poetry
On 6 and 7 October Sing Lit Station and Grapple Max presented Sing Lit Body Slam, the inaugural Poetry & Pro Wrestling Performance, at Aliwal Arts Centre in Singapore.
What a night. The room was packed with standing room only at the back. My doppleganger Jon Gresham would be proud.
Here are the images:
And here is the aesthetic case for the event from Hamid Roslan.
All images are copyright Jon Gresham. All rights reserved. Please ask beforehand if you wish to use an image.
On 6 and 7 October Sing Lit Station and Grapple Max presented Sing Lit Body Slam, the inaugural Poetry & Pro Wrestling Performance, at Aliwal Arts Centre in Singapore.
What a night. The room was packed with standing room only at the back. My doppleganger Jon Gresham would be proud.
Here are the images:
And here is the aesthetic case for the event from Hamid Roslan.
All images are copyright Jon Gresham. All rights reserved. Please ask beforehand if you wish to use an image.
Speakeasy #31 was held on 17 May 2017 at Artistry with poets, Yong Shu Hoong and Will Beale.
Shu Hoong is one of my favourite poets and Frottage one of the best Singaporean poetry books published. Will Beale is such an exciting poet who uses music to great effect.
If you missed this reading, or want to hear more, then do come along to "Singapore & Australia: connections, country & belonging”, a literary roundtable presented by Sing Lit Station on 22 June 2017 at 3A Jalan Kubor.
Shu Hoong and Will, and also Balli Kaur Jaswal, David Wong and Eileen Chong, will be reading and discussing their Singapore Australian connections.
David Wong & Antoine Cassar were the guest poets at Speakeasy on 28 September at Artistry.
David read from his outstanding debut collection, For the End Comes Reaching, and Antoine read Passaport, printed in the form of an anti-passport.
‘Valid for all peoples, and for all landscapes. For all citizens and villagers of flesh and blood, wherever they were born. Your worth is not proportional to the population of your country. Entry free of duty, no need for a stamp or visa, the doors are unscrewed from the jambs.’
A hat was passed around with proceeds from the evening going to support the important and valuable work of HOME.
HOME provides counselling & advice for migrant workers, runs a shelter, supports migrant workers in disputes with employers, helps with medical issues, provides education & emotional support, and conducts advocacy campaigns & research including an Anti Sex Trafficking Campaign. I have images from a beauty pageant organised by HOME here.
On 1 May 2016, Mhd Mukul launched his debut english poetry collection, Me Migrant, at The Arts House. The book is published by Ethos Books, translated from Bangla with help from Fariha Imran and Farouk Ahammed and transcreated by Cyril Wong, with input on several poems from Marc Nair.
The High Commissioner of Bangladesh launched the book while many - over a hundred, by my reckoning - of Muhammed Mukul’s friends at Healthserve, in the migrant worker and literary communities were in attendance.
“Md Mukul Hossine was born in Patgram, Bangladesh, and has a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences. In 2008, he arrived in Singapore and has been working in its construction sector. Mukul writes poems, novels, and short stories. He enjoys composing poetry to remember his mother back home. His novel, Buker Simanaye Sukh (Happiness at Heart’s Edge) and his poetry collection Apurna Vasana (Unfulfilled Desire) have been published in Bangladesh. His other works have also appeared in anthologies. Mukul has spent many long nights writing poetry. His favourite poet is Rabindranath Tagore.” - Ethos Books
Md Mukul and his book are currently receiving a lot of attention in the Singapore media. This focus is a welcome change from the othering and simplistic political dialogue surrounding migrant workers. The media gaze and ‘celebrity’ opportunities should not sanitise, absolve and/or distract from the need to recognise:
Don't just buy Md Mukul's book, please support those on the ground providing much needed help to, and recommendations benefitting, migrant workers such as Healthserve, TWC2 & HOME.
Images from other SGLit Migrant Worker Poetry events
Images from the HOME Showtime Pageant
On 11 March 2016, ‘Rollercoasters & Bedsheets - an anthology of sex in minutes’ was launched at China Square.
Published by Pillow Book Media, this poetry collection was edited by Charlene Shepherdson and Muslim Sahib following an open call.
Like old movies I tend to gloss over, or chortle quickly through, the sex scenes in my saintly prose.
So as one of the world's last innocents I found this book of poems educational and encouraging.
Some of my favourite turns of phrase/lines include:
"Till my legs utterly succumb
To kinetic Stockholm syndrome"
Muslim Sahib
"Noses take in the salty tang of simmering abalone and tongues"
Ignatius Tan
"The way you eat a river snail,
she says, is to put the shell to
your mouth, and your tongue
over half the opening."
