Many of the world’s governments, including our own, speak continuously and obsessively about “growth.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t refer to the poetry collection at Barnes & Noble or to poetry readership nationwide. However, when poetry is mentioned in media outlets it seems a select, elite few garner all the attention while a talented pool of young and hungry poets remain under the radar. Jee Leong Koh is a poet from Singapore who has studied at Oxford University and received an MFA in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. His poetry has been featured in prestigious journals like the University of Virginia’s Best New Poets. He now lives and teaches in New York City.
Jee is a poet tackling many contemporary issues and doing so in a plethora of ways on the page. By reviewer’s accounts, he’s a poet growing in skill with each publication. He’s the author of three books, Payday Loans, Equal to the Earth and the recently released Seven Studies for a Self Portrait. Jee’s blog is Song of a Reformed Headhunter. He was kind enough to take some time out to answer a few questions.
CC: Jee, three books of poetry and you’re barely in your 40’s. This is an impressive feat. But our readers are equally interested about your background in Singapore, your transition to New York and your choice to study, of all things, the art of poetry. Fill us in!
Jee: Singapore was not so long ago highlighted in The New York Times for its high standards of living and of education. The reports are correct. The educational system in Singapore is demanding, and the economic drive of its people powerful. In its headlong development from an ex-British colony to a wealthy island-state, however, it has exploited, instead of developed, its cultural heritages and possibilities for economic motives. There have always been Singaporean writers and artists, but their number is few and their voices marginal, not just in relation to the authorities, but also the small Singaporean audience for the arts.
Growing up in that climate, I thrashed around for literary models, other than the British writers—Philip Larkin was a favorite—whom I absorbed in school. I still remember, quite clearly, the small local bookstore, fluorescent lighting flattening and freezing everything, in which I found the book of poems Days of No Name, by a Singaporean poet, Kim Cheng Boey. This was the first book of poems by a near-contemporary that I genuinely admired, for its questing spirit and language. They were poems about living and writing in the USA, in a transient community of like-minded artists. That book was also my first nudge to emigrate. Boey himself has since become an Australian citizen.
Besides poetry, the other big push to migrate came from my confusion over my sexual orientation. I thought I might be gay but since I lacked any sexual experience was unsure. Sodomy was, and still is, proscribed in Singapore law, but even more disquieting was the social silence around the subject of being gay. I thought at that time, in 2003, I had to move out of the country, to be a poet and to be a gay man. The two things have been intertwined in my head since then. My first book Payday Loans, a sequence of 30 sonnets, is about making my way in New York City as a poet. My second book Equal to the Earth is about coming out as gay and looking for a viable life.
CC: Your poetry publisher, Bench Press Poetry, has the slogan “poetry that exerts pressure at every point, and so achieves a momentary rest.” As a martial artist, I instantly loved the quote. Tell us what it means to you.
Jee: The slogan combines force and balance, two qualities vital to my poetry. As a martial artist, you will enjoy this anecdote. On my first visit to China last June, I watched The Flying Acrobatic Show in Beijing. As I wrote on my blog afterwards: “All the acts were astonishing feats of human agility and daring. But what really concentrated my attention was not the two boys running like hamsters on a huge wheel suspended high in the air. Nor was it the twelve girls riding a single bike. It was three young men balancing their bodies against one another’s with superb force and counter-force. Wheels and bikes were unnecessary appurtenances to the singular accomplishment of the human body. Clad only in loincloth, their bodies were not merely on conspicuous display but in necessary performance. I have seen more muscular bodies on the dance floor but they appeared in excess of what clubbing required. Nothing about the Chinese acrobats suggested superfluity: everything was directed at action and produced stillness.”
CC: Norman Mailer once said, “Every one of my books has killed me a little more.” You are an author with multiple books in the world – tell our readers a bit about how your books (and the process of shaping them) have shaped you.
Jee: “Shape” is the right word to describe my relationship with my books. I am very concerned to shape not just individual poems, but the entire book. I think of it as a kind of spiritual exercise, akin to the Glass Bead Game in Herman Hesse. I left Evangelical Protestantism behind, and so poetry is now, for me, my form of spirituality. Most of the time I experience both the world and myself as contradictory fragments. Poetry is a place where I put the pieces together. The Nietzsche epigraph to my latest book sums it up, I think: “And this is all my creating and striving, that I create and carry together into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident.”
CC: Vijay Seshadri, an author with the acclaimed Graywolf Press, has complimented you by referring to you as a “physical poet.” For those new to poetry or new to you, how would you describe your work and your style?
Jee: The best introduction to my work is to read some. Here is one section from the title sequence of my latest book Seven Studies for a Self Portrait:
Study #5: After Frida Kahlo
I dream I am a wreck of a woman.
I am not grand like ruins, I am not a broken column.
I am the traffic accident on morning radio.
A bus handrail is sticking in my uterus like a huge thumbtack.
My collarbone hangs from my throat like a necklace.
I dream a monkey is picking up bits of my spine with his pale hands.
The monkey is carefully arranging me back together.
I hear the Professor say the monkey is the traditional symbol for lust.
My monkey is very gentle.
When he is finished, I will take him to my breast, and offer him my nipple.
CC: You explore a truly diverse array of poetic forms – from sonnets to free verse and countless in between. How does the choosing of form arise? Is it influenced by topic/subject or something else altogether?
Jee: Poems come to me mostly as their opening line. And that opening line dictates the form of the poem, whether metrical or free verse, whether sonnet, villanelle, sestina or rondeau. Sometimes I challenge myself to write in poetic forms that I dislike, for instance, the list poem, to see if I can make something I would like better. Similarly, I do not like most English-language ghazals, and so I had to write 49 of them to conclude Seven Studies. Most recently, I have been working with Japanese short forms, the haiku, senryu and tanka. Poetic forms are a distillation of the culture of their origin, and I would like, as a poet, to inherit and continue all cultures, to treat nothing human as alien to me.
CC: Lastly, what do you feel your poetry can offer 21st century America?
Jee: What the best poetry gives me, wisdom and delight.
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