By Stephanie Yap, The Sunday Times, Jan. 13 2008
If you were wondering: Yes, the plates in the title are the kind you eat from. The image is taken from one of the poems in this collection, in which a couple, both stricken with Aids, carry on with their daily lives, including the washing of dishes, "without grief, but also / without hope."
As for the collection, it serves up three narrative strands which, in their apparent unconnectedness, might lead one to wonder at first glance if the poet is biting off more than he can chew.
One describes the lives of the Hindu god Shiva and his lover Mohini, the female incarnation of the god Vishnu. Another draws from the poet's classical music background, with love poems which bear Italian musical terms as titles. A third is told from the perspective of a couple coping with illness and impending death.
But in what is his most polished collection thus far, Wong manages to interweave and merge the three strands into a luminous symphony, best appreciated when read straight through in one sitting, as per concert hall conditions.
His lyricism is in full bloom here, evoking that dreamy, Wong Kar Wai feel previous reviewers have remarked upon.
Take his description of a couple dealing with death: "But when they catch him asleep, they touch as / quietly as they can, forgetting, for a moment, / that he is lying there between them, / dreaming of freezing deserts and majestic ruins / overrun with weeds and mute with memory."
But it's not all exquisite imagery and profundity. What buoys this collection is its sense of loving irreverence, like the gentle humour with which the poet mixes the sacred and the quotidian: "Shiva / enters the garden / like a man / coming home / to his wife, loosening / the tie of his divinity, / shaking the clouds / from his feet".
Or, in a tribute to booty-shaking goddesses both immortal and mortal: "I was Mohini, vibrating / madly, a wilder / Shakira."
As the collection explores emotional attachments and loss, the notion of empty instruments of nourishment as a means to reflect more intangible warmth takes on poignancy.
But, ultimately, this poetry collection burns strongly with its own inherent energy, celebrating love in a generous, timeless way: "Even with one of us gone, would not the mind / of the other reveal its universe, its constellation / of memories like a field of flickering candles / the same face at the centre of every flame?"
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Review of "Excess Baggage & Claim"
By Jaya Savige, The Australian, Oct. 3 2007
[P]ublished by Transit Lounge, Excess Baggage and Claim, co-authored by Melbourne-based Terry Jaensch and Singaporean poet Cyril Wong, presents the reader with a very different set of challenges, the nature of which makes this volume one of the most unnerving reads of recent years.
The collection, in two parts by Jaensch and Wong respectively, is essentially a no-holds-barred paean to the vicissitudes of love and longing, set against a backdrop of seedy karaoke bars, promiscuity and coruscating self-analysis. It is the result of a lengthy correspondence that eventually saw Jaensch travel to Singapore on an Asialink residency.
Jaensch introduces one of the volume's central themes, the protean nature of individual identity, in Leaf the Size of My Torso:
I approach myself from a variety
of angles
I delete
several spontaneous selves cast in bad light.
My task now is to cultivate one authentic self
from a series of predictabilities.
Like Hardacre's, Jaensch's voice is the locus for a collision between East and West and high and low culture, evident from the outset in his choice of epigraphs. The first, from the father of conservative politics, Edmund Burke -- "For only that which thwarts our will can be the cause of a grand and commanding conception" -- alludes to the baggage of the title; the second, a lyric from pop diva Beyonce -- "I don't think you're ready for this jelly" -- sets the work against the backdrop of the nightclub scene in the first years of the new millennium, and simultaneously throws down the gauntlet to readers who might be discomfited by some of the collection's more confronting subject matter.
Jaensch can be subtle about his sexuality when he wants to be: "Chinatown prepares for the new year, roosters line the streets" (from Karaoke -- Yangtze). At other times, he is less so: "To keep my cock limp I recite poetry/This country is like one/endless mall, beat, I tell the thirty-something/pole as he goes down on an inconsistency" (from Karaoke Booth 2).
But it is with Wong's contribution that the collection takes on a haunting tone. From the outset, the spectre of childhood sexual abuse looms large. The poem Don't Move -- "My father climbing/over me./How many boys would/know what that's like?" -- opens the suite, and each successive piece is testament to the destructive effects: "Is this/damage I must unstitch for the rest of my life?"
This is strong stuff, and while Wong's delivery is more direct than poems on the same subject by Sharon Olds, his unflinching, flinty voice is reminiscent of that North American writer. The poems have a devastating cumulative effect. Midway through the suite, the speaker observes:
A whore's capacity to seduce
is like a eunuch's influence in the Ming dynasty,
that strategic diversion from prejudice,
which shields them, even as they remain tethered,
love everywhere beyond the widening circles of their lives.
The pitch-perfect identification with the figure of the whore and that of the eunuch suggests the anguish at the heart of this book. Its subject matter, dark and vital, adds yet another thread to the rich cross-cultural conversation canvassed here.
[P]ublished by Transit Lounge, Excess Baggage and Claim, co-authored by Melbourne-based Terry Jaensch and Singaporean poet Cyril Wong, presents the reader with a very different set of challenges, the nature of which makes this volume one of the most unnerving reads of recent years.
The collection, in two parts by Jaensch and Wong respectively, is essentially a no-holds-barred paean to the vicissitudes of love and longing, set against a backdrop of seedy karaoke bars, promiscuity and coruscating self-analysis. It is the result of a lengthy correspondence that eventually saw Jaensch travel to Singapore on an Asialink residency.
Jaensch introduces one of the volume's central themes, the protean nature of individual identity, in Leaf the Size of My Torso:
I approach myself from a variety
of angles
I delete
several spontaneous selves cast in bad light.
My task now is to cultivate one authentic self
from a series of predictabilities.
Like Hardacre's, Jaensch's voice is the locus for a collision between East and West and high and low culture, evident from the outset in his choice of epigraphs. The first, from the father of conservative politics, Edmund Burke -- "For only that which thwarts our will can be the cause of a grand and commanding conception" -- alludes to the baggage of the title; the second, a lyric from pop diva Beyonce -- "I don't think you're ready for this jelly" -- sets the work against the backdrop of the nightclub scene in the first years of the new millennium, and simultaneously throws down the gauntlet to readers who might be discomfited by some of the collection's more confronting subject matter.
Jaensch can be subtle about his sexuality when he wants to be: "Chinatown prepares for the new year, roosters line the streets" (from Karaoke -- Yangtze). At other times, he is less so: "To keep my cock limp I recite poetry/This country is like one/endless mall, beat, I tell the thirty-something/pole as he goes down on an inconsistency" (from Karaoke Booth 2).
But it is with Wong's contribution that the collection takes on a haunting tone. From the outset, the spectre of childhood sexual abuse looms large. The poem Don't Move -- "My father climbing/over me./How many boys would/know what that's like?" -- opens the suite, and each successive piece is testament to the destructive effects: "Is this/damage I must unstitch for the rest of my life?"
This is strong stuff, and while Wong's delivery is more direct than poems on the same subject by Sharon Olds, his unflinching, flinty voice is reminiscent of that North American writer. The poems have a devastating cumulative effect. Midway through the suite, the speaker observes:
A whore's capacity to seduce
is like a eunuch's influence in the Ming dynasty,
that strategic diversion from prejudice,
which shields them, even as they remain tethered,
love everywhere beyond the widening circles of their lives.
The pitch-perfect identification with the figure of the whore and that of the eunuch suggests the anguish at the heart of this book. Its subject matter, dark and vital, adds yet another thread to the rich cross-cultural conversation canvassed here.
Review of "Like A Seed With Its Singular Purpose"
By Gillian Bickley, South China Morning Post, Nov. 12 2006
"If you can be this sad, you can also be this happy." There's no doubt of the intensity of the experiences Cyril Wong reflects in this, his fifth collection of poetry. The sadness is patent. But the happiness seems something hoped for, rather than achieved, except perhaps in the joy of expression, the joy of creating his work.
If the personality presented in each poem is one and the same, this book presents the only son of parents who wanted him to do well at school (a cane was used "to whip my school grades into shape"), and who also wanted him to have children within a happy, Christian marriage. His father ceased talking to him 20 years ago, when he learnt more than he was ready to learn about his son's private life. Wong became alienated from his mother, because her hopes and expectations for his life jarred with his own desires. This work shows the pain of rejection, hope for acceptance, and the desire for a different version of happy love and domesticity.
Wong lives life on the three levels of body, mind and spirit. Simple actions such as cutting toenails or trimming sideburns lead him to consider other types of loss: the loss of loved ones and the personal dissolution that occurs at death. He reacts deeply to cultural manifestations and events broadcast through the international media. "Heat" responds to an exhibition about the Japanese occupation of Singapore during the second world war. That day is a moving narrative of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.
Personalities of high and popular world cultures appear: Baudelaire, Simone Weil, Maria Callas, Meryl Streep. Chinese and Indian religion, dance and music are presented with inward understanding. In "Why I sing", Wong - an admired counter-tenor - describes his feeling that singing creates, "enlightenment - respite,/ more like, even mercy - " and his experience that singer and listeners meet, "So far from what we are/ we find ourselves again."
His mind is full of questions, which it seems he can never "turn off / like the lights in a living room". Kissing Pope John Paul II's ring, as a boy, his mind urged the question, "What about us?" Later, when he watched the news about this Pope's death, saw the pain in his eyes through his broadcast image, his question changed to, "What about you?"
In these poems, the expressions of rebellion against a seemingly pre-ordained world order resemble those of the English romantic poets William Blake and A.C. Swinburne.
The book title is taken from the poem, "Walls, loss of light", which interrogates the Creator about his purpose in creating man. The poet suggests that the Creator's "singular purpose" was simply to create. Compared with such a work of creation, none of created man's achievements can be considered a success.
