On Newness
Brandon K. Liew on New Singapore Poetries
There is something to be said on the feeling of newness. Newness is necessarily abrasive—reactive—a distinction from oldness, from sameness and safeness towards the brash trembling excitement of strangeness. Newness begins as the antithesis of goodness; new art creates new values— it does not conform to existing parameters of quality, but rather, challenges it. ①
It is this feeling—this challenge—of newness that is evoked from the pages of New Singapore Poetries, the latest anthology of poetry from independent press Gaudy Boy, an imprint of New York-based literary publication Singapore Unbound. New Singapore Poetries is an unabashed playground of form and finesse. The poems within pulse with feeling and resist signification. Imbued in the newness of this anthology is a conscious deterrence of novelty and nostalgia (no roaming merlions or anxious Singlish to be found) derived from its seemingly oxymoronic title; these are not so much the ‘newest’ of poems about Singapore but rather a series of texts that maintain a constant tension between newness, a conceptual Singapore, and the limits of poetic form. In defiance of their modernist forefathers, they have not only casted themselves out of the house, but broadened what it means to be home again.
As an anthology, the focus and desire for a counter-discursive movement of poetics is clear and made explicit in the opening page of the introduction. New Singapore Poetries features the work of eighteen poets who, in the words of editors Marylin Tan and Jee Leong Koh, ‘straddle national identity and personal grief; process loss of history and rewritten trajectories; interrogate dialectics, boundaries, official narratives; traverse the sensuous and the sterile, the pleasurable and the austere, the natural world and natural language; and tell slanted the truth about the way our beloved and accursed country navigates such essentials such as neo-liberalism, consumerism, and colonialism.’ Intriguingly, the inclusion of members of Gaudy Boy and Marylyn Tan herself among these eighteen poets is a conscious act, manifesting the liminality of the publication to and from the island nation-state. This is neither a state nor topographic-bound anthology but a collection of gestures toward the conceptual: Singaporean history, Singaporean form, Singaporean bodies, Singaporean memories and sensations. There is newness in play—that is, form and content that resist signification, but they exist within the described confines of a Singaporean experience ((New) Singapore Poetries). There is a sublimation of otherness—otherness to and of Singapore—in the inscriptions. Poets and poems pretend (perform) to be Singaporean and un-Singaporean at the same time; the word ‘Singapore’ appears in every one of the eighteen biographies among a diverse span of worldly publications, dwellings and identities: ethno, linguistic, queer. The materiality of the publication itself (Published in New York, Printed in the USA) almost endorses the peripherality of the word ‘Singapore’ in the title, yet anchors it in the literary centre of New York. Poet, poem, and publication then, straddle a national (official) Singapore at their centre (New (Singapore) Poetries), claiming a positional ownership and self-identity. In doing so, they reclaim (de-limit) the island shoreline (New Singapore (Poetries)).
The newness of these poetries, as Tan suggests, ‘lies in them chasing a throughline to what is important, paying attention to the keenness of their concerns, and then presenting them in forms varied and ever-evolving.’ But there is something more to be said on the feeling of this newness. After all, ‘it is by feeling alone’, Baudelaire reminds us some 177 years ago, ‘that art is to be understood.’ ② Feeling drives the deconstruction of form, content, representation, and meaning in these poetries. Feeling, I would think, is what is left on these pages for us to experience and discern. Singapore might have the reputation for being the world’s most emotionless society, ③ but New Singapore Poetries at least is a step in a new direction. I could not help but feel (understand) newness at the end of the 300 pages.
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The anthology opens with ‘seni itu sunyi, ④’ where ila commands rhythm out of silence (‘seni itu berat / seni itu sarat / seni itu lembik / hanya tahu ambik’ ⑤), turning art into intimacy (‘tapi untuk siapa / cuma until aku / seni, seni itu sunyi’ ⑥) and returning it back to silence, like the ending of a slow dance. In a similar way, ila’s ‘Hari Kebangsatan ⑦’ is a slow burn of cinder into fire packed into a spitting prose poem of delineated uncanny critique. Following this, Anurak Saelaow’s self-portraiture across his eight poems, one of which is titled ‘Concerning Anurak’, brings a certain physicality to the process of effacing one’s self-concept (‘Writing not to excavate but to heap more dirt onto the whole. / O burial mound sitting like a scab over his heart’). ‘Strategic Sand Reserves’ positions a physical, cultural, and temporal distance to home:
[…] Jerked awake, I think
of the haplessness of distance
and time, the years used and spentlike the rockets I once observed
arching over water. My parents
encased in that steady accretionwhile I bob like a lone beacon
in the Atlantic, rolling in bed,
flashing my signals back east.
