One of Singapore’s most admired and respected poets, Yeow Kai Chai has two poetry collections, Pretend I’m Not Here (2006) and Secret Manta (2001), which was adapted from an entry shortlisted for the 1995 Singapore Literature Prize. In 2009, he edited the anthology Reflecting on the Merlion with Edwin Thumboo, with his own poems included in the anthologies No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry and Love Gathers All: The Singapore-Filipino Anthology of Love Poetry. A journalist and music critic, he is also a co-editor of the independent online journal Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS). Known for wearing different caps as a writer, he has worked in the Singapore media industry for more than a decade, including as deputy editor of Life!, the lifestyle and entertainment section of The Straits Times; and currently as the English editor of My Paper, Singapore’s first bilingual free paper. Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé casts seven pointed questions in his general direction, as Kai Chai lets fly his thoughts on his second collection.

(*Desmond Kon created the PROMOSAIC/PO-ERM interview for authors whose work has made him pause on seven separate occasions, hard and heavy enough for him to put together seven pressing questions, ranging from the very specific to very broad, and always ending with the film question.)

Read five of Kai Chai’s poems here:

Couplets

Quarterly Report No. 6: Ethnological Warfare Atrocity Exhibition

Quarterly Report No. 7: Epiphytes And Vetiver Control

From A To Z, An Action-packed Zoetrope Via Taste, Fruit, Bodily Organs And Synthetic Organisms

My Flooey Love

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé: I love how, in the cover and title pages alone, I’m confronted with a sort of Foucauldian facelessness of the disappearing author, evanescent and dropping south, out of sight. The playful use of “pretend I’m yeow kai chai” moving into “pretend I’m     here”, moving into the bolded “not by yeow kai chai.” I’m too tempted to read “death of the author” into this collection, what with the twelve “Memento Mori” installments propping it. Could you tell me how you cut and shuffled identity, and more of the “death” deck?

Yeow Kai Chai: The collection began to take shape with ‘Memento Mori,’ the first of 12 installments, which I wrote after my maternal grandmother died in 2003. It was the first death in the family that truly affected me and made me rethink life.

Memento mori, which means “Remember you shall die” in Latin, refers to a range of paintings, statues, photographs, and architectural details that serve as reminders of our mortality. The poems are a continual process of grieving and reflection as I try to comprehend death, and by extension what we are when we are alive.

The evanescence of our identities feeds into this idea. You make up your identities throughout your life. Identity is not static, being inevitably tied to role-play and context. We hide and expose certain aspects of ourselves at any one time. When we meet colleagues at work or chat online, we adopt versions of ourselves, despite our best intentions.

By extension, we should be wary of any poetry/philosophy/doctrine that posits a self-contained world and a sound epiphany that gives readers a woozy sense of comfort. It’s emotionally and intellectually manipulative and far from reality.

And yes, I subscribe to Roland Barthes’ idea of the death of the author, of not relying on biographical details of the writer to distill meaning. Poetry for me is liberating: To be faceless is to be free. The less we know of an author, the more we would be able to mine from his or her works. It’s a call to readers to step out of their shells and be whoever they want to be.

Yet death hangs over the proceedings because it foreshadows and doesn’t go away. Writing gives us a false sense of our permanence, so it’s important not to take everything for granted. It is the ultimate mortal coil.

Kon: I see “Dear Bruce.” I see “Dear Alvin.” These are reminder/remembrances that dispatch themselves like a missive, like a bulletin. How do you see your work figuring itself within the art of letters, and the writing thereof?

Yeow: Growing up, I’ve always loved writing and sending letters to friends and classmates. As we got older and busier, we’d drift apart and stop writing. The advent of slapdash e-mail positively kills the art of crafting letters.

I view my poetry as an attempt to resuscitate and revamp the epistolary tradition. Readers (think they) are confidants who are privy to a private address. Or they believe that they have chanced upon somebody else’s diary entry or a lost correspondence. They feel privileged. The tone of a letter is often rueful, nostalgic, and confessional. Yet the direct intimacy also underscores the risqué thrill that one gets while eavesdropping on a conversation. The poems tap on all these tropes and conventions and have fun with them.

For the record, “Dear Bruce” is a reference to the American photographer and music video director Bruce Weber who made Chop Suey, a 2001 film homage to his favorite things and a jazzy, associative collage of personages, ideas, and found footage. “Dear Alvin” is for a cousin of mine and subverts the small talk one might have with a relative or an acquaintance in a chance encounter.