Wong's own creative and personal ambitions are expressed movingly and terribly in the inverted, unjustified, self-doubting, final statement of the book: "If my self is a shadow, at least I made a dent in the light." His work appears here as blank verse, free verse, poetic prose, a dramatic playlet and a series of poignant propositions.
"If you can be this sad, you can also be this happy." There's no doubt of the intensity of the experiences Cyril Wong reflects in this, his fifth collection of poetry. The sadness is patent. But the happiness seems something hoped for, rather than achieved, except perhaps in the joy of expression, the joy of creating his work.
If the personality presented in each poem is one and the same, this book presents the only son of parents who wanted him to do well at school (a cane was used "to whip my school grades into shape"), and who also wanted him to have children within a happy, Christian marriage. His father ceased talking to him 20 years ago, when he learnt more than he was ready to learn about his son's private life. Wong became alienated from his mother, because her hopes and expectations for his life jarred with his own desires. This work shows the pain of rejection, hope for acceptance, and the desire for a different version of happy love and domesticity.
Wong lives life on the three levels of body, mind and spirit. Simple actions such as cutting toenails or trimming sideburns lead him to consider other types of loss: the loss of loved ones and the personal dissolution that occurs at death. He reacts deeply to cultural manifestations and events broadcast through the international media. "Heat" responds to an exhibition about the Japanese occupation of Singapore during the second world war. That day is a moving narrative of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.
Personalities of high and popular world cultures appear: Baudelaire, Simone Weil, Maria Callas, Meryl Streep. Chinese and Indian religion, dance and music are presented with inward understanding. In "Why I sing", Wong - an admired counter-tenor - describes his feeling that singing creates, "enlightenment - respite,/ more like, even mercy - " and his experience that singer and listeners meet, "So far from what we are/ we find ourselves again."
His mind is full of questions, which it seems he can never "turn off / like the lights in a living room". Kissing Pope John Paul II's ring, as a boy, his mind urged the question, "What about us?" Later, when he watched the news about this Pope's death, saw the pain in his eyes through his broadcast image, his question changed to, "What about you?"
In these poems, the expressions of rebellion against a seemingly pre-ordained world order resemble those of the English romantic poets William Blake and A.C. Swinburne.
The book title is taken from the poem, "Walls, loss of light", which interrogates the Creator about his purpose in creating man. The poet suggests that the Creator's "singular purpose" was simply to create. Compared with such a work of creation, none of created man's achievements can be considered a success.
Wong's own creative and personal ambitions are expressed movingly and terribly in the inverted, unjustified, self-doubting, final statement of the book: "If my self is a shadow, at least I made a dent in the light." His work appears here as blank verse, free verse, poetic prose, a dramatic playlet and a series of poignant propositions.
Review of "The End Of His Orbit"
By John Phillips, The Arts Magazine, 2002
Cyril Wong, like many young Singapore poets, demonstrates confidence and delicacy in that overwhelmingly dominant poetic mode - the lyric. The sheer range of prosodic skills he employs to evoke uncanny, sensual, sometimes brutally open emotional vignettes between his various personae and their addresses is impressive. Neatly organised sections contain apostrophes, odes and elegies to parents, lovers, friends and teachers, to the poet himself, to parts of his body and his name, and in a final section he hands the lyric first person over to historical and mythical personae, a brief series of witty alternative perspectives.
Yet impressive prosody alone would not be sufficient reason to celebrate this new collection, which emerges in a field crowded with competent examples of the genre. The lyric mode in the context of a stark consumerism (Rajeev Patke has called it "the somnambulism of the lyric") too often amounts to little more than well turned similes or startling metaphors in the descriptive service of emotions often found better evoked in popular music and soap opera ("he descended/Into the couch like a coffin/Into a hole in the ground").
Wong's poems surpass the blandness of the contemporary lyric by interrogating the rules of naming and address (the titles are often dedications or puzzled reflections on names). Thus the poems tread figuratively between a fear of confinement and a cautiously candid openness.
Cyril Wong, like many young Singapore poets, demonstrates confidence and delicacy in that overwhelmingly dominant poetic mode - the lyric. The sheer range of prosodic skills he employs to evoke uncanny, sensual, sometimes brutally open emotional vignettes between his various personae and their addresses is impressive. Neatly organised sections contain apostrophes, odes and elegies to parents, lovers, friends and teachers, to the poet himself, to parts of his body and his name, and in a final section he hands the lyric first person over to historical and mythical personae, a brief series of witty alternative perspectives.
Yet impressive prosody alone would not be sufficient reason to celebrate this new collection, which emerges in a field crowded with competent examples of the genre. The lyric mode in the context of a stark consumerism (Rajeev Patke has called it "the somnambulism of the lyric") too often amounts to little more than well turned similes or startling metaphors in the descriptive service of emotions often found better evoked in popular music and soap opera ("he descended/Into the couch like a coffin/Into a hole in the ground").
