Dear Peter,

Thank you for your sincere and heart felt comment to my review of First Words.

With regards to my comment on the poet of "Fall from Grace", you said that a poet should have the right to "'step into someone else's shoes' to get a wider perspective of any issue." I fully agree with you on this. An artist should have the licence to put himself in the position of other people if only to gain a better understanding of someone else's situation to create better art. However, the problem I had with First Words was not about writers putting themselves into the shoes of others. What I found disturbing is that in attempting to convey their thoughts and ideas, a fair number of the poets have resorted to a style and language which is clearly not theirs. They have recycled the form and language of earlier poets held in great esteem by the academic community. They have imitated the style and thoughts of Wordsworth and other poets of the poetic canon. While Wordsworth, Coleridge and the other poets who inspired the young writers of "First Words" were indeed great artists of their time, their language is now a mockery and, in certain quarters, hardly qualifies as poetry at all if you're under the age of thirty. Romanticism was a failed movement of the past and should be left in the classroom. It has no place in the modern mass culture of today. (insert horrified gasp from "whaliao stop opening another can of worms lar" editor in this space.)

So what exactly is the culture of today? It is indeed hard to define. Our modern day culture is so inundated with television and the mass media that our attention spans have gotten considerable shorter. With our short attention spans, we now crave instant excitement, and long poetry definitely cannot provide this. T.S Eliot's "The Waste Land" created a great deal of excitement in the early part of this century because there was no television. However, the cinema and radio were already encroaching upon the world, and certain writers like Gertrude Stein realised that writing would have to compete with the celluloid mass media in grabbing people's already shortening attention span. The poetry of Milton or Wordsworth, so readable less than half a century ago, quickly fell out of favour, and rightly so, because it generally took a long time to finish reading them. What was worse, the language was deeply grounded in euphemism and clearly did not reflect the language of the changing times. In other words, the older poems lost their connection with reality because they had nothing to do with real life as the people knew it. Neither did it express the nature of the age they lived in.

Similarly, we at the latter end of the twentieth century have no more patience for long extended poems couched in euphemistic language. We want poems that get straight to the heart of the matter as our attention spans last as long as the four minute song we hear on the radio. The extended hyperbole and euphemism of the earlier times is now redundant and does not provoke a response anymore. Furthermore, we now live in a post-modern age where everything that could possibly have been done has already been done. We know all about Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Eliot etc.etc. We don't want a rehash of their styles. We want something new. Ironically, "something new" seems to be a very scarce commodity these days as everybody is so much aware of what came before that it is very difficult to write something original. Or else, everybody is so aware of what came before that they must make it known to the world that they knew what came before and the only way to do that is by imitation. This way, anyone who watches or reads their work can say "Hmmm, this clearly has the influence of Coleridge and Ginsberg". To those who have no idea who Coleridge or Ginsberg are, tough luck. To depart from the poems in First Words, take Edwin Thumboo's "Ulysses and the Merlion". Edwin Thumboo is a great poet and I do not mean to slight him. I have read his works and I do appreciate many of his poems. But this particular poem is so different from his main body of work. For one thing, it requires a foreknowledge of who Ulysses' is. Second, it's style and content is a direct allusion and in imitation of Tennyson's "Ulysses". Not many people here know who Ulysses is, let alone Tennyson. The main object of the poem is therefore lost to them.

This, in my opinion, is not what writing poetry is about. Poetry should not be an occasion or a vehicle with which to show off one's knowledge. Rather, it should capture the spirit of the times and society one lives in. Therefore, if poetry is about capturing the spirit of the times, then it should be written in the language of the times. It should be written in the type of language which people use, which is why I find Mandeep Singh's "Four Kittens and An Old Lady" a very refreshing change from the other poems in the collection. Firstly, it is written not only in the language of the times, but it is also reflective of the rhythms of local speech. Secondly, it is situated in a familiar place which we all know, the HDB block. Now, compare Mandeep's opening lines:

There were three tiny kittens Living on the ledge of her 3-room HDB flat and mine.

High on a rock, deep in a castle where
The Normans had fought, a half-imagined shape
Stoops in the darkness, soaked in hungry pain,
Stretches out both hands, rapt as if in prayer.
Even Coeur de Leon could fight in vain
To reach this tower; others have tried to escape.

The second poem, while technically sound, fails to endure in our memory as it has nothing what at all to do with our lives. This brings me to another point I have to make about local poetry and which I feel our young poets should pay particular attention to.

We have attained a very high level of proficiency in the use of the English language. We have developed an accent distinctively our own (I'm not referring to the fake American/British accents we hear so much of nowadays). Why should we not have our own kind of writing? (ed: YES!!) Thus far, most of the poems in the collection, with a few exceptions, sound like imitations of English poems. In your reply to my review, you agreed that some works by young writers sound insincere. You then went on to say that this may be due to the fact that they have yet to develop the necessary linguistic skills with which to express themselves. You then go on to say that "they resort to clichés and adult-sounding terms borrowed from the limited literature they have read". I would like to say at this point that not having the necessary linguistic skills is not necessarily a handicap to expression. Just read Ming Cher's Spider Boys. Afterall, with mastery of the English language being taken from the hands of the English themselves these days, who is the arbiter of what is appropriate English or not? The main problem, in my opinion, is that many of our young writers "borrow" from the literature which they have read. The problem arises in this manner: Young poets see a local situation they want to put to paper. However, they cannot write it down in the way they thought about it in their heads because the nature of their thoughts does not sound like the language of the books they have read. They therefore attempt to translate their thoughts and expressions into another register, the "correct" way of speaking' register. The result is that something is always lost in the translation, in this case, sincerity.

I think Mandeep Singh's poem succeeds because he does not attempt to translate his thoughts into the style of the books or poems he has read. Instead, he puts it down in exactly the manner he thought about them, and this is why we are so drawn to that poem in particular.

I would like to end with the plea that young writers write about things they and their readers are familiar with. Write about our landscape, our problems (like Christopher Ong has done in "Yati"). If you don't write about them, no one else will. The result would be that we will all know everything there is to know about London town, California, or the Mojave, but absolutely nothing about Bedok or Clementi. Leave Coeur de Leon and the Normans to their own people. More importantly, write with your own voice, the one in your head which you live with everyday, and not with the voice you read of only in books.

Thank you for taking the time to read my reply. I can appreciate the need for support and encouragement which young writers need as I myself am one. However, I feel that blind praise makes for non-constructive criticism and tends to create an insular sub-culture which, instead of promoting the works of local writers, only serves to keep them circulating within a eslf-gratifying closed environment. This is a feature of the arts scene in our country and I do hope that the writing scene does not follow the same trend. I mