BEYOND THE PARTICULAR

When I first showed my poems to publishers, they were concerned my work is too insular, too personal. But I kept on writing in the personal mode, with family and homosexual love as my predominant themes.

What convinced me it is more worthwhile writing for a credible few than for thousands more likely to be interested in, say, the latest Chicken Soup for the Soul or True Singapore Ghost Stories, was a letter from Arthur Yap, one of my most admired poets. He told me that “Stepping into” is among his favourites in my second book, The End of His Orbit.

“Stepping into” was a poem that wrote itself within twenty minutes when I was at my computer one night trying to finish my university homework. It began as a sentence that sounded like the beginning of a conversation, except there is an emphasis created by a line break:

Stepping into the flat this evening,
something strange happened.

I wanted to weave something more philosophical into the conversational tone that this poem was already beginning to possess. It was to be a poem about memory, as well as about my mother; about the way she saw the world and how it was ruled by her upbringing, whereas my perspective was determined by how much I did not want be like her.

I decided to engage with the idea of repetition and hint at how it forms the basis of our understanding of the world, of language and logic. But nothing is ever repeated the same way twice. Contexts keep shifting. Hence, the following descriptions:

the veranda became a veranda,
the yellow lamp on the wall
a yellow lamp on the wall

It is important to me that the poem does more than narrate an event, regardless of whether it contains already a poignancy that will move readers. I want to set readers thinking as well as move them, leaving a more complex aftertaste in their minds. The idea conveyed here is simple: the past and the present are all at once the same and yet different. There is something constant that moves through our lives, in spite of our belief we have the power to change ourselves, to move on from one level of maturity to some higher plane.

Still, there are differences:

the mat on the floor turned red
instead of its present blue,
the woman who looked up
from the shelf of potted plants –
now a shelf of mangled bonsai –
became a woman with subtler lines
underneath her eyes

The line breaks came naturally and I felt there was no need to alter them. The ending had loomed in my head long before I set down the first lines, and, patiently, the poem completed itself on the computer screen:

...a woman with subtler lines
underneath her eyes, speaking,
as she had once spoken,
'Never forget.' I nodded,
as I had always nodded.
'I won't.' But that was then.

The hypnotic rhythm of the repeated ideas in the poem helped to rock the poem into being. I almost heard strains of Philip Glass on the piano when I was writing. This poem could most certainly be analogous to a piece of Minimalist music. It is one of the easiest poems I have ever written.

At first, I was uncomfortable with how different this poem was when placed with other poems in The End of His Orbit. The other poems contained a greater edginess due to the near-hysteria of the emotions expressed within them. I like this quality when it surfaces in my work, as it makes the poem more palpable and exciting to read. I had decided at this point that I would only be as calm and compassionately distant as Linda Pastan or Lee Tzu Pheng when I reached their age. “Stepping into” was calm, but yet it both hid a lot of emotions as well as pointed obliquely at them, particularly at the poem’s end, without disrupting its central focus on the notions of time passing and the loss and unexpected recovery of remembered connections.

Then I started playing around with the poem’s structure:

Stepping into the flat this evening,
something strange happened;

the veranda became a veranda,
the yellow lamp on the wall

a yellow lamp on the wall,
the mat on the floor turned red

instead of its present blue,
the woman who looked up

from the shelf of potted plants –
now a shelf of mangled bonsai –

became a woman with subtler lines
underneath her eyes, speaking,

as she had once spoken,
'Never forget.' I nodded,

as I had always nodded.
'I won't.' But that was then.

Turning the poem into two-line stanzas worked for me: it helped to promote the repetition idea, with words and images repeating at points that seemed to echo each other, both resonantly and dissonantly, within the poem.

At this point, I had been reading poems by Mark Doty. Some of his poems played with line indentation to create a distinctive look. Influenced partly by Doty, I decided to indent the second line of each stanza. This created a minor jarring effect that threw certain repeated ideas into a slightly edgier light. It was a discreet way of heightening a surreal aspect of the poem:


Stepping into the flat this evening,

something strange happened