A photograph, perhaps more so than any poem, is something that continues to haunt me. One can describe place, deconstruct its technical aspects, but there is something haunting about the visual quality found in an image, its raw affect that straddles the space between memory and forgetting. It lodges in some limbic node and refuses to be described.
To describe carries the idea of sketching, to mark the form or figure of.
These monochrome images, taken over the years in various places, carry something of that indescribable moment to me, whether it is in gesture, the depth of a building or the way an image bisects itself; the frame drawing its own lines of meaning.
Sri Lanka (2017)
“In these all-seeing days, the traffic between memory and forgetting becomes untrackable. Photography is at the nerve center of our paradoxical memorial impulses: we need it there for how it helps us frame our losses, but we can also sense it crowding in on ongoing experience, imposing closure on what should still be open.” – Teju Cole, from “Known and Strange Things”
India (2011)
“The photograph isn’t what was photographed, it’s something else. It’s about transformation” – Garry Winogrand
Nottingham, UK (2012)
“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” – Richard Avedon
Sightlines launches on 23 May at 3Arts, a pottery studio in Joo Chiat Place.
It’s been a book that has been on an incredible journey, starting from Waye reaching out to me to write poems from her collection of film photographs. At that time, I was just beginning to write about collaborative processes as part of my PhD at RMIT. Here was a chance to put theory into practice. Of course, ideas are far easier than the actual work of selecting images, arranging them into a kind of arc and then writing poems that allowed for a different sightline, another way to apprehend the image. The first title that emerged was Waypoints, but eventually, we realised that while it described each image/poem pairing as a node on a journey, what we were really after was a treatise on different ways of seeing.
Sightlines allows for a dialogue between text and image. The reader is not bound to one particular way of seeing or reading, and the work has to be ‘read’ not just as a pair, but as a grander arc. The narrative, so to speak, begins and ends in Singapore, where both of us are from. Whilst travel is the given, there are other elements that layer the experience of travel, such as the implied female persona that moves from one space to another. Then there is the medium of the image; film. The treatment of grain, how light falls and is held on the page and the emotional resonance of an analogue process seems to cohere with the personal nature of the poem; as a space that is made intimate through a different kind of viewfinder.
And to add yet another layer to the experience, we are showcasing selected poem/images with pottery works made by various artists at 3Arts, a pottery studio. The pieces and the prints (A2, framed and printed on acid-free archival paper) are available for sale.
Here’s a sample of one of the poems and images.
Come journey with us on an evening of looking, listening and learning.
I was invited to read at The National Gallery Singapore on 24 Feb together with a bunch of really cool poets – Momtaza Mehri, Charlene Shepherdson, Jennifer Champion and Tse Hao Guang. We were responding to Minimalism. Space. Light. Object. an ongoing exhibition at NGS, either to the individual exhibits or on themes of form/anti-form, light or space. I wrote two new pieces for the reading. The first was after Tatsuo Miyajima’s Mega Death, where I spotted a single number counting up against an entire room of descending numbers.
Stubborn
From distance, a pulsing envelope of blue magic beckons in irregular heartbeats, a chorus for the clicking crowd
Seen up close, one number counts upwards while the rest descend like a herd reasoning down to zero
One number walks upslope an improbable anomaly a refugee refusing order a sheep swallowing the language of wolves
The other numbers blink furiously as they chase zero, starting over at their own pace, making up the apparition of a faceless crowd, lights going on in a silent room.
The lone number climbs against the tide, against all logical proof; glitch in the system, broken integer.
Like that one child in class who keeps raising a hand to ask question after question, dissatisfied, holding up the diminishing lesson, holding time itself with a clenched fist, wired for a different world.
The other poem drew its inspiration from Jiro Takamatsu’s pair of 1971 artworks titled Oneness of Wood and Oneness of Concrete. I tried to embody the idea of words contained within words through a series of haiku, where the four successive haiku that followed the first one comprised of words drawn from the latter.
Containment
Here is the earth and here we find, body broken between unread lines
Here the line is broken between body and earth
Find the unread body broken earth here, and here
Earth lines, find the broken here, unread, between
BuySingLit is back for a third year (https://buysinglit.sg/programmes-list/) and there are a whole host of programmes, workshops, performances and readings that caters to different languages and age groups.
Book publishers, retailers and literary non-profits band together to encourage more people to discover and embrace Singapore’s literature. And they are doing this through a variety of way, some conventional and some experimental. Its good to know that as a literary community, we’re not content to rinse and repeat but are willing to innovate and embrace new ideas.
I’m excited to be doing two new things for this year’s festival. The first is a terrarium workshop called We all step on snails: A Poetry & Terrarium Experience on the 9th and 17th of March, 1-3pm.