Wong's poems surpass the blandness of the contemporary lyric by interrogating the rules of naming and address (the titles are often dedications or puzzled reflections on names). Thus the poems tread figuratively between a fear of confinement and a cautiously candid openness.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
The Poetry of Personal Revelation: Reviewing Cyril Wong’s "Unmarked Treasure"
By Leonard Jeyam, Southeast Asian Review of English, No. 47 April 2006/07, p. 96-99
If both Koh Beng Liang’s and Alvin Pang’s last volumes of verse point outwards to a civilised, urbane Singapore, most of Cyril Wong’s poetry prefers to dwell inwards, seeking inner truths about external realities. His is rarely a public poetry that yearns to be consumed by wit, artifice, and social integrity; instead the perceptions of his inner self often take centre stage.
Instead of arriving at the artifice of social, universal truths, Wong prefers to concentrate on self-extenuation and, not unlike his earlier verse, probe the fissurings of the self few are brave enough to speak about. In “Flight Dreams”, for example, the persona of the poem realises that the dreams of his future cannot be realised anymore as a result of his mind’s young mind discovering the undercurrents of sensuality, sexual desire, which actually help him find release from the dreams of “entrapment” his parents had for him when he was younger.
Then I discovered a part of me that rose up
in a hundred bedrooms that eventually
looked like each other, when a stranger’s
hand or mouth would push me back into myself,
only to suck me back out again by the shock
of the body’s capacity for desire
like a black wave rolling back and forth,
back and forth right through me.
But such sexual release, the persona discovers later, is only akin to an astronaut cast adrift in space, “into a starry nothingness”. The perceptual space his words evoke often concord with just the right tone and image. His personal, inner world also discovers just the right public sphere to cohere in, although Wong can be accused of not always wearing his emotions subtly. In “Notes to a Suicide”, the persona explores the alienable perspectives of such an act but wallows in gladness thinking about the victory which his newspaper obituary would eventually engender over his parents:
Imagine it: my face on the last page
of the Straits Times. Passport-size
no less. A grin on my face, for sure,
mother having chosen it herself.
But do not mistake that grin for irony.
Among veterans, I will be the exception,
the prodigious newcomer for arriving
before my time. And so imagine it:
that finishing tape at the end of the race
tightening to an arc across my chest.
Reading Unmarked Treasure is to invite into our minds the clash of intimate and chaotic pieces of the fragmentary nature of human experience. Wong’s verse works on different levels of metaphoric revelation and relevance, although it is all too easy to pigeon-hole such verse as being merely confessional. His fondness for the tropes of the postmodern snapshot and visual stimulae is certainly evident in all his writing. This often translates sensitively into a penchant for enacting meaning simply by way of imagery:
Uncertainty exploded and pushed
out against the walls around my voice, but
my love only saw my easy confidence, my self-
deprecating humour, while my min was opening
a window from the back of my head to gaze
out into some horizon, where a vague silhouette
of myself was walking further and further away.
This plane of revelation, amalgamating personal grief and lyrical suggestiveness, is something uncommon to anything being written in Singapore at the moment. Perhaps only Alfian Sa’at’s outstanding second book of verse, A History of Amnesia (2001), could compare in terms of autobiographical insight although his private and public juxtapositions have a different strategy in mind. That is to say that Alfian’s later poetry prefers to dwell on the social context of being Singaporean, wherein identities of nation, state and the individual are explored. Wong’s poetry, on the other hand, is a totally private universe full of delicate perception written in a deceptively simple, revealing style. Vision arrives out of solitude, out of the very dreariness of living. He finds emotional centres, which often arrive with an achingly beautiful choice of metaphor. He remembers an old home in a litany of images in “First Home”:
I am a child again standing at this balcony,
succumbing to a solitude I knew then how to love,
a row of potted plants humming to a day’s luminosity,
while those clouds are the vast sails of ships
billowing with the future’s
unstoppable gale.
Then when the “unstoppable gale” of the future actually arrives, the wonderment of fondly remembered things begins to be suffused with the ideas and feelings of adult family conflict and sexual insecurity. These images often evoke a sense of loneliness and grief, two things not always easy to replicate in verse especially when faced with the subtleties of image and language. In his tribute piece to the Thai artist Araya Rasdjaumrearnsook, Wong discovers again that in images of defeat/loss he is able to learn a new language of acceptance and transcendence, which subsumes the possibility of genuine selflessness. Then nothingness he felt as a young child as a result of the emotional estrangement between he and his father is dealt with first:
This was before my father stopped talking
to me, Araya, before I realised that love
meant I would always be the one
giving more. And I learnt how disappointment
too could swell to something as deafening
as a plane outside my window, that blizzard
of sound rocking the insides of my ears
and chest so hard and often that how
could I not help but begin to love that too.
