Sep 2002

Yesterday/ Today - 9/3/2002







In the room where Window
opens out to Wall
she sat the entire day.
Sixteen hours on end
speaking to no one but that
disemobodied cackle
nine thousand miles away

"Raining. Rainy day.
Can't go out
or I'll get wet."
So the Room Without A View
The Room with Thin Walls
becomes the only choice.

Today outside my window
it's pouring.
Morning here, night there
The rain drops falling between
Window and Wall
Come one day late.







Say Something - 9/7/2002







Beneath these layers of sound
Say something
that will jog memory's film
play emotion's tunes.

Conversation grows tiring
Say something
that I've never heard before
instead of the mindless
pitter patter of sounds repeated
ad nauseum

Corpse left stretched out
to dry
On the rack
of public politeness
Come forth dead man
Speak!
Through your parched skin and tearing lips
the frizzled ends decaying muscles
Speak!
from your belly
Wonderful Words of Life!
Speak!

In the distance
Thunder
rolling but failing
Beaneath these layers of sound
Caught in a web
of inaction.







Unreal City - 9/18/2002







Beneath the bend of the tallest tower
In the safe shadow of its eye
Beyond the glare of the moonlit hour
Soft before the Morning's cry

There my love with silken eyes
Woven from Midnight's hue,
With open arms and dying sigh
Whispered tenderly and true.

"If this poor sight is what remains
Of Love's once all-conquering power
Then here I stand, alone in pain,
Beyond the moonlit hour."

A Question implied but never Asked
Turns strangely sweet then sour
Her sigh, like the dawn winds, quietly passed,
Beyond the moonlit hour.









Why The Unreal City - 9/20/2002







In reply to Eunice's pleasant request for some background and Gaston's typically boorish remarks about the inferiority of everyone else's work.

1. The poem isn't really mine. It's the result of reading AS Byatt's Possession, which is simply brilliant. I finally read it after meaning to for several years because the movie's coming out and I can't bear to watch the movie before reading the book.

2. Anyway, Byatt does several interesting experiments in the book. One of these is the (re)creation of a Poet. She styles the protagonist, Randolph Ash after the late Victorian poets - Browning in particular who is anonymously famous in most Singaporean minds for the line "The Best is Yet to Be ..." which comes from his dramatic monologue Rabbi Ben Ezra. He wrote "My Last Duchess" - a poem that people are probably familiar with. But he wrote a massive epic poem called the Ring and the Book. So this Randolph Ash is your epic poetry writer etc ... Byatt effectively creates several poems, letters, diary entries that are in that Victorian style and these form the basis of the modern day plot of the book, where two young academics try to piece together Ash's "missing" life.

3. At the same time, Byatt makes comments about post-structuralist critical theory, Freud, Lacan, the feminist movement, literary biography and of course, because she's British, the weather.

4. The point - when I was in JC, one of the things we did for Prac Crit was to recreate poetry. You'd be given a style, a particular theme and you had to wrote a poem or continue a poem. The particular challenge of this exercise arose when you had to write in fixed forms, rhyming forms with fixed metres. The belief was that if you forced yourself into the Poet's shoes, you would be able to respond better to the poetry. Of course, Byatt's book does a double take on it. The researchers are trying to piece together the individual from the scraps, in order to know the poetry better - so where does the circle end? Also, Byatt creates the poetry and the individual and so at another level, traps her researchers in another layer fictionality.

5. The title of the entry, which effectively is the title of the poem, is a quote from TS Eliot. It's from the Wasteland:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

6. The structure of the poem, I guess, is rather easily worked out and the stilted language is in echo of late Romantic verse. Echo and repetition feature and images of ruin desolation and solitude as well, stock images of the Romantics.

7. So the poem becomes a re-reading of more traditional forms of poetry because Eliot's contribution effectively denies the illusion of the sufficency of these traditional structures in conveying meaning. And of course the act of re-creating means that the form is also simultaneously interrogated.

8a. So that's the background Miss Tang ... though writing this out did help me crystalise my thoughts on the issue

8b. But of course, Gaston, the average erudite individual would have been able to work all this out wouldn't he, before offering advice as to whether one should stick to prose. BTW, the noun forms of the adjective "erudite" are "erudition" and "eruditeness". "Erudite" is never used as a noun in refer to a person. A quick perusal of six dictionaries confirmed this. Of course, we may all have to change our minds on this because of Gaston's insistence in the matter ... I'm sure he's never wrong! ;)









Responding to Poetry - 9/21/2002







"... puts the the writing of poetry into question.
should poetry be rigid and formulated or
should it be spontaneous and free of contrivance?"