Home remains a moving dislocation from the present time and present place. Lisabelle Tay’s critique of mandatory national service in ‘Mangosteen Season’, likening the ripening of boys to scented fruits and the ripening of their mothers’ love, is somewhat prophetic; barely a month after the anthology’s December 2022 publication, the Singaporean Minister for Defence announces a total of 42 national servicemen deaths while in service over the last two decades: ⑧
have you noticed how this year nothing’s changed?
How the boats circle, island to island to island, weighted
with freshly shaven boys posturing, some trying
not to cry, necks craning toward the next
two years of national service, some to die?
Tay’s contributions to New Singapore Poetries are an assortment of poetic form, but the line about the ‘ocean milk’ of a mother’s body in ‘Solarium’ strikes me deeply, written in a sea of words mimicking spouting, cascading water. Nathaniel Chew’s section, which works as a self-contained structure, begins with ‘language acquisition’, middling with ‘language remission,’ and ending with ‘language death’. They are interspersed with litanies, oologies, stories, and shape poems that a literary formalist might have fun going to bed with. Among the rooted shapes and figures are swirling temporal instances (‘egg timers’, ‘thawing chickens’, ‘rushed hours’, ‘boiling’, ‘blossom’ ‘monsoon’, ‘pulsing’, ‘rutting’) that animate the text.
In my journal, that I sometimes scrawl in in the middle of the night, the only entry I have for Kenneth Constance Loe, is ‘like a bouquet in a sweaty basement gloryhole’. I was concerned when I woke up and read my description, but upon returning to the poems, it (sort of) made sense. Loe’s words are visceral, visual olfaction; in ‘how many potential beaux does it take to change a fennel bulb?’ they read:
this bulb is fused with salsiccia masquerading
as heteroflexibility obliviously waiting
in the wings of an overfamiliar embrace;
[…]
and the only thing complicated is vegetables—
a deconstructed salad on all fours
with three closets staring at your fronds?
Moving on from flora to fauna, Jack Xi renders slimes, slugs, fowl pests, and chickens where ‘Singapore is an inked booklet of birds’ in the poem ‘In the Guts of Your Mooncake an Egg’. He swallows the Holy Ghost in ‘La Malekzorcismo de la Kvira Korpo (the anti-exorcism of the queer body)’ where ‘GOD / fizzed in my insides like bacterial fission, papered over / my mouth with a thick film of cells […]’ and sizzles biblical burgers in the eight stanzas of the shape poem ‘A Lot Like Ourselves’ where the form of each stanza follows the differentiation of a Fordian factory as bodies discharge onto a conveyer belt (‘I was registered for birth in a McDonald’s country’).
Two-thirds into the anthology, Mok Zining practices ikebana: cutting, arranging, nurturing, throwing away colonial affixes to history. There lies a certain beauty in the necessity of culling and curation that is reminiscent of the literary idiomatic advice ‘kill your darlings’. Mok’s floristry lessons reconfigure feeling and being in the process of remembering; in ‘Floristry Basics: Synonyms’, this is expressed most viscerally: ‘each cutting is / unique, but that / is not to say / despair is / the only rational / response to / wilting. […]’ She peels back a colonialist narrative to reveal the thorns of ‘multiculturalism’ and the genetic engineering of the state to produce the perfect sweet-smelling flower. Laetitia Keok traces her mother through an etymology of feeling. In ‘Grief Work’ in particular, she engages the affective semiotics: ‘In your mother’s tongue, the word for love / & the word for grief is only a difference of tone.’ Having put my own grandfather and uncle to rest in a hospital bed, I can recognise these as tender pillow poems, a bedtime story in reverse. Worms Virk merges body with island and the MRT subway train network in ‘He Fucked Me Like the North-South Line’. Focalising the island state through the first-person, the effective refrain is initially comical:
He fucked me like the North-South line.
The air was hot and heavy, the world stood still.
Our bodies collided the way trains do at Joo Koon,
His Marina South Pier against my Redhill,
Marymount me, I am your Chinese Garden.
15 December 2011 had nothing on him,
I was moaning about it for weeks afterwards.
The stanzas prior to the second repetition of the refrain erects a sarcastic letter of complaint to authority (‘We apologise for the inconvenience / […] learn that it is our responsibility to avoid being affected / […] We normalise the vocabulary of failure’), and the later stanzas subvert the third into a harrowing encounter of sexual violence:
He fucked me like the red line.
But I don’t know how he managed to.
Since he doesn’t see lines,
Can’t see the platform gap between a yes
And my terrified no.
