By Chen Yun

A couple of days ago, I attended the ELL symposium – Celebrating Words, which was graced by notable local poets and writers like Felix Cheong, Heng Siok Tian, Cyril Wong, and of the older generation – Oliver Seet and Edwin Thumboo.

Basically, the event was categorized by 3 different sessions which began with some poetry reading by featured local poets, and ended off with a Q&A where they would field questions from the audience.

I quite like Heng Siok Tian’s Mixing Tongues, which was drawn from her own personal experiences of – in her own words – having to master both English and Chinese despite being brought up in a dialect speaking family. It reminded me briefly of Catherine Lim’s works, which has a tendency to bring in some aspects of Chinese culture, e.g. idols and gods. Heng explained her approach towards the crafting of this poem, which was initially meant to be a 7 stanza long poem, each with 30-31 lines, mirroring the length of a month. To push it further, she tried to fit 24 syllables into every line, to represent the 24 hours in each day. However, she confesses that she gave up on it, as the ‘need to impart discipline and exercise restrain’ was getting to be too ‘controlled’. Her brief comments made me think about the conflict between craft and personal expression in poetry writing. Should something which is birthed from the outpouring of the soul be freely expressed, or edited and constrained to make it palatable for consumption?

Felix Cheong’s A Love Poem, By Way Of Wikipedia, also sat well with me. I found the title pretty interesting, because it has a defamiliarization effect for me, since the word ‘poem’ is fleshed out, making the reader conscious of that which is an artefact, and constructed, not so much an outpouring of the emotions of some lovestruck figure. The image of the artefact which can be defined as something man-made is compounded by the use of ‘Wikipedia’ which is a compilation of bits and pieces of information. The two words used in harmony, seems to give the poem a rather deadpan vibe as seen from how the poem makes use of definitions – “[love] is a many splendoured thing’. This seriousness is however, severely undercut by the nonsensical quirky phrases that follow. Wikipedia also seems to be appropriate given that it is an open book, available to all, and can be edited by anyone, like how love is worn on the sleeve and holds no pretense (or can be full of false truths, depending on the view you take), and is vulnerable in that anyone can have the power to edit it.

Audience participation was requested, and we were to shout ‘edit!’ at the end of each stanza. It proved to be an easy task after all, since there were only two stanzas. Not only did it compound the technique of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ as with the title of the poem, the verbal articulation of the word sounded like the French – ‘à dit’, which means ‘to say’. Fitted in quite appropriately with what we were doing – saying. Also, it illuminated the links between the art of editing and saying. To edit something, is, to some extent, the expression and articulation of another opinion in a bid to replace or change the former.

It is a many-splendoured
thing, a crazy little thing, that old
devil, blind, star-crossed, head
over heels, patient and kind, never
having to say you’re sorry. [edit]

It is an old, crazy patient, sorry
splendour, blind as heels,
the devil’s kind of cross, never stars or say in your head. Little
by little, it is a thing, and over. [edit]

I also enjoyed Oliver Seet’s Hainanese Chicken Rice in Singapore, which was full of food imagery and mouth-watering phrases that made us all hungry. Seet actually made a trip down to Hainan because he wanted to try the original version of this tasty national dish. Having found the original authentic Hainanese chicken rice in a small little humble village, he confesses that it was extremely different from what he expected. The chicken meat was thin and measly, and the rice hard and oily. The soup too, was ghastly different from the local version, with shreds of cabbage in it. From the way he described the dish, I imagine that he must have found it to be quite a nasty experience. In his words, ‘We [Singapore] do it best!’ Food aside, his brief preamble got me thinking about the question of what makes Singaporean literature what it is, given that something belonging to a foreign land can be assimilated into our local culture so effortlessly, and given a brand new makeover which made it better than the original.