Ironically, the poet learns from the Thai’s artist’s fondness for reading and singing to corpses on film so as to, we are told, facilitate the “communication between her and her memories of loss”. In his long sequence, Wong too wishes his living father dead, which he says is similar to the years “spent / mourning his absence”. His father, we can garner from numerous poems in the volume, despised his son’s less than manly physicalities and kept an emotional distance from the rest of the family too. Wishing him dead would help the poet-self to compose his own meaning or “own stories” on and around the metaphorical dead body. The poet could then begin to understand the language of forgiveness:
sing bittersweet love songs
from a throat already raw from rage
and crying to his sealed eyes
and mouth, not fearing if he would
awaken to scorn my womanly voice.
But for this, I would require him
to be really dead, Araya, as only then
could I truly begin to forgive him.
Cyril Wong is the custodian of a strand of Singaporean poetry that is rare indeed. One would have thought that being confessional in a hugely autobiographical age is commonplace enough. Yet, we forget that to be Asian still means keeping one’s sentimentality in check, which in turns renders sensitive and sentimental outpourings unnecessary. It has been suggested by one Singaporean critic that such biographical musings could also be viewed as a form of social protest from within the authoritarian island-state. While this could be wholly possible, I feel that we should not miss the essence of what Wong’s poetry is all about. His is an art that works simply from a personal plane, and from within such a plane we have some of the most sensitive, articulate probings into the nature of one’s self that have never been seen before in all of contemporary Singaporean verse.
If both Koh Beng Liang’s and Alvin Pang’s last volumes of verse point outwards to a civilised, urbane Singapore, most of Cyril Wong’s poetry prefers to dwell inwards, seeking inner truths about external realities. His is rarely a public poetry that yearns to be consumed by wit, artifice, and social integrity; instead the perceptions of his inner self often take centre stage.
Instead of arriving at the artifice of social, universal truths, Wong prefers to concentrate on self-extenuation and, not unlike his earlier verse, probe the fissurings of the self few are brave enough to speak about. In “Flight Dreams”, for example, the persona of the poem realises that the dreams of his future cannot be realised anymore as a result of his mind’s young mind discovering the undercurrents of sensuality, sexual desire, which actually help him find release from the dreams of “entrapment” his parents had for him when he was younger.
Then I discovered a part of me that rose up
in a hundred bedrooms that eventually
looked like each other, when a stranger’s
hand or mouth would push me back into myself,
only to suck me back out again by the shock
of the body’s capacity for desire
like a black wave rolling back and forth,
back and forth right through me.
But such sexual release, the persona discovers later, is only akin to an astronaut cast adrift in space, “into a starry nothingness”. The perceptual space his words evoke often concord with just the right tone and image. His personal, inner world also discovers just the right public sphere to cohere in, although Wong can be accused of not always wearing his emotions subtly. In “Notes to a Suicide”, the persona explores the alienable perspectives of such an act but wallows in gladness thinking about the victory which his newspaper obituary would eventually engender over his parents:
Imagine it: my face on the last page
of the Straits Times. Passport-size
no less. A grin on my face, for sure,
mother having chosen it herself.
But do not mistake that grin for irony.
Among veterans, I will be the exception,
the prodigious newcomer for arriving
before my time. And so imagine it:
that finishing tape at the end of the race
tightening to an arc across my chest.
Reading Unmarked Treasure is to invite into our minds the clash of intimate and chaotic pieces of the fragmentary nature of human experience. Wong’s verse works on different levels of metaphoric revelation and relevance, although it is all too easy to pigeon-hole such verse as being merely confessional. His fondness for the tropes of the postmodern snapshot and visual stimulae is certainly evident in all his writing. This often translates sensitively into a penchant for enacting meaning simply by way of imagery:
Uncertainty exploded and pushed
out against the walls around my voice, but
my love only saw my easy confidence, my self-
deprecating humour, while my min was opening
a window from the back of my head to gaze
out into some horizon, where a vague silhouette
of myself was walking further and further away.
This plane of revelation, amalgamating personal grief and lyrical suggestiveness, is something uncommon to anything being written in Singapore at the moment. Perhaps only Alfian Sa’at’s outstanding second book of verse, A History of Amnesia (2001), could compare in terms of autobiographical insight although his private and public juxtapositions have a different strategy in mind. That is to say that Alfian’s later poetry prefers to dwell on the social context of being Singaporean, wherein identities of nation, state and the individual are explored. Wong’s poetry, on the other hand, is a totally private universe full of delicate perception written in a deceptively simple, revealing style. Vision arrives out of solitude, out of the very dreariness of living. He finds emotional centres, which often arrive with an achingly beautiful choice of metaphor. He remembers an old home in a litany of images in “First Home”:
I am a child again standing at this balcony,
succumbing to a solitude I knew then how to love,
a row of potted plants humming to a day’s luminosity,
while those clouds are the vast sails of ships
billowing with the future’s
unstoppable gale.
Then when the “unstoppable gale” of the future actually arrives, the wonderment of fondly remembered things begins to be suffused with the ideas and feelings of adult family conflict and sexual insecurity. These images often evoke a sense of loneliness and grief, two things not always easy to replicate in verse especially when faced with the subtleties of image and language. In his tribute piece to the Thai artist Araya Rasdjaumrearnsook, Wong discovers again that in images of defeat/loss he is able to learn a new language of acceptance and transcendence, which subsumes the possibility of genuine selflessness. Then nothingness he felt as a young child as a result of the emotional estrangement between he and his father is dealt with first:
This was before my father stopped talking
to me, Araya, before I realised that love
meant I would always be the one
giving more. And I learnt how disappointment
too could swell to something as deafening
as a plane outside my window, that blizzard
of sound rocking the insides of my ears
and chest so hard and often that how
could I not help but begin to love that too.
Ironically, the poet learns from the Thai’s artist’s fondness for reading and singing to corpses on film so as to, we are told, facilitate the “communication between her and her memories of loss”. In his long sequence, Wong too wishes his living father dead, which he says is similar to the years “spent / mourning his absence”. His father, we can garner from numerous poems in the volume, despised his son’s less than manly physicalities and kept an emotional distance from the rest of the family too. Wishing him dead would help the poet-self to compose his own meaning or “own stories” on and around the metaphorical dead body. The poet could then begin to understand the language of forgiveness:
sing bittersweet love songs
from a throat already raw from rage
and crying to his sealed eyes
and mouth, not fearing if he would
awaken to scorn my womanly voice.
But for this, I would require him
to be really dead, Araya, as only then
could I truly begin to forgive him.
Cyril Wong is the custodian of a strand of Singaporean poetry that is rare indeed. One would have thought that being confessional in a hugely autobiographical age is commonplace enough. Yet, we forget that to be Asian still means keeping one’s sentimentality in check, which in turns renders sensitive and sentimental outpourings unnecessary. It has been suggested by one Singaporean critic that such biographical musings could also be viewed as a form of social protest from within the authoritarian island-state. While this could be wholly possible, I feel that we should not miss the essence of what Wong’s poetry is all about. His is an art that works simply from a personal plane, and from within such a plane we have some of the most sensitive, articulate probings into the nature of one’s self that have never been seen before in all of contemporary Singaporean verse.
Tembak: Cyril Wong’s “Tilting Our Plates To Catch The Light”
By Zedeck Siew, Kakiseni, Dec. 28 2007
It seems safe to say that Cyril Wong is the current light of Singaporean poetry. Widely published, he's been seen at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, among other places. We saw his verse onstage in The Fun Stage's "Existence", way back in 2004; we saw him in person last April, in a reading at No Black Tie. He's highly visible back home, even on the island of overachievers -- and, in light of recent events (like the debate surrounding Section 377-A of Singapore's penal code, or the clash between playwright and fellow poet Alfian Sa'at and MP Thio Li-ann over her homophobic parliamentary speech), his work is a reminder that sexuality is a non-issue when compared to our shared humanity.
"Tilting Our Plates To Catch The Light", Cyril's seventh and latest -- it was published in November -- is a display of prowess; an unabashed paean to a relationship, it is divided into sections titled by Italian musical directions, and given a divine counterpoint by way of interwoven Indian myth. This last device, itself, is pretty slick: the poet takes a relatively insignificant (at least, in the vast, History-of-the-Universe context of the Hindu Puranas) scene -- that of Mohini dancing before the demon Bhasmasur to save the Shiva's skin -- and re-imagines it into a tryst between The Destroyer and Vishnu, by way of the latter's voluptuous avatar. Assuaging his wife's jealousy, Shiva tells Parvathi that:
We are only
aspects
of a single being
and no matter
who I love, or who I am
loved by, we are but
folded back into
the same
origami sea.
The long view of eternity, in other words, renders every gesture -- of conflict, death, (especially) love -- transient. But the two other lovers in "Tilting Our Plates", the book's primary focus, are mortals (even if they are mirrors of the gods) and rebel against time's bulldozer; they are trying to savour their stolen gestures as long and as intensely as they can. In a section called "Pianissimo" they engage in a threesome:
When he is awake, they make love with his hands
running down their backs, his breath in their ears.
But when they catch him asleep, they touch as
quietly as they can, forgetting, for a moment,
that he is lying there between them,
dreaming of freezing deserts and majestic ruins
overrun by weeds and mute with memory.
The need to hold hands, after all, is immediate; one of them (perhaps both) has AIDS. Cyril's verses are haunted by this spectre of tragedy ("Somebody is turning his lover over, / pulling the ribbon off the top / of the gift", one of the most terrifying eloquent descriptions of the disease's spread I've come across) -- but, more importantly, it is haunted by the struggle to stave off tragedy: "I touch your arm now / to draw you back into the present / to remind you that the music is still beautiful."
For personal amusement, I started tallying the appearances of the word "love" (or one of its variations) in the book: 62 times in 92 pages. "Tilting Our Plates"'s language has the desperate earnestness that characterises all poems of love -- but it comes equipped with the awareness of impending loss that justifies this desperation. Beauty is only beautiful because we know it will not last.
