Around the middle of 2014, Christine Chia and me got whiff that LKY was ailing. It had long been a common point of discontent for the two of us that for all the anthologies Sing Lit had put out over the past decades, none of them had engaged with the gigantic figure of The Man, despite his shadow looming large over anything "SG"-branded. So we did a mini-open-call + emailed a ton of other writers. There was no lack of a response - we managed to put the whole thing together in under six months: an anthology of poems that ranged from a secondary school student and a 95-year-old American; short-ish prose from ringers like Amanda Lee Koe and Jeremy Tiang, and even a play extract from Robert Yeo. It launched in Dec 2014, alongside the first SingPoWriMo anthology.

People said nice things about the antho, and it seemed to capture a bit of the zeitgeist - the affection from some, the angst or even anger from others, all overlaid by this sense of having grown up in a country where it was impossible not to know his name. I like to think we got in ahead of the wave of overblown emotion / gross hagiography / reactive cynicism that hit once he passed a few months later, and were able to present an honest perspective on the whole range of feeling the country had for The Man. It quickly sold out its first print run within a year and is now in its second, which is unusual for any poetry anthology anywhere in the world.

Around the middle of 2015, we got a bit antsy again - things were stirring in the national pulse. The wave of post-LKY-ness had just dissolved into this tide of SG50 celebration, which then rippled into a snap election, all overcast by uncertainty about the future. We put out an open call that began on National Day and ended a week after the elections, to allow those feelings to bubble to the surface. And we dragged the young wunderkind Cheryl Julia Lee on board to resuscitate our aging editorial team with a breath of fresh air.

The result is A Luxury We Must Afford - another zeitgeist collection, but operating in a very different space from its sister anthology. If ALWCA was the history of everything leading up to SG50, ALWMA contains the hopes of SG51 and beyond. Singapore after The Man, newly easing into its mid-life crisis, against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world and region.
The book's launching on 15 Jan, in the same place where The Man used to hold court - The Chamber at The Arts House at The Old Parliament. Do drop by and listen to some poetry, and maybe some music.

I'm ending this lengthy plug with a short poem from the first anthology. Its sentiments are the starting point for the second.

THEY GOT YOU ALL WRONG 
by Norashiqin Toh

I know. What you meant to say is:
We cannot afford poetry as a luxury,
for poetry is not luxurious.
It is simply necessary.

Check out the event here.

So basically there is so much cool shit going on with Sing Lit Station that I don't know where to start:

- our inaugural Manuscript Bootcamp open call ends 15 Sep - send in your work into the jaws of hell and hope that it isn't chewed up and spat out! We're looking for 3-4 really promising novels, short story collections or creative non-fiction - the full criteria is on the site. 

- Sing Po On The Sidewalks (SPOTS):  we want to put invisible poetry on Singapore sidewalks, because being uniquely Singaporean, we copy Mass Poetry from Massachusetts (ba dum tssss). vote for your favorite pieces here, and an indiegogo fundraiser will be up soon! our first SPOTS will be coming to the civic district at the end of this year, but contact us if you're an institution and would like to host a piece of invisible poetry on your open-air spaces!

- Ten Year Series is launching the remaining 4 books from last year's Manuscript Bootcamp - the first two, Tse Hao Guang's Deeds of Light and David Wong's For The End Comes Reaching have already hit the ground running with rave reviews. The next four are: 
- Amanda Chong's Professions
- Daryl Lim's A Book Of Changes
- Samuel Lee's A Field Guide to the Supermarkets of Singapore
- Jennifer Anne Champion's Caterwaul
like the Planeteers, all of them are DIFFERENT and UNIQUE and DIVERSE and WTF but only when you combine all of them together do you get CAPTAIN PLANET so buy buy buy all when they launch at SWF this year!

- also launching at or before SWF - the long-awaited SingPoWriMo 2016: The Anthology! you want to know what else is long-awaited? A Luxury We Must Afford, also launching at or about then, and Unfree Verse from Ethos Books, which will launch early next year! launchlaunchlaunchlaunch NUCULAR

- other cool things we're brewing - a publication for the BuySingLit campaign next year; another run of SingPoOnTheMRT in Feb/Mar; a potential LITERARY ESCAPE GAME with a large national heritage institution combined with an inscrutably puzzling poetic chestnut... the list goes on for the mad, mad minions of Sing Lit Station, #nevernotworking to drive the Singapore literary scene into a tizzy!

- (separate from SLS, i'm also (1) making my first forays into translation. more on that soon. (2) have secured time to attend the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Festival in Guangzhou - i pangsehed the Manila edition last year but i'm looking forward to coming back this year yayayay. *collapses in a pile of releasing hot air*)

I remember a period of time in the '90s where you would still actively see poetry in the pages of the ST, in Life. Like actual poems, commissioned about various events, not just book reviews. Oh, and the poetry book reviews then would be half-page dos with glossy photo, not the single column you get these days... You'd even find the odd image of a poet or two (perhaps once a year or so) on the front cover of Life. And then it died an unheralded death somewhere along the way.

So I volunteered to write random satirical bits for The Middle Ground a while back, because - poetry shouldn't, can't, mustn't disappear from mainstream notice. It shouldn't be cloistered in the high halls of academia, or the reference sections of the National Library. It needs to get out there. Even if it means getting its hands dirty. (My run lasted only a few months before I had to tap out for the master pun-ster Felix Cheong himself, but I'll be coming back very soon.)

Back to the Straits Times: poetry still peeks out of random nooks and crannies in Life, but thanks to the efforts of Chua Mui Hoong, it's coming back in a big way in the Opinion section of the main paper - real serious all! After the obligatory piece by Prof Thumboo and some fiery work by Tania de Rozario in the past weeks, I have a satirical poem in today's Opinion section, next to the brilliance of Amanda Lee Koe. Though my piece is really for the lulz, please do go and read hers. Shots fired!

Maggie Tiojakin talked to me a while back to submit poetry to the Jakarta Post in another newly launching initiative, and it's actually happened, oddly, on the same day that my ST piece dropped, i.e. today. She picked a piece - tongues - from "making love with scrabble tiles" that I thought was uniquely Singaporean/ Singlish-focused, and hence incomprehensible to "foreigners". Till I realised that the same awkwardness of an evolved, Asian, multi-cultural patois in a mono-angmoh Western context translated pretty well. I've sent in a pile of other pieces to the Post, and am hoping to create that Southeast Asian bridge - in the months to come, I'm going to try dragging other SG writers across too - we have a lot we can share, and a lot we can learn from a place different in many ways yet kind of same same in many others.

Lastly, this weekend kicks off yet another newly launching initiative - "That's Life", a literary podcast pioneered by Lydia Vasko for the Straits Times. Alvin Pang, Deborah Emmanuel and me were locked in a studio in ST for more than an hour, and much passion ensued. Ostensibly we were there to talk about SingPoWriMo but it kind of ran wild, as events with Alvin Pang tend to do. I mumbled a lot but managed to sneak in a first reading of my crazy flying sushi duel poem from SingPoWriMo '16 as a sample of the madness that goes down.

People are beginning to pay attention to the poetry we have at home - or at least journalists are. Stay tuned for more developments and the launch of... deng deng deng... SING LIT STATION!

POETRY. IS. COMING.

​

​in lieu of resolutions - my literary workplan for the year and beyond. 

i think i'm going to have to cut back on the travel, and to some degree on the school workshops - i'm not in WGR this year, but in all honesty i need a break. tentmaking, actual writing, and outreach - one has got to give. last year it was actual writing. this year it's gonna have to be outreach.

steady-state:
project SPWM 3 - Apr 16
project SPWMANTHO 3 - Q3 16
project WORKSHOPS (WAVE 6) - Q3 16
project POETRYSG (WAVE 2) - Q2 16
project IPSTER - Weekly 

imminent:
project ALWMA - Q2 16
project SINGLITSTATION - Jul 16
project UNFREE - Q3-4 16
project 10SB - Q3-4 16
project BOOTCAMP 2 (Prose) - Q4 16

in the works:
project SINGPROWRIMO - late 16 / early 17?
project PROSESG - 17-18?
project SINGLITDAY - 18?
project INSTABLR - late 16 / early 17?
project SNAPVINE - late 17
project MACHINA - early 17
project CROSSOVER (PHASE 2) - mid 17
project PISANGCANTOS - mid-late 17
project BEAUTOPIA - 18
project DRAGON GATE - 18

dormant:
project WHYISTOPPED
project RENT
project SEKALI
project SLAM
project LALALAND

//
recap of 2015

project BOOTCAMP 1 - Mar
project SPWM 2 - Apr
project WORKSHOPS (WAVE 5) - May
project IPSTER - Aug - current
project $20ANDJUSTICE - Oct - current
project CROSSOVER (PHASE 1) - Aug - Nov
project SONNETS+ - Nov
project SPWMANTHO 2 - Nov
project POETRYSG (WAVE 1) - Nov

a few people have been asking me which poems are newly upsized and which poems are original. so i did a reference chart in both image and excel (downloadable) form for your convenience. 
​

tl;dr - lots of things happened. 