Make your very own terrarium while I serenade you with a series of poems about our natural world. Note: snails not included!
Tickets can be found at bit.ly/terrariumtickets. Each ticket comes with a $10 #BuySingLit voucher.
Each session is limited to 20 pax.
On 16 March at 2pm, I’ll be at the very lovely Temenggong 18/20 space, a black and white bungalow along Temenggong Road, to share my poems from my travels while everyone has a cup, or two, of tea. Think of this as a rest-stop for the world-weary traveler. Let poetry be a balm that refreshes and renews the soul. Best of all, this is a double bill featuring fellow travel writer Tan Mei Ching.
Note: Please bring your own cups.
General Admission – $28
Student / NSF / Senior Citizen – $20*
Ticket price excludes ticketing agent fee.
Each ticket comes with a $10 #BuySingLit voucher! Get your tickets here
Stop! Have you heard a strange story, come across an unexplained phenomenon or been weirded out by someone or something in Yishun!
Crispin Rodrigues and I are putting together a geo-mapped online anthology of the uncanny things that go on in Singapore’s strangest neighbourhood.
Full details of the open call are up on the blog: https://uncannyyishun.wordpress.com
but suffice to say, we’re looking for original poems, flash fiction and flash creative non-fiction.
Some people start the year binge drinking at a manic New Year’s Eve party. Some start it with a list of neatly written resolutions. And others start it with an early night in bed, ignoring the festivities and fireworks to face the new year bright and early.
I spent the first week of January in hospital.
How did I get there? It all started with an ill-fated calisthenics workout. Not having done anything like this before, I went for a beginner class, which turned out to be an advanced form… of torture. It was tough, to say the least. And the instructor should really have modified the exercises that he made the beginners (Carolyn and I) do versus the rest of the class, who were regulars.
The thing about exercise is that it needs to be gradual; muscles need conditioning to get accustomed to increasing weight and stress. You don’t climb Everest on a whim. Or tackle 45 pull-ups in thirty minutes.
The day after the workout. I could not straighten my arms. I was like a velociraptor, dangling my useless arms and roaring at everyone. I thought it was the usual muscle fatigue after a particularly strenuous workout.
Two days after, my arms started to swell up. I was pleasantly surprised at first to have such large forearms after just one round of calisthenics. But as the day wore on, they ached and I started to feel acutely dehydrated. That’s when I knew something was really wrong.
Saturday night. A&E at Tan Tock Seng Hospital. The attending doctor looked a bit worried after she got my urine and blood test results. She put me on a drip and said I had to be warded. I had done some googling beforehand and found that the worst case scenario was a rare, but not unheard of condition called rhabdomyolysis. Here’s what WebMD has to say:
Rhabdomyolysis is a serious syndrome due to a direct or indirect muscle injury. It results from the death of muscle fibers and release of their contents, mostly an enzyme called creative kinase, into the bloodstream.
And one of the causes of rhabdo is extreme muscle strain, for example, an overdone calisthenics workout.
So there I was, waiting six hours in a bed in a room full of hacking old men for a bed in a ward. One gentlemen even pooped in the gurney next to me. The smell was… incredible.
The results for my creatine kinase levels came back. My worst fears were realised. Rhabdo the Terrible had come. It was 70,000 units per litre (U/L). In a normal person, that level should be between 20-200 U/L.
Day 2 in hospital!
The colour of my pee (definitely not normal)
This was my forearm at its most swollen. Yikes!
My arms were like jelly. I was unable to prop myself up. An IV line dripped lifesaving fluids through my veins. I downed up to 5L of water daily. In the days to come, the CK level spiked to 80,000 U/L before steadily dropping.
The view from my window. Rain…
and sunshine.
There was lots of time to read, to worry about my PhD research and to dwell upon the vagaries of life in a hospital ward. I had opted for B2 class, which meant a 5-bed ward, but due to a shortage of space I was (fortunately!) offered a single room in a recovery ward which used to house the CDC. It wasn’t exactly quiet though, as nurses frequently yelled to each other down the length of the hallway and a very noisy old man yelled “OI!” at regular intervals to get attention. I assumed he was in pain, but he frequently followed it up with a string of choice curse words, so I wonder whether he was simply chafing at the ignominy of being in hospital.
When I did feel better, I went for a walk down the corridor…
and peeked outside, feeling hemmed in like this fleeting glimpse of the sky.
Fortunately, after a week of this, my levels dropped to 7,000 U/L. Still very high by regular standards, but good enough for me to go home. So I said goodbye to my bed for a week and celebrated with a soy ice-cream from Mr Bean.
