australia meets the liwuli and the empat perkataan

At the tail end of my whirlwind tour through Australia, I made a stop at the SA Writers Centre in Adelaide and conducted a workshop on Asian forms, ranging from the more familiar haiku, tanka, rengu/renga, pantun, to the rediscovered forms liwuli and empat perkataan that Singaporean writers have appropriated and run away with in the past few years.

The workshop went down well, and attracted (to my initial trepidation) local Australian writers Mike Hopkins and Rob Walker, who both had very kind things to say. Both of them took to the liwuli like naturals, and their mod-liwuli offerings can be found here and here.

Somewhere along the line I also managed to get heard by David Martin Jones, who decided to borrow a couple of my lines to make a political point in what is ostensibly a review of the LKY musical (?!?)

"The young satirist Joshua Ip admits that in Singapore ‘I hold my own tongue /I eat my own words/ I shut my own trap’. To prove Ip’s point, in March, the party state imprisoned a sixteen year old blogger, Amos Yee, for obscenity."

"Young satirist"??? You didn't hear it from me.