The Singapore Scene

Last December I was given the chance to scoot a few thousand miles across the globe and do a spot of creative teaching. I don’t really want to say ‘creative writing teaching’ as I don’t know if what I did quite qualifies. In fact, most of the time I found myself working out ways to be as creative as possible about time spent actually teaching to try and cope with the jet lag. Some of this took the form of bringing a number of visiting writers into the sessions to talk about their work and do the real creative teaching.

By a stroke of luck (or misfortune on the students’ parts) we ended up with four male poets from Singapore’s burgeoning scene: Cyril Wong, Alvin Pang, Yong Shu Hoong and Aaron Maniam. Through their workshops, the books they brought with them to our sessions and the book launch event for Over There — Poems from Singapore and Australia, which coincided with my visit (of which more later), I found myself juggling not just jet lag and teaching, but also a sudden and refreshing immersion in Singapore’s hot-off-the-press poetry.

Singapore is only about fifty years old. One of the more successful projects of the British Empire, the small group of islands off the south coast of Malaysia’s mainland are smaller than your average European capital. After a troubled period of Japanese occupation, followed by Malaysian ownership and then severance, Singapore quickly developed into a major hub for business, blending eastern and western cultures well. This growth was no doubt helped by the rigid — though not unfriendly to westerners — government hierarchy, which is essentially a dictatorship.

The impact of this on literary life over the past half-century is immediately obvious. Up until the late 1990s, there was only one publisher for homegrown poetry worth counting on any fingers. For the — back then, though Rotterdam has since overtaken it — largest trading port in the world, you’d have expected a little more cultural variety, but even today all newspapers must be licensed and published by the government-operated printers. While this hasn’t led to an overtly oppressive society, underwritten by violence, there is pressure on artists and journalists to self-censor.

The only kind of poetry that flourished up to the late nineties is overwhelmingly steeped in ‘voice-of-the-people’ nation-building. One milestone is the 1995 anthology Journeys: Words, Home, and Nation: Anthology of Singapore Poetry, 1984-1995, edited by the uncrowned laureate of Singapore Edwin Thumboo. The title says it all: poems about the national symbol, the Merlion; poems about defining flora and fauna; about the nationalistic spirit. I bought a copy as an educational tool, but had to put it aside before it damaged my western liberal sensibilities. That’s not to say the poetry is all bad, but that the intentions behind poetry’s social purpose ran against what I was used to.

Things may well have continued to stagnate in this environment, if it hadn’t been for an energetic wave of editors stepping up their operations. Alvin Pang is one of the tireless and brilliant centrepieces of the poetry scene. As editor, facilitator, networker and an excellent poet also, his name seemed to be behind almost everything I stumbled across. At the launch event I went to, he compered, chaperoned, carried his young child on one arm, poured drinks for guests, and, while I tried to tuck myself into the inevitable back-of-the-shop poetry section, screamed my name to all and sundry, introducing me to key figures in the literary scene.

The event was crammed: a coterie of young students in their late teens, graduates of the Creative Arts Programme took over the sofa next to me while poets in their sixties stood grumbling behind shelf stacks, straining to spot the readers. Ng Yi-Sheng, Yong Shu Hoong, Madeleine Lee (whose book, Synaesthesia, I picked up on the strength of the two poems she read) mingled with unpublished names, floor spots and a couple of guest performance poets, including the very entertaining Bani ‘Bunny’ Haykal. The space was so busy that Alvin had to put readers on a chair in the middle of the room, so people could see what was happening. (And, fortune of fortunes, none other than John Mateer was in the room, passing through Singapore on his way to China.)

Pang’s main achievement as an editor has been to introduce personal, intimately-voiced poetry into the public sphere, expressions of self that provided a table across which individuals could begin to empathise more. A landmark anthology kick-started his mission in 2000: No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry, (published by ethos books) edited by Pang and Aaron Lee. You could say this marked the start of the ‘private self’ in Singaporean poetry. Contributors to the anthology were selected from outside traditional poetry circles, for their style of writing, as a challenge to the mainstream. By western standards, the anthology was doing nothing new, but by Singaporean standards this was a groundbreaking book.

Since then the scene has grown to encompass something much more at ease, and much more capable of standing up alongside western poetry on its own terms. While still revelling in the personal voice (perhaps confessional would be going too far, though really it’s Frank O’Hara’s influence that seems to be behind some of this) the poets I read while I was there seem to be technically brilliant at the short lyric, far better and far more tolerable to my palate than writing over here, which seems to have mined that vein bare.

Don’t just take my word for it. The Quarterly Literary Review Singapore has used the internet’s marginally greater freedoms to create a meeting point for Singapore’s scene and the international community. Edited by Toh Hsien Min, another active and inspiring figure on the scene, the magazine has scooped up samples from many of the new wave poets. It’s worth catching Cyril Wong’s column, ‘The Acid Tongue’, while you’re there.

The current newcomers’ scene is dominated by a handful of exciting queer poets: Cyril Wong, Ng Yi-Sheng, Alfian bin Sa’at and Teng Qian Xi were some of the more touted names on the air. In Singapore, where multi-religious sentiment dominates the law, homosexuality isn’t so much frowned upon as pushed back into the closet as quickly as possible. Yet these poets are out in the community, teaching, sharing, even campaigning for freedom of expression and against organisations that attempt to curtail their rights; and as you’ll see from Cyril’s ‘Acid Tongue’, the discussion is stepping into public forums.

It’s not all roses, though, from my perspective. While the scene is exciting in many ways, at some point I found myself mourning the absence of an experimental tradition. When the short lyric ‘I’ is in itself an innovation in a scene, it’s very hard to start making the leap to names like Prynne, or Silliman, or Ashbery. I’m optimistic for their future, having picked up Over There, however. Co-edited by Alvin Pang  and John Kinsella, some of the work in there was properly wild (a few pages in, I was hit by a ‘wall of words’ poem, no other way to describe it). While the experimentation primarily stems from the Australian names in the book, the influence can only be a good thing. Give it another ten years or so, and they might well see a bit more export to match the import.

Alvin’s work may be the first to arrive on our shores; I’ve heard he’s being considered by an English publisher and he has had poems placed in UK magazines here and there. My hopes aren’t too high, though; this island has always been the opposite of Singapore in its ability to allow access and synthesis with foreign cultures. Despite the fact that Aaron Maniam, Yong Shu Hoong and Alvin are all visiting the UK in 2009, there still doesn’t seem to be enough interest here in the poetry (though if the opportunity arises, I’m going to try and set up readings).

Some of this is to do with international book rights territories, which seem to have left Singapore outside of western sales zones, even affecting online sales. Australian is the only place that seems willing to pick up and distribute the books, as well as inviting readers to their literary festivals. The industry seems unlikely to change to accommodate Singapore’s book trade, so instead I’m hoping to see partnerships between publishers like ethos books, or first fruits and UK and US presses. The landscape is most definitely ripe for a Singapore Poetry Series over here, but once again, the issue of UK insularity needs to be addressed. (Though, of course, if anyone needs an editor for that series, my schedule is clear from mid-March.)