The obvious turn here is the ‘moaning’ line of the refrain that transforms from one of ecstatic pleasure to trivial complaint to grim testimony as it is repeated three times in the poem, a kind of anamorphic focalisation. ‘He Fucked Me Like the North-South Line’ is a warning signal of eumenidic fury that appropriates the KPKB ⑨ stereotype of the Singaporean obsession with complaint: ⑩ ‘And I will shut down your train lines / I will be your disruption / […] Damn right you should be scared of me’.
The mood shifts quickly when we get to Ally Chua’s ‘Martin Scorsese and I Get into a Taxi’, which projects an introspective desire (kink, longing) of sexual self-determination onto Taxi Driver’s famous screenplay of misogynistic violence, interspersed with narratives and names of real-life domestic abusers and their victims. The prose poem subverts the label of victimhood (‘Is it safe is it safe is it safe?’) onto a confession of a submission kink:
I want to be helpless. I want to be powerless. I want men to take me by force, wrap their hands around my neck, and choke me until I ride the edge of fear
that turns into an statement of autonomy:
Here’s what I know: I am not a victim
I want to walk the streets at 3am I want people to move out of my way I want a rise
and fall origin story I want to be the tough motherfucker I want to drink hard I want to
fuck hard […]
In the triptych ‘Natural History of the Florids, 19th Century’, ‘Natural History of the Florids, 20th Century’ and ‘Natural History of the Florids, 21st Century’, Shawn Hoo oscillates between Singapore’s two imperial spectres Raffles and Japan—terming and recording as he performs an exercise in counter-historical re-classification. Like water slushing in a disposable plastic container (form), he moves and re-moves filth, rebounding names (known), history (studied), and space (explored). Lines from the penultimate poem ‘Placard’ mirrors the anthology’s own propensity to Singapore (‘To know this country / is to not know placard / from public assembly. / […] This poem / is and isn’t about you’), and the blind bureaucratisation reflected upon the nation. With a similar reflexivity, Izyanti Asa’ari combines lamentation and invitation in a translatory call-and-response refrain across her poems ‘The boulder that swallows you’ (‘Batu Belah, batu bertangkup, / the boulder swallows you whole.’) and ‘Doorway’ (‘Orangnye dah pegi / Tinggal rumah je. / The old man has left. / But the house remains.’). Like the house that remains, there is a remnant of tense feeling—an absence— trapped in the poetic structure released at the end of each verse akin to the culmination of an arpeggio.
Lune Loh’s punctuation poem ‘Breath as Cinema’ repurposes a modern form of Singapore poetry. Known as twin cinema ⑪, the form consists of two discrete columns of poetry separated by a vertical line. However, ‘Breath as Cinema’ contains no words, only lines of punctuation marks that become increasingly asymmetrical. The application of punctuation saturates Loh’s other poems, artificing lineation in de-lineated prose poems, turning blank space into code, creating shapes through the repetition of words in the removal of punctuation. As such ‘Breath as Cinema ’ is easily read as a question—is it still a poem if it has no words? The short answer: yes, because the punctuation, both in this poem and generally, continue to function as a signifier. And if ‘breath’ is the signified in this case, the twin cinema poem scores three different rhythms of breathing. More interestingly, the punctuation forms the shape of a pair of lungs, effectively bringing twin cinema into the realm of concrete poetry.
Later, we encounter Shou Jie Eng’s prosaic intervention into lists, specifically a Whalemen’s shipping list from 1843 ⑫ in ‘Eight Divers’, which injects empathy and intimacy (romantic, maternal) into the neoliberal paperwork of a resource-extracting machination:
The whaleman casts his drug
into a child, not to kill it
but to secure the mother. […]
At home, her belly changes beyond
seeing, swells against the covers,
child behind her bilge. Find a way
of saying attachment.
So too is architecture and draftsmanship personified into a love prose in ‘How We Build (When We Know How)’ where ‘Every client is not a lover. Not every client is a lover. But in some way, all clients are lovers.’ Christian Yeo on the other hand, maintains a conservative rhythm in both carefully lineated poems and flash-fiction prose, writhing words into a show of tension and release. His poems, in my opinion, bring a more confident and subtly expressive poetic instinct into the fold; in ‘Farm Mart’ an instructive tonality serves as the foundation of the poem, maintained even as the voices, characters, and languages shift:
Two children, one Boston baseball cap.
Twice we call out, ke yi wei ma.
Speak English, Papa says,
pull up your socks.
[…]
The sunset soon.
Quietly we come, and quietly we will go.
The italics are not translation.