Quick response? I think there are no "shoulds" in the matter. Different literary periods have placed differing levels of emphasis on the issue. Even Shakespeare wrote in varying amounts of structure and presumably, spontaneity. Each "serves" its purpose as it were. Unless you were to argue that poetry shouldn't serve any purpose and should exist as pure expression. That's a possible thought too but at another level, there are assumptions about the nature of expression (can expression be free from governing structures) and the way language is necessarily structured.

A more involved response? First off, we don't necessarily have to think of poetry as falling into either one of these categories. The belief that writing is either spontaneous or contrived stems perhaps from the reactive proclamations of writing movements that tried to reject earlier notions. The Romantics for eg, believed that their verse was wild and free, and yet to us they seem awfully controlled and deliberate. To say that the sense of the spontaneous is merely a concept that is relevant to a particular cultural moment is perhaps a possible cop out that one might take in the issue. But we won't.

We may then think of contrivance and spontaneity as modes of writing - tools of the process - rather than apt descriptors of the final work. Indeed, they may be different paths that lead to the same poem, or at least the same impression.

Secondly, if by spontaneity we think that one doesn't work hard at poetry, then we would do well to remember that even the most avant garde poets, work ceaselessly in achieving effect. Keroauc was a notorious revisionist, continually re-working his ideas - even in separate novels. And yet he's often pointed to as being spontaneous. My thesis supervisor in the U was into this weird sound-body-breath poetry stuff, and while he poems seem to "descend" into meaningless riffs, he would/was/is meticulous in working out the sounds before each performance. of course each performance exists in time, perhaps highlighting the difference between poem as "performance" and poem as "writing".

In conclusion, our notion of spontaneity could perhaps be sophisticated thus:

In his liner notes to Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" (a seminal album in Jazz improvisation), Bill Evans likens Jazz improvisation to a Zen-like calligraphic practice where a figure had to be written on very thin paper, in a single stroke, otherwise the paper would be torn by the ink and the figure ruined. To execute that moment meaningfully, one had to practice a life-time. To play 12-bars of gut wrenching Blues as if it were the only thing your heart could say, means hours on scales and riffs. While music is constrained by time, unlike writing, where a note played cannot be taken back, the principle of intensity applies. Spontaneity does its subject justice only if the writer has a depth of resource to draw upon. Only if that moment is drawn out from a reservoir of thought and emotion. And this thought and emotion doesn't just happen. It's years of accumulated meaning, connection making, reading, reflecting and finally, articulating.









A 95 - 9/30/2002







What's a A 95? Until today I didn't know. Then I got letter from the ministry stamped all over with red "confidential"s. Of course it had been opened and pawed through by the VP and P ... obviously "Confidential"ity has its other meanings in our bureaucratic Universe.

Anyway, an A95 is a Medical Review for People that were appointed to MOE under some clause that states that these individuals might have "non-organic" medical problems. My A95 refers to the Army Incident obviously.

MOE had, in 1999, after I informed them about the Army Incident (otherwise they would never had known - as to why I informed them ... that's a story for another day)decided that I was not psychologically sound enough to teach. They decided then to not appoint me to the teaching service. Which suited me fine as I was rather interested in doing a further degree anyway - except that they wanted me to foot the bill of the bond - 120 000 buckeroos - at which point PSC got involved and convinced that I was not as shot in the head as the paranoid Doctors at MOE thought I was. Anyway - they certified me "Unfit" then "Fit", all without my presence (and knowledge), until they came to the final decision.

So today I get a letter saying I have to go for a medical review.

To which I politely replied -

1. They certified me mentally unfit and fit (and God only knows what else) without interviewing or talking to me in the first place. Certainly my presence at a review won't make a difference.

2. The review was supposed to be in Dec 2001. If they were to busy then to bother, I don't see why I should bother now.

3. Coping with depression is a continual process. You can't tell from a review session (where they ask silly questions) how a person's coping. Anyway, I haven't been on Medical Leave ever since I started teaching. If they want to review people, they should start with everyone else first.

And that - no - I wouldn't be attending any medical review.

Petulant? Stupid? It's just a formality you should go through?

Perhaps.

But we find our sanity in shaping and defining our decisions. Perhaps I did just a little bit of that today.

The good side of all this? The P and VP probably think I'm crazy - means they won't get me to do important (to them) stuff - that's good, very good. It'll actually give me more time to TEACH and think about HOW TO TEACH. Maybe I should grin at them once in a while ... just to remind them ....