Kon: I read “Picnickers In New York, A Fugue For A Lost Cartographer” in a cab somewhere between Bugis Junction and Tanjong Rhu, and my reading got caught on references to “Coney Island,” then “Madison Square Garden,” then “Al Pacino,” then “Sean Lennon,” and I was reminded of how we spent those crazy nights collaborating on those Oscar predictions for that 8 Days spread. It was 1996, and Sense and Sensibility didn’t win (thank Annie Proulx for Brokeback Mountain ten years on). You’ve been covering entertainment journalism for the longest time—in fact, I credit you with single-handedly lifting the intelligence quotient on music taste here and about—so how much of popular culture permeates your poetry? And how does it function?

Yeow: Popular culture is part of my DNA and the source of my many pleasures, and I suspect it’s the same for many people, too. Yet strangely, pop culture is terribly underrated and underused in literature, well, at least in Singapore.

I don’t know why but it’s probably intellectual snobbery and an aversion to anything that threatens the ivory tower of high art. I’m bored to death of the kind of cookie-cutter school of Singapore poetry that inadvertently has to contribute to “nation-building” and feeds into stereotypes.

The resistance of fuddy-duddy academia to any form of so-called “low culture” (as opposed to the high culture of “dead people”) is the stumbling block to more people actually appreciating literature and seeing the relevance of it to their everyday lives.

Anyway, pop culture surrounds and assails us—in the form of movies, television, music, magazines, gaming. It’s an infinite source of inspiration. There is no need to be queasy, guilty, or disdainful about referencing Hollywood celebrities or chart-topping hits. It’s how we use these tools—pop or serious—that should distinguish the enlightening from the dull or derivative.

Take, for instance, John Ashbery’s amazing poem “Farm Implements And Rutabagas In A Landscape.” It’s a masterpiece, combining the classic sestina form with an unlikely subject, the Popeye comic and its carousel of characters like the Sea Hag, Swee’pea, Olive Oyl, Whimpy, and of course Popeye himself. The poem title itself is also a red herring, sounding very much the title of a 16^th century painting of a European landscape painting.

Similarly, I gladly borrow and adapt pop culture’s panoply of characters and forms. Without trying to steer too much readers’ own valid interpretations, “Memento Mori VI” is a tribute to and parody of music criticism, combining clichéd lyrics, music video, genre film, art-house, and even an appropriation/subversion of a publishers’ glowing blurb in an Ashbery book-jacket. “Picnickers In New York” is a travelogue and a meditation on the meaning of home. “Dumbwaiter” is a meta-poem on writing itself and disparate characters who may or may not be connected. There are nods to films like Fight Club, The Poltergeist, The Fly, The Croupier, Iris (the Iris Murdoch biopic), and TV drama Charmed.

Kon: Fast-Forward/Back-Track to pg. 45, and we arrive at the line “we’re just another platonic couplet prowling an imaginary straight line for breakfast.” This meta-clause seems to center your discipline of writing in couplets in various poems, as seen in the inaugural “Memento Mori,” “Hunky Nuts Lupus,” “Insomnia,” something that regains its centripetal force in the very reflexive “Couplets” (easily one of my favorite poems). How does the couplet work to service your poetics, and if you may shed light on your lush use of the prose poem as well?

Yeow: The couplet is a beautifully nimble and friendly form. It looks easy and is open to a zillion possibilities. The long, long poems can be forbidding, but if presented in affable couplets, they can be slyly inviting.

One of my favorite poets is John Yau, an expert in the couplet. For him, each couplet can operate as a vignette that has nothing to do with the next, and yet somehow, through sheer self-induced logic, the reader will connect all the dots. I like that!

That’s how I wrote most of the couplets. Increasingly, I try not to subscribe to a purposeful point-first approach where one sets out to write a piece about, say, the Merlion (unless I have to). Each clause just completed will hopefully spark off another unexpected association, and transport me to another world. “Hunky Nuts Lupus”—incidentally the fabulous title of a magazine interview with Jack Nicholson for his 1994 horror film Wolf—and “Insomnia” are products of this process.  “Couplets” is a filmic/meta twist of the term “couple” and its various semantic permutations as realized in title, subject, and form. These are lines that sound like you’ve heard them before, but made afresh and strange.

Just as exciting is the prose poem. Oft-misunderstood, it straddles two genres uneasily. The element of risk and danger belies its humdrum, familiar surface. Conversely, the prose poem shouldn’t be a shorthand for unimaginative, utterly prosaic passages or a pathetic excuse for folks who don’t know how to use stanzas. Often I’ve seen a so-called prose poem, when in fact it’s a rather conventional short story or a non-fiction piece…that’s not good.