It seems safe to say that Cyril Wong is the current light of Singaporean poetry. Widely published, he's been seen at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, among other places. We saw his verse onstage in The Fun Stage's "Existence", way back in 2004; we saw him in person last April, in a reading at No Black Tie. He's highly visible back home, even on the island of overachievers -- and, in light of recent events (like the debate surrounding Section 377-A of Singapore's penal code, or the clash between playwright and fellow poet Alfian Sa'at and MP Thio Li-ann over her homophobic parliamentary speech), his work is a reminder that sexuality is a non-issue when compared to our shared humanity.
"Tilting Our Plates To Catch The Light", Cyril's seventh and latest -- it was published in November -- is a display of prowess; an unabashed paean to a relationship, it is divided into sections titled by Italian musical directions, and given a divine counterpoint by way of interwoven Indian myth. This last device, itself, is pretty slick: the poet takes a relatively insignificant (at least, in the vast, History-of-the-Universe context of the Hindu Puranas) scene -- that of Mohini dancing before the demon Bhasmasur to save the Shiva's skin -- and re-imagines it into a tryst between The Destroyer and Vishnu, by way of the latter's voluptuous avatar. Assuaging his wife's jealousy, Shiva tells Parvathi that:
We are only
aspects
of a single being
and no matter
who I love, or who I am
loved by, we are but
folded back into
the same
origami sea.
The long view of eternity, in other words, renders every gesture -- of conflict, death, (especially) love -- transient. But the two other lovers in "Tilting Our Plates", the book's primary focus, are mortals (even if they are mirrors of the gods) and rebel against time's bulldozer; they are trying to savour their stolen gestures as long and as intensely as they can. In a section called "Pianissimo" they engage in a threesome:
When he is awake, they make love with his hands
running down their backs, his breath in their ears.
But when they catch him asleep, they touch as
quietly as they can, forgetting, for a moment,
that he is lying there between them,
dreaming of freezing deserts and majestic ruins
overrun by weeds and mute with memory.
The need to hold hands, after all, is immediate; one of them (perhaps both) has AIDS. Cyril's verses are haunted by this spectre of tragedy ("Somebody is turning his lover over, / pulling the ribbon off the top / of the gift", one of the most terrifying eloquent descriptions of the disease's spread I've come across) -- but, more importantly, it is haunted by the struggle to stave off tragedy: "I touch your arm now / to draw you back into the present / to remind you that the music is still beautiful."
For personal amusement, I started tallying the appearances of the word "love" (or one of its variations) in the book: 62 times in 92 pages. "Tilting Our Plates"'s language has the desperate earnestness that characterises all poems of love -- but it comes equipped with the awareness of impending loss that justifies this desperation. Beauty is only beautiful because we know it will not last.
Merlion Heart
By Ishaan Tharoor, TIME, Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2007
It is one of the more delicious workings of karma that Singapore, which criminalizes homosexuality, should have as its leading young poet an openly gay man. But while Cyril Wong relishes waving "a purple flag" in socially conservative faces, his work expands beyond simple sexuality — being "just a gay poet," as he puts it — to embrace themes of love, alienation and human relationships of all kinds. His latest volume of verse, Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light, is due to be published this month, hopefully to burnish further the international reputation that the previous five collections have established for him.
Wong, 30, burst onto the scene in 2000, with Squatting Quietly. It was, like many debut collections, a document of rebellion — in this case, against the values of his Christian, middle-class Chinese upbringing, and the social alienation that his sexuality entailed. Much of the latter had been brought into stark relief during 2 1/2 years of national military service, during which, he jokes, he was "too campy in the camp." His natural levity masks the loneliness and vulnerability he felt in the barracks. But ultimately it was poetry, rather than humor, that gave Wong a means of working through the frustrations driving him, at times, to a suicidal state of mind. "It helped me wash my dirty linen in public," he says.
In this respect, Wong's poetry differs from that of older Singaporean poets such as Edwin Thumboo and Lee Tzu Pheng, who typically concerned themselves with questions of national and cultural identity (indeed, Thumboo has spoken of Wong's "remarkable inwardness"). Wong worries less about his cultural provenance and more about his own isolation amid the boom and bustle of the cityscape. In one poem, he bemoans his distance from his mother: she "sits in front/ of the television every day,/ afloat in a dress too large/ for her body, fanning herself/ with a magazine, feigning contentment." He compares his father, who has refused to accept Wong's sexuality, to a cockroach hiding in a chair. "We are furniture to each other," says Wong. (The two men still don't speak.)
Some of Wong's rawness was tempered in Unmarked Treasure (2004) and Like a Seed with Its Singular Purpose (2006) — two volumes praised for their probing, reflective study of love and desire. In the poem "Practical Aim" from Like a Seed, Wong asks: "After deep loss, what does the heart/ learn that it has not already understood/ about regret? When all light finally/ forsakes a room, do we take the time/ to interrogate the dark, and to what end?" Other poems simmer with sexual energy; an aircraft landing on the tarmac becomes heady foreplay with the "slow lick of its wheels/ against the runway's/ belly."