Andrew Kirkrose Devadason asks about vicarious queerness in ‘GLASS VASE CELLO CASE’ (‘Queer curation is queer creation, I say, about to watch / the same movie for the fifteenth time. This is barely a joke. / Do you ever read so hard into a text it feels like you’re the one / writing it?’) and the out-of-body experience of a coded gaze in ‘WHY ARE YOU STILL LYING AT THE WEIGHING OF THE HEART?’ (‘Boy as state of hunger. Not-boy as state of meat / […] sea me now. no more sex for me. i want to be / unsexed. want to breathe again […]’). In ‘TRUTH CONDITIONS’ gender codes are literally transcribed into the conditionals of programming language, where a long section of code is given (‘[…] (Y∙R))V((A∙H)[…])’) followed by a description index of A to Z (‘[…] A: Every photo in the family album is of someone who is not me. […] H: Hell is a mirror that does not recognise your face. […] R: Someone at the sink sneers. […] Y: I walk into the correct bathroom […]’. The labour of deciphering the conditional relations of these statements is then entrusted onto the reader, astutely mimicking both the complexity and mundanity of everyday coding/de-coding of the body.
Marylyn Tan perfects a Wildean queer litany in ‘THE OSCAR ROSARY’ across the excerpts of ‘THE DEDICATION’ and ‘LITANY OF OUR OSCAR AS TRAGIC GAY ICON’, scribing both roles of Celebrant on the left side of the page and Congregation on the right. The figure of ‘Oscar’ as a ‘tragic gay icon / […] body-negative misogynist / […] a sex object / […] an Asian motorcycle zhng’d up ah beng style’ is sainted in a queer sacrament, a ritual group-validated through call-and-response. Like the modern appropriation of the nun into a liberated sex symbol, Tan queers the pious profane and the sublime pornographic. In ‘daddy issues’ the social contract between Singaporean state and citizen is made analogous to an anally fixated Sub/Dom sexual relationship:
if you work hard enough maybe you’ll earn the right
to sleep
in a bed tonight
[…]
who’s
a
good girl?
[…]
don’t you need your strong, first-world dom
to protect you against the big bad
terrorism slash Marxism slash civil unrest slash alternative lifestyles?
Beyond this basic premise of the state fucking you over, which is almost historically universal, is something more specific to the Singaporean psyche: a critique of Singaporean subject-making through a stimulus-response psychology of pain and pleasure discourse—that is, the state fucks us up the ass because we are taught to ask them nicely.
Finally, Hamid Roslan brings the anthology to a close in engaging shapes and spaces in a single sustained poem ‘The Shape Of A Body Uncertain’ to structure a dream-like narrative of nomadic provenance after the origin myth of Si Tanggang, ⑬ code-switching between English, German, and Malay. The poem reads as a half-reflection, half-revision of an inscribed bodily history that grapples with the context of its becoming (‘Where I am taught how I ought to see myself / […] Where I respond because that’s the only way to twist the narrative back into shape’). This disassembled body is where we find the finality of the anthology, and new shapes with which we are invited to put ourselves together again.
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All translations in the footnotes are off-the-cuff direct translations by this reviewer, produced in the course of writing of this review, and suitable for general reference only.
Notes
① Aira, César. On Contemporary Art, David Zwirner Books, New York, NY, 2018, pp. 30–31.
② Baudelaire, Charles. The Salon of 1846, David Zwirner Books, New York, NY, 2021, p. 23.
③ See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/21/singapore-least-emotional-country-poll
④ ‘art is silent [empty]’
⑤ ‘art is heavy / art is full / art is soft / it only takes’
⑥ ‘but for who / just for me / art, art is silent’
⑦ A play on ‘Hari Kebangsaan’ / ‘national day’, but with Satan added.
⑧ See: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/42-national-servicemen-died-while-in-service-over-past-20-years
⑨ Kao pei kao bu / cry father cry mother, meaning kicking up a big fuss
⑩ See: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/the-high-art-of-complaining
⑪ Twin cinema was first used by Yeow Kai Chai in the Jul 2010 issue of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. It has enjoyed continued popularity with Singaporean poets since.
⑫ Whalemen’s Shipping List, first published in 1843, was the main source of information on American whaling vessels throughout the second half of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries.
⑬ Si Tanggang is an old Malay folktale. The most known modern re-telling of Si Tanggang is Muhammad Haji Salleh’s The travel journals of Si Tenggang II in 1979.
Brandon K. Liew is a doctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne with an interest in Malaysian literary history, cultural policy, and the global novel. His recent publications include poetry in the anthology Malaysian Millennial Voices and a peer-reviewed article on The Unquiet Dreams of Lesser Writers. He is the curator of A Wasteland of Malaysian Poetry in English, an anthology audio-exhibition of Malaysian poetry from the 1950s to the present.