I was asked once to define what a prose poem is. My answer: It looks like prose and behaves like poetry.

Kon: The couplet form is finally given full attention in the seven “Perspex Box” poems, fabulously articulated in six stanzas. Can you tell me more about this sequence, what informs its aesthetics, what function it has in the grander scheme of your collection?

Yeow: The sequence has its germination a decade ago; in the countryside outside Dublin in County Wicklow in Ireland (I was there for a Warner Music junket to cover the sibling pop group The Corrs for their first live MTV concert).

We were on the road when the van stopped at a junction. The road split into two ways like a tuning fork. I thought it was a perfect metaphor for a couplet. They are parallel lines but not really.

Later, we drove past the Glencree Centre For Peace and Reconciliation, an NGO dedicated to dialogue, peace-building and reconciliation in Ireland and Britain.

Eventually, both that road and the NGO appear in the first parter of the Perspex Box series: “The Tuning Fork Road points to two insolent ways” and “Away from the musical glare of the cameras I cook/for the Clencree Centre For Peace and Reconciliation” (although I have, ironically, misspelled the word “Glencree”).

The poems are about perceptions and misinterpretations; negotiating identities, private and public; stitched from overheard/made-believe/clichéd phrases.  Each installment recasts the previous’ lines, reshuffled and reconfigured with incremental changes in syntax and semantics.

How do the poems link to the grander scheme? Well, I’ve always viewed the Perspex Box series as the Hyde Park of the collection. People come and go, stand up and make declarations. It’s the ultimate democratic place where you can state who you are and what you want to be.

Two years ago I was in Gothenburg for a writers’ festival and I decided at the spur of the moment to try to mimic the atmosphere of a stroll through the Hyde Park. I read the poems in between snatches of music by the Welsh post-punk group The Young Marble Giants played from my iPod, with words and music drifting in and out.

Kon: “Concealed Exit Ahead” is surprising in its sparseness. Seems to afford a resting stop with its breathier lineation. Here, I am suddenly made aware of the powerful use of image and imagery that charges your heavier poems, brimming over. Absolutely love “strea bleek over edg of white”! So images and imagery…please talk to me about images and imagery.

Yeow: Why the flourish of images? On the most simplistic level, it could be because I don’t sleep until very late at night, or early morning. My working hours are long and irregular and my brain will still be operating overtime at 2am.

I view the images as film-lets, missives from my subconscious; sometimes I’m shocked at what I come up with. Aside from movies and music, some images are copped from TV documentaries, arts, modern art installations at Modern Tate, the Body Worlds Exhibition, magazines’ profiles.

Generally, I don’t care for didactic critics or poets who dictate one way of looking at things or writing poems. Instead I present images for the reader and let him or her make up the narrative(s) along the way.

Sure, people have asked me about how I came up with the images and what they represent, and the answer is truthfully I don’t quite know. It’s a state of “not-knowing”, of not censuring oneself and dismissing something as silly or improbable.

It’s vital to get to that state. Images aren’t there to provide illusory cohesion so you can all feel good about yourself. They should provoke and transform, not conform and sit pretty like lapdogs.

Kon: The question I end all my interviews on. Erm, if you could have Pretend I’m Not Here made into a film, how would you imagine it?

Yeow: Pretend I’m Not Here will be part noir, part music video, part sketch-pencil animation, part Goth horror, part romantic soft porn, part gripping whodunit—a portmanteau that slips in and out of consciousness.

As this will never happen in real life, may I humbly request the two Davids to be in it—Lynch and Cronenberg, playing twins who are private eyes, or two halves of the same character, like in Mulholland Drive?

The movie will open like a scene from the title poem from my first book Secret Manta, with a black trash bag floating over a deadbeat raglady as she goes into sleep (from which she may not wake up from).

I want Isabella Rossellini, Winona Ryder circa 1990, that Pale Man from Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, and singers Joanna Newsom, and Sinead O’Connor circa The Lion And The Cobra days to be in it just because I want them to. And also because they don’t really fit into the System—and that’s how I sometimes feel too.

The music will be a psychedelic/experimental/jazz-folk melange of Vetiver, Tiny Vipers, Caetano Veloso, Grizzly Bear, D.M. Stith, and Antony and the Johnsons.

All my family, friends, colleagues and animals will appear in it like cameos in a Woody Allen or Robert Altman ensemble film, all chatting, gossiping, sleeping around and becoming one another. Maybe, Des, you can drop by too.