30 Oct - Day 1 - a furious rush down to check out the launch of itinerant bard, Koh Jee Leong's critically acclaimed Steep Tea. This event was at Booktique, and clashed with the opening ceremony of SWF, necessitating some vehicular scrambling, ferry service duties, and a mad rush to and fro via the carpark of old parliament house - i.e. the whole of SWF in a microcosm. i missed the ceremony part of the ceremony but arrived in time for free food. being late, i hung out with new friend michael farrell and some of the poetry.sg / ISD crew in the awkward kids / cool kids corner outside the bookstore and in a mini alley between the temporary storage thingy and the wall. it was airconditioned and there were seats but it was a mini alley and people kept mistaking it for the way to the toilet. after i while i wandered off to the screening room and found utter head trips screening and tripped out a bit.

​31 Oct - Day 2 - ​also known as the day of the avocado. thanks to the generosity of dr chen deah chien, a tub of premium avocado matcha green tea ice cream was gifted to singpowrimo. sounded simple enough - sell ice cream on a hot day, all proceeds go to singpowrimo. we just needed to stump up manpower - our very generous volunteers bernice and chloe. however, there was one piddly detail - the ice creams were $15 a tub. wehhhh. and we weren't allowed to sell them any cheaper. thanks to the generosity of swf passersby, we did make a few hundred dollars, which we are very grateful for - but i kind of feel we could have sold out the whole tub if we had just priced it a tad cheaper.

i wandered in and out of sessions from the morning, having to keep an eye on the ice cream - the standout was "Getting Published Overseas" with Toh Hsien Min, Koh Jee Leong and Alvin Pang - you'd be hard pressed to find a better qualified panel in Singapore. Lots of good banter and questioning on the Singapore scene, and its inwardlookingness and outwardlookingness.

The afternoon also saw the launch of Hao Guang and David's virgin collections - Deeds of Light and For The End Comes reaching, collectively forming the first releases from the Ten Year Series imprint of Math Paper Press. I had fun hosting the panel - both of the guys are good readers and keen observers of the human condition, and Hao Guang's scholarly calm is an interesting foil to David who basically just goes rogue every few minutes into a splutter of obscenities / perversion / wtf are you talking about.

I was glad to see the room stacked to capacity for the two young poets. (because it only gets harder from here. hurhurhuhurhurr.)



The day ended with the 2nd Sing Lit Town Hall, convened hastily in the wake of NAC's Lit Arts Masterplan consultation sessions. A few of us bemoaned that the consultation sessions held a month prior were mainly occupied by the (good) NAC brief, and left effectively 15 minutes for consultation (of the 20-30 lit arts stakeholders invited).  So we put together our own self-consultation town halls, to allow us to bellyache - and hopefully get some ground-up initiatives off the ground. This one was well attended, and had useful contributions from the NAC officers present (thanks May and Puay Shian!) as well as international consultants around by way of the festival. 

We finally adjourned to Lau Pa Sat to wash down the bellyaching with bellyfilling - sadly, this plus the townhall meant that we missed the Epic International Poetry Night at the Gallery, which is always great fun. I commemorate this event with an out-of-focus photo, because tired.

1 Nov - Day 3 - kicked off early at 10am with Things Not To Ask A Writer in the Chamber with Adeline Foo and Shamini Flint, hosted by Ian Chung. As can be observed from the photo, the early hour destroyed Adeline, and Shamini looked out to kill before her morning coffee... but we survived. There was a particularly offensive uncle who in the Q&A posed a question that went something like - "So I hear that all of you have failed in your various careers, which is why you became a writer, unlike me - I have been very successful in my career. Now I am approaching retirement, so I am thinking that being a writer sounds like a very easy and enjoyable life..." and somewhere around there I lost the question. I was waiting for Shamini to obliterate him with lawyerly hellfire, but I found out later that she misunderstood the question because it was so absurd.  I responded to him obliquely, as I usually do, with poetry.

