for a certain reverence for the poets (both past and present) which I might miscarry for want of sufficient knowledge of (or I dare say, interest in) our literary history. While poetry.sg will fill this lacuna by virtue of its existence, I wish to embark on a brief reflection on the meaning of this invitation, or the literary gesture of this feature and conclude with a brief introduction of the poetry of this second and final instalment of Dead Poets’ Society.

As Ip explains in the “Foreword”, “each younger poet was asked to write a piece in response to their favourite pieces by the senior poets”. On the surface, this invitation to write functions as an invitation for a novel encounter, be it to learn (“[…] there’s also much to learn from his approach to poetry […]”), search for a contemporary in the past (“It’s weirdly contemporary, Donna-Haraway-esque, and queer […]”), channel affects (“[…] with this piece I sought to refract these slivers of light through my own lens”), meditate on perennial conundrums (“I find an invitation to stay with the uneasiness; with the flinch”), or acknowledging a kindred spirit (“the sense of stagnancy coupled & juxtaposed with that of upheaval is profoundly compelling to me […]”). But what diminishes the novelty of this characteristic is the fact that this is the modus operandi of all literary production insofar as we are heirs to our own literary predecessors. What then is the punctum that pierces these generalities such that it will “memorialise and revitalise Singapore’s rich literary canon”?

My best guess is that the gesture concealed in this invitation is the act of searching, discovering, or founding a community. The popular idea that communities are founded on commonalities often eclipses the necessary work of forging these very traits that we now call ‘something-in-common’. The surprise, esteem, or affirmation that emanates from these poems is undergirded by this invitation as their necessary condition. When Samuel Lee observes Mohamed Latiff’s “honesty and ambivalence about Singapore’s pre-independence decades”, this is not a communion already made possible by our shared geography or political horizon but the effects of a process of engagement that strived to create an affinity. When Andrew Devadason responded to Wong Phui Nam with a barrage of questions, it was clear that he found an interlocutor in his singularity, with no recourse to succession, history, or time. Perhaps, this feature aims to do just this: a hopeful dissemination that invites us all to tussle, not with “our past” such that it becomes a part of our present as a heritage, but with those whom we have yet to encounter.

Today, everybody knows that writing begins with the death of the author. For those who are already familiar with the late poets in this final selection, it will appear that the literal sense of this provocation is taken as the irreverent raison d’être of Dead Poets’ Society. However, like a joke that ceases to be humorous upon analysis, the appearance dissipates when subject to scrutiny. In the same way that Chew Keng Chuan, Yeoh Lam Keong and Tharman Shanmugaratnam once thought that we have no legends, we have “no new legends anymore” because what we have before us is a field yet unacknowledged, that knows little to none of its origins. Who is Cécile Parish in Wave #1? Can we even begin to find the Cécile Parish? Since any archive does so much more than preserving historical facts and tracing an elusive origin, the invitation amounts to this: What can Cécile Parish, Mohamed Latiff, or even Goh Poh Seng stand for us? For all of us future readers, what can these names mean for us beyond our literary practice or heritage?

If the first selection of Dead Poets’ Society “collects poets of concision and control, of precision and particularity”, this final selection must be an assemblage of powerful images, comprised of poets that pull no punches. In this issue, Jack Xi infects Goh Sin Tub with an actual mycelium that is everywhere, all at once, as it eats our plastic while it appears in our culture, from high fashion to the newsroom. David Wong’s search for joy in Goh Poh Seng ends in a spectacular disaster, though the city is still hospitable in all its urbanism. Topaz Winters is the fierce mirror of Teo Poh Leng as she trades winter for summer in the nine hours that “F.M.S.R. A Poem” took to travel between two cities, with no lack of admonishment. Andrew Devadason surgically interrogates Wong Phui Nam’s Osiris, which by morning Iris must have absconded with the sutures. Lastly, Samuel Lee’s reconstruction of Mohamed Latiff’s city is a mediated ekphrasis of Lim Hak Tai’s Riot (1955) which succumbs to eternity, which is the abiding hope of all poetry.

