Letters to Myself

Ammiel's class on Thursday brought me back. He brought the whole class back. He wanted everyone to talk about "How you ended up here?", wanted us to talk about how we came to poetry and perhaps why we wanted to read the stuff that he's so thick into. I didn't say much except for turning to the Beats as a 17 year old Singaporean, an experience that many in the class shared despite the vast cultural differences. A fuller memory of poetry --

Sy -- self-designated poet of the class, in both languages. I remember him writing a tortured Sonnet about angels and tombstones while I flippantly copied a Wordsworth rhyme. Got me to thinking about the lengths individuals would go in forming an identity in poetry.

Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey and the Beats. In the strange corners of the National Library, sudden discoveries. Along with the metaphysical poets -- strange companions. But liberating. Perhaps I was attracted to the psychadelic hardcover design of the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

I remember how poetry and the Beats almost saved somebody's life. 17 and with no place to go, trying to start out again after being on Probation, he turned to the books without the grammar. He starting writing without the rules. I would sit with him, hours late into the Teck Hin night, listening to him, listening to myself. We read Kerouac together, Marvell too, Herman Hesse and of course, Shakespeare. The only person whose ever asked me to read out loud cause he liked the sound of my pseudo TS Eliot voice.

And I remain intimidated by the notion of the poetic. I remain desiring to read BIG BOOKS whose meanings need to be teased, pried open, hunted out. I still sit -- reading LINES out aloud. LINES that don't make sense but play with my sense of how words should sound, put together in a line. And I remain awkward, hesitant, shy, afraid, diffident around the company of poets -- self-proclaimed or not. In a strange way, perennially outside.