After that SWF bought lunch at Asian Market Cafe at Raffles City, which is always nice. Got to meet an interesting mix of local and international writers, from comic artist Lefty Kam to festival board chair Philip Jeyaratnam to the editor Ravi Shankar - of course after that I had to pop down to the launch of UNION, edited by Ravi and Alvin Pang. It is literally the literary phonebook.

the UNION launch was 50% contributors, which is no rap on it at all, its huge. lots of people were going around trying to get each other to sign.  I circulated my copy and tried to get people to sign with pictures, to moderate success. 

Toh Hsien Min followed the brief (see left).

It was also very nice to see rare appearances by Chandran Nair (who many of us had never met before), Dr Lee Tzu Pheng, and Ms Ho Poh Fun. Dr Lee was a former mentor, and Ms Ho anchored the Creative Writing Club back in RJ when I did a stint as chair - I was able to finally pass them hardcopies of my books - sonnets from the singlish for Ms Ho, and a luxury we cannot afford for Dr Lee.

2 Nov - Day 4 - A weekday, so only one event. The Creative Arts Programme's 25th anniversary party. While the lineup was a refreshing change from the usual parade of yellow middle-class yuppie dudes (or well, just dudes) - i was really disappointed with the event. 20+ people showed up, a good 30-40% of who were mentors and event organisers. the rest looked like recent participants. where was the alumni? where was everyone older than 20 and younger than 40 - ie the bulk of CAP's "product"? besides Qianxi, Terence Heng and me - there was nary a published CAP alum in sight. the CAPpers  I contacted afterwards had no idea the event happened.

shocking, and speaks to the growing irrelevance of a quarter-century-old programme. the sentimental bit of me immediately thought, hell, i should organise a proper silver jubilee party for CAP and chase all the old friends out of the woodworks. but then realitycheck set in and i put that very much on the backburner. if there is enough enthusiasm for that particular community, i don't need to be the one to make it happen, given that i was never socially central to CAP - it was very much a pre- learning-to-deal-with-other-people-adequately stage of my life.

3 Nov - Day 5 - ISD sweeps Golden Point Awards! The English Poetry category was dominated by Daryl Lim, David Wong, and Amanda Chong, all of whom are SingPoWriMo participants, members of the Image-Symbol Department, and alumni of the Manuscript Bootcamp. If you have no idea what any of this is, check out Ten Year Series where everything will be explained. Not succinctly.

I was also allowed into the room to videograph all this because honorable mention, chinese poetry. and this isn't the last that GPA will hear of me - i'm going to keep plugging away at the non-english languages because cross-pollination - challenge or opportunity - can only be a good thing for the scene. if we're going to keep saying we have four official languages and market ourselves as a bilingual nation then our writers should lead by example.

in lieu of celebration, most of the team adjourned back to Banana Arts Center - to pull a latenighter ironing out all the kinks (well, most of the kinks) for the launch of poetry.sg ​the next day!

4 Nov - Day 6 - the big one! a huge double launch. 
 
singpowrimo 2015: the anthology, the second in its series, captures the best of the 30 days of madness of april 2015, the second Singapore Poetry Writing Month. partially crowdfunded through a successful indiegogo campaign, the anthology gathers 157 poems culled from a selection of the 1300 writers (now 1400++) in the facebook group. this edition was edited by daryl yam, jennifer anne champion, and me.

if you want to read the freshest, liveliest voices in the sg english poetry scene - there's no better place to start. a sprinkling of these new talents in the latest singpowrimo-spawned workshop group: [insert cool name here] including Ruth Tang, Rodrigo de la Pena Jr, and Rohan Naidu entertained the packed audience, and outgoing editor of the previous volume, Ann Ang, brought the first half of the launch to a close.

what can I say about this all-star team? ISD, bootcamp, whatchamacallit - they picked up poetry.sg where jen crawford, alvin and jee leong left off with the Singapore Poetry Archive (SPARK) and finally made it happen - a huge database of 50 poets, featuring not just bios and biblios and selected poems, but 62,579 words of individualised critical commentary, and 81 videos of them reading their work. this is just the beginning - the team is committed for a year to continue growing the database, and let's see what happens if NAC renews our funding - perhaps 4 languages, or even other genres are on the cards. 

my main job for this project is to throw money at them and watch good shit happen. please throw money at me so i can throw more at them.

5 Nov - Day 7  - and on the seventh day, we rested.
6 Nov - Day 8 - and on the eighth day, i continued to rest, instead of going to the 12-hour Attitude Problem madness allnighter curated by Huzir Sulaiman, much to my chagrin. i really hope they re-stage it, on a proper weekend, possibly at a better acoustic venue, during daylight hours, because i am no longer young.