/ FEATURED POETS

/ FOREWORD

Written by Joshua Ip
Dated 30 Aug 2023

poetry.sg turns 8 years old this year. Our front page displays a wall of faces from across Singapore’s literary history, a compilation of poets who have each in their own way left their mark on this city’s literature. Some have no picture, with most of these without faces coming from pre-independence Singapore: Ee Tiang Hong, Margaret Leong, Cecile Parrish and more. Beyond poetry.sg, you can only find their work in libraries.

History has been kinder to poets who have passed more recently. There are rumblings that the collected Wong Phui Nam and Ho Poh Fun are coming into print, thanks to the efforts of Daryl Lim Wei Jie and Ann Ang respectively. The collected poems of Arthur Yap were released a decade ago by NUS Press and remain in print (and are the one book of Singapore poetry I would recommend in any hypothetical what-book-would-you-bring-if-shipwrecked-on-a-desert-island scenario.) And Mohamed Latiff Mohamed casts such a long shadow over the Malay literary scene that multiple selected works are available, covering different decades of his output.

But others that were published before have been lost to the years – Goh Poh Seng, Goh Sin Tub, and the aforementioned Ee, Leong, and Parrish. Thankfully, Teo Poh Leng, the author of the first book-length publication in English by a poet from Singapore, was discovered more than seven decades after his death by Dr Eriko Ogihara-Schuck, and has come into print again with the help of Ethos Books.

poetry.sg is one of the few places that holds on to their poetry, behind our wall of black-and-white faces. However, we do not want to be mistaken for a mausoleum. Rather, we take pride in trying to bring the poetry of our dead poets back to life, whether by recording their poems being read by the voices of contemporary poets on our YouTube channel, or now, by bringing them in conversation with younger poets in a new feature we are calling Dead Poets’ Society.

Dead Poets’ Society pairs ten poets on poetry.sg who have passed with ten younger poets, most of whom are not yet on poetry.sg. Each younger poet was asked to write a piece in response to their favourite pieces by the senior poets, as well as to write a short reflection on the experience and their process. We will be releasing Dead Poets’ Society in two waves, each showcasing five pairs of poets.

The first selection collects poets of concision and control, of precision and particularity; and yet, in several instances, the poets paired often adopt almost diametrically opposed approaches, while maintaining similar characteristics. Ho Poh Fun’s cool, precise, biologist’s eye, which discerns only the natural world, is inverted by Ally Chua, who superimposes the images of flora and fauna onto humans. Ee Tiang Hong refuses detail or description beyond the momentous date he cites, almost refusing imagery entirely; Tricia Tan forgoes her own words and serves as an amanuensis by compiling documentary poetry from an account of that same date with a medical student’s eye for detail.

Others attempted to channel the spirit of the senior poet to a closer degree. Margaret Leong’s terse, observatory quatrains of a kelong scene are fittingly followed by Pamela Seong Koon’s tender, gnomic non sequiturs. Cecile Parrish’s sparse tetrametric sonnet is a question mark that Ang Shuang does not attempt to answer. Instead, pithy free verse lines echo her garden-bound reflections on enigmatic, unexplained “lanes of loss”.

I hope that Dead Poets’ Society encourages you to read Ho Poh Fun and Arthur Yap; I also hope that it leads you to Pamela Seong Koon and Tricia Tan. If all else fails, we have at least forced some younger poets to read some older ones. As a demonstration of the accomplishment of key performance indicators, Ally Chua and Ang Shuang both knew nothing about Ho Poh Fun and Cecile Parrish respectively before being assigned their tasks to respond to their work. So, one poem or one line at a time, we have sought to move the needle.

I want to end by talking about the first pair of poets in this wave, which starts off with one of my favourite title and first line pairings. Arthur Yap’s “conceptual art” begins famously with the first line: “is enough”. In discussing the space left by a picture after being removed from a patch of wall, it recalls the image discussed earlier in this piece – poets whose faces are not present. Tse Hao Guang picks up Yap’s baton in “black & white”, a poem about a poem about a piece of art, an ek-ekphrasis sharing Yap’s detachment and precision, continuing to invite our eye into the negative space Yap has left behind. Tse invites the reader to “grab a drink & / look out / the window / with my fingers.” That space, as Yap reminds us, “is, /too, enough.”