The last time I was warded was almost thirty years ago, and it felt like a combination of being confined to the bunk during ICT with room service (including blood pressure tests) being offered at all hours. Not terrible, but not something I would like to repeat anytime soon.
After an intense ten days at the Singapore Writers Festival I’m back to considering the role of text and image in my work in a couple of events that are coming up this weekend.
Most of the time, the image is made first. It occurs from a way of looking, an intense gaze in search of something striking. It does not have to be spectacular or manufactured. The image is often found at the intersection between light and chance.
The frame is always deliberate, and what is excluded is sometimes what is unnecessary; an abundance of sky which fills too much of the frame, or cropping out what’s distracting, which could be something as simple as one person too many, or simply a brightly-coloured object.
The void deck, spotless; where not even doggies dare to leave barks behind
The poem almost always comes afterwards, a kind of reflection to the image. The poem is a mirror held up to the image, translating that striking moment into its own composed shape.
The frame line sits between, an unused space that separates two adjacent images, or frames. If one considers the image and the poem as two successive frames, then the frame line is what divides and connects them.
So join me this Saturday as I talk about my solo photohaiku exhibition, Slide and Tongue, at Intersections Gallery, 34 Kandahar Street at 2pm. More details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/258257094880173/
And the very next day, I’ll be speaking on Today at Apple at the Apple Store on Orchard Road! It’s a talk/photo walk where I share a few ideas and approaches to photography and then we’ll all go for a photo walk together around the Emerald Hill area to take a few images and write a poem based on them.
We’re back! This Saturday at the Arts House Play Den, for just one night. But got two show lah, 6.30pm and 9pm – to cater for those who wanna eat dinner before, those who wanna eat dinner after and those who have to catch a flight.
After .gif, Wu Jun Han and I played to a capacity crowd at the ArtScience Museum for the first run of Green is the Colour of my Heart, we felt bad that people actually came (albeit, late) for the show and had to be turned away! So we decided to stage it again, with the generous venue support of the Arts House.
I would like to say that the second time round, we’re definitely more comfortable and confident with our material, plus, it’s a different space, so it allows for some variety in staging. Some people liked the show so much they are coming back again! That’s truly moving, and I’m thankful that poetry still has a place in my peoples’ hearts.
Tickets are available here: greenisthecolourofmyheart.peatix.com Use discount code: GREENHEART for a 20% discount.
I’ll also be selling Vital Possessions, which contains several poems from the show as well as Auguries of Modern Innocence, which will be performed together with a kickass soundtrack by .gif. as well as visuals from the amazing artists who illustrated the poem.
Vital Possessions is my ninth (ninth!!) book of poetry. The roots of this book came about through the Gardens by the Bay residency in 2015. I had the opportunity to spend hours walking and thinking in the grounds of GBTB. Initially, I wasn’t enamoured by how planned and fake the gardens seemed to be. I am more a fan of wide-open moors and natural forests. But gradually, I came to see the gardens as that perfect synthesis between nature and nurture. It is, in many ways, the epitome of our garden city. The Supertrees are like our skyscrapers, inhabited by a variety of human flora, and the grounds of the garden are much like our planned estates, neatly segmented while still keeping a semblance of nature and enough variety to keep us sane.
The poems in the book began to be shaped by this overarching theme and along the way, they expanded as I explored and visited other green spaces. I also considered the way we interacted with our environment. Along the way, the title of the book morphed from Naturebiotics to For Yours Is The Garden to Vital Possessions. It became a treatise on what we believe and hold dear to in an age of uncertainty, where our faith is frangible and our knowledge fractured.
The book reads like one long narrative and dips in and out of the following themes: our relationship with nature and natural spaces, how technology interfaces with our lives and the votive value of nature. Haiku accompanied by photographs intersperse the poems. They function as pauses, a breath of image; quirky and quiet reminders of the unnoticed quotidian.
Ethos Books, my publisher, has been very patient with the manuscript over many moons of editing and piecing together the book. The cover proved to be especially tricky, because with such a title, it was truly difficult to find an image that would evoke a similar state of feeling.
The book launch is at the Esplanade Concourse on 11 August, at 5pm. I will be doing something rather different, and invite all of you to come and join me as Vital Possessions finally emerges into the world.
So there I was, waiting six hours in a bed in a room full of hacking old men for a bed in a ward. One gentlemen even pooped in the gurney next to me. The smell was… incredible.
and peeked outside, feeling hemmed in like this fleeting glimpse of the sky.
Fortunately, after a week of this, my levels dropped to 7,000 U/L. Still very high by regular standards, but good enough for me to go home. So I said goodbye to my bed for a week and celebrated with a soy ice-cream from Mr Bean.