Wong ran afoul of Singapore's censors when they threatened to pull National Arts Council funding from his second volume due to the gay content of some poems. But he learned to cope with the restrictions, and they haven't prevented him from attaining mainstream acceptance, represented by his winning the Singapore Literature Prize in 2006. If he's proud, Wong doesn't show it. Self-deprecating and mirthful, he describes himself as lazy, living off his partner's patience and generosity. Though he cites the succinct, confessional styles of American poets Sharon Olds and Raymond Carver as his most direct influences, he feels little in common with contemporary American poetry, which he sees as solipsistic. "There's a boring sameness to it all," he says. "I wish they would stop harping on about their penises and their nose hairs."
Not that Wong has been above some of that in the past. But his recent work strikes boldly into new territory. Tilting the Plates emphasizes the musicality of poetry rather more than his previous collections, while taking as its core a love story between two shape-shifting Hindu deities. Like those beings, the poet also enjoys inhabiting different avatars. At literary festivals from Adelaide to Edinburgh, Wong, a trained opera singer, has been known to "invoke Whitney Houston," belting out renditions of I Will Always Love You that leave stunned fellow authors wondering how they are going to follow on. If straitlaced Singapore is unhappy about being represented by charming camp like that, well, you could call it poetic justice.
See actual article:
It is one of the more delicious workings of karma that Singapore, which criminalizes homosexuality, should have as its leading young poet an openly gay man. But while Cyril Wong relishes waving "a purple flag" in socially conservative faces, his work expands beyond simple sexuality — being "just a gay poet," as he puts it — to embrace themes of love, alienation and human relationships of all kinds. His latest volume of verse, Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light, is due to be published this month, hopefully to burnish further the international reputation that the previous five collections have established for him.
Wong, 30, burst onto the scene in 2000, with Squatting Quietly. It was, like many debut collections, a document of rebellion — in this case, against the values of his Christian, middle-class Chinese upbringing, and the social alienation that his sexuality entailed. Much of the latter had been brought into stark relief during 2 1/2 years of national military service, during which, he jokes, he was "too campy in the camp." His natural levity masks the loneliness and vulnerability he felt in the barracks. But ultimately it was poetry, rather than humor, that gave Wong a means of working through the frustrations driving him, at times, to a suicidal state of mind. "It helped me wash my dirty linen in public," he says.
In this respect, Wong's poetry differs from that of older Singaporean poets such as Edwin Thumboo and Lee Tzu Pheng, who typically concerned themselves with questions of national and cultural identity (indeed, Thumboo has spoken of Wong's "remarkable inwardness"). Wong worries less about his cultural provenance and more about his own isolation amid the boom and bustle of the cityscape. In one poem, he bemoans his distance from his mother: she "sits in front/ of the television every day,/ afloat in a dress too large/ for her body, fanning herself/ with a magazine, feigning contentment." He compares his father, who has refused to accept Wong's sexuality, to a cockroach hiding in a chair. "We are furniture to each other," says Wong. (The two men still don't speak.)
Some of Wong's rawness was tempered in Unmarked Treasure (2004) and Like a Seed with Its Singular Purpose (2006) — two volumes praised for their probing, reflective study of love and desire. In the poem "Practical Aim" from Like a Seed, Wong asks: "After deep loss, what does the heart/ learn that it has not already understood/ about regret? When all light finally/ forsakes a room, do we take the time/ to interrogate the dark, and to what end?" Other poems simmer with sexual energy; an aircraft landing on the tarmac becomes heady foreplay with the "slow lick of its wheels/ against the runway's/ belly."
Wong ran afoul of Singapore's censors when they threatened to pull National Arts Council funding from his second volume due to the gay content of some poems. But he learned to cope with the restrictions, and they haven't prevented him from attaining mainstream acceptance, represented by his winning the Singapore Literature Prize in 2006. If he's proud, Wong doesn't show it. Self-deprecating and mirthful, he describes himself as lazy, living off his partner's patience and generosity. Though he cites the succinct, confessional styles of American poets Sharon Olds and Raymond Carver as his most direct influences, he feels little in common with contemporary American poetry, which he sees as solipsistic. "There's a boring sameness to it all," he says. "I wish they would stop harping on about their penises and their nose hairs."
Not that Wong has been above some of that in the past. But his recent work strikes boldly into new territory. Tilting the Plates emphasizes the musicality of poetry rather more than his previous collections, while taking as its core a love story between two shape-shifting Hindu deities. Like those beings, the poet also enjoys inhabiting different avatars. At literary festivals from Adelaide to Edinburgh, Wong, a trained opera singer, has been known to "invoke Whitney Houston," belting out renditions of I Will Always Love You that leave stunned fellow authors wondering how they are going to follow on. If straitlaced Singapore is unhappy about being represented by charming camp like that, well, you could call it poetic justice.
See actual article:
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