7 Nov - Day 9  - after the exertions of the first week, i was able to just go to events and listen for a change. caught Gwee Li Sui and smart ang mohs talking about lit prizes in the morning; hopped over to Suntec (weird venue) to see an eclectic troika of Ho Kwon Ping, Bertha Henson and Pooja Nansi trade diverse but optimistic views on our national future in "Imagine Singapore"; chionged back to TAH, tompanging newfound friend agustinus wibowo (who is my latest facebook headworm - he keeps posting ministories on his travels that just make me pause and listen) and NAC friends; hopped into the end of a session on lit reviews with Yong Shu Hoong, Stephanie Ye, Aaron Lee, O Thiam Chin and Jeremy Tiang - where I snuck in a question on whether QLRS should get with the times and embed facebook comments, heh heh; then had my mind blown in a session in The Chamber with the mad, mad Christian Bök going Interstellar.... which broke poor Hao Guang (see right).

I ended the day with a bit of poetry reading - Singapura Campur at the Gallery, with a big pile of readers literally pulled out of a hat by enthusiastic moderator Khoo Sim Eng: Kelvin Tan, Shelley Bryant, Yeo Wei Wei, Jerrold Yam, Wong Su Ann, Divya Victor, Audrey Chin, and Marc Nair. I got the closing slot because I told Sim Eng I needed time to put together something special. 

I did a short set of new sonnets from sonnets from the singlish upsized edition - making this the first time and first place I'd read out anything from the half old, half new book, double the size of the previous sonnets from the singlish (which is now available free and open sourcey right here on this website.. but you'll have to buy the new one.) 

but the special bit was a parlour trick that i regularly pull off - i.e. the summary poem, this time an empat perkataan. hwa chong has seen me do this a few times at YAWP(?) and it always brings joy, but it kind of hurts my head.

8 Nov - Day 10 - the final day kicked off with a workshop from the Bökster himself, where he again blew our minds with unreadable undiscoverable unconscionable conceptual poems of different shapes and sizes and flavors. (anagrams are one area i feel like exploring sometime in the not-so-immediate future.) 

but for all of the flash and pizzazz, he also put together a nice tight mini-package on basic poetic craft that outdid anything the much more highly-qualified (one would think) paul muldoon gave us last year (basically a ton of estoric rambliness and a round of immaculate corpse, for goodness' sake). not just a conceptualist, but also good strong basics - i'll be using his frame the next time i teach poetry for sure.

we then brought him to eat yong tau foo at funan (in his suit) because he looked hungry. (and promised to bring him to eat chicken rice + sip singapore slings some other time, which did indeed happen on a later date.)

coming back at The Arts House after yong tau foo, i realised i'd missed the gig of friends, but managed to catch up with them just after - the HubbaBubbas - Ryan, Stephanie and Mervyn, a talented post-acoustic trio merging big voice, slick guitar, tight harmonies and rocking vocal percussion into a smooth, folksy sound. (being an a capella alum i am of course a fan. ) new SWF under yeow kai chai is definitely bringing in new faces and new styles - i'm looking forward to their EP next year, and i got to flog them my book too, so #supportlocal and hurrahs all round.

more wandering around the festival - saw the very smart Ranjit Hoskote cross swords with our own Paul Tan, peeked into the ineffable Desmond Kon's session with the Bökster, and then off into the Chamber for my first crack at the Closing Debate! i got the lucky first spot, which means i got to shut off completely once my speech was done without needing to activate my brain for rebuttals or whatnot. my team of Vernetta "is Denise" Lopez, the fab Deb Emmanuel and Adrian "The Teenage Textbook" Tan put up a logical, practical and clear-minded fight in proposing that Singaporeans are Not Dreamers.... but of course, in a writers' festival, the opposition led by Onietta Effendi, Hirzi Zulkiflie, Shamini Flint and Gwee Li Sui crushed us mercilessly. (I blame Hirzi's five million fans who managed to pack themselves into the over-capacity Chamber.) but the verbal barbs flew fast and furious, the bad jokes and horrible puns (chiefly Adrian and Gwee) hazed up the Old Parliament, and somewhere out there, an old man turned in his grave... because the house declared that Singaporeans are Dreamers! IT IS FINISHED!

#endSWF #collapse #nomoretill2016 

so this imprint is a thing. check it out, its explained better over there.