Stephanie Chan
"In me there
moves an
other
spilling like
a sound
sliding
into fire."
Samuel Caleb Wee
"... Yet if familiarity
is what it takes for you to be here,
your lips persevering in
its gentle craft, its whispers
roaring across the infinite dormant
caves of my body, so be it. There will
be fresh sheets when you call."
Jerrold Yam
"Falling asleep with the wonder
of what your bedsheets would say
if you let them speak."
Charlene Shepherdson
Images and posts on other Singapore Writers & #SGLit event can be found here.
The Second Migrant Workers Poetry Competition was held on 13 December 2015 at the National Library.
It was standing room only with over 200 people attending - a much bigger crowd than last year. This year there were over 74 entries - 65% female, many mothers. The 14 finalists included Banglar and Chinese construction workers and domestic workers, from Indonesia, India, the Philippines, China and Bangladesh.
I sat next to one of the finalists, Rolinda from Bacalog City, who read her poem to her seven year old daughter, My Wish, from a frog exercise book given to her by the 5 year old son of her Singaporean employers.
Invisibility and transformation were some of the themes mentioned by Shivaji Das, one of the organisers, Kirpal Singh, one of the judges, and Debbie Fordyce from TWC2.
Alvin Pang, another of the judges - whose poem Made of Gold, concerns the deceptions involved in the migrant worker experience, said about the poetry we heard, “We cannot even pretend to begin to know what’s going on. We can only begin to understand the blindness that has afflicted us for so long, so much that we do not know and do not see among us.”
Stories continue to swirl around us, obscured by images of ourselves ...
Frenchman, Tour d'Eiffel, Paris, August 2008
Je me mire et me vois ange! et je meurs, et j'aime
—Que la vitre soit l'art, soit la mysticité—
A renaître, portant mon rêve en diadème,
Au ciel antérieur où fleurit la Beauté.
I can see my reflection like that of an angel!
And I feel that I am dying, and, through the medium
Of art or of mystical experience, I want to be reborn,
Wearing my dream like a diadem, in some better land
Where beauty flourishes.
Stéphane Mallarmé, Les Fenetres
In Singapore, Australia and Jakarta, worlds fall apart, everyone is looking for an escape, and nothing will be the same again. Exploring possibility and desire, yearning and identity, We Rose Up Slowly is the debut collection of short stories by Jon Gresham. Buy We Rose Up Slowly on line here.
Enough of that blatant self promotion. Here is a poem:
I
I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.
I see the summer children in their mothers
Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,
Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There in the deep with quartered shades
Of sun and moon they paint their dams
As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.
I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or lame the air with leaping from its heats;
There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
Of love and light bursts in their throats.
O see the pulse of summer in the ice.
II
But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There, in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.
We are the dark derniers let us summon
Death from a summer woman,
A muscling life from lovers in their cramp
From the fair dead who flush the sea
The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp
And from the planted womb the man of straw.
We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweeds’ iron,
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the county gardens for a wreath.
In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh ho the blood and berry,
And nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies
Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry,
O see the poles of promise in the boys.
III
I see you boys of summer in your ruin.
Man in his maggot’s barren.
And boys are full and foreign to the pouch.
I am the man your father was.
We are the sons of flint and pitch.
O see the poles are kissing as they cross.
Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953
On 20 March at Books Actually, Eric Valles and Desmond Kon talked about the craft of writing, their literary journeys and their poetry and prose. Both poets have been journalists and have strong theological interests that shines through in their work.
Desmond spoke about his novel, Singular Acts of Endearment (Squirrel Line Press), which recently won an award at the Beverly Hills International Book Award.
I really enjoy the rich, intricate, ambitious depths of Desmond’s fiction and poetry. I first met Desmond in 2010 at an NUS reading where he read some Haikus and I read my short story We Rose Up Slowly. Recently we caught the wrong bus from Speakeasy and I left him, late in the evening, stranded near a building site on the other side of One Raffles Quay.
Eric talked about his poetry collection After the Fall: Dirges among Ruins (Ethos Books). He read a wonderful poem about the restoration of a mural in Changi prison.
It was a very warm and pleasant evening.
Ho Chih Minh City, March 2012
Water
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
From Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings, Faber & Faber Ltd, 1964
Larkin looks a little like Eric Morecambe.
Downy Hair
Charmed by a girl's soft ears,
I piled up leaves and burnt them.
How innocent her face
in rising smoke - I longed
to roam the spiral of those ears,
but she clung stiffly
to the tramcar strap, downy
hair fragrant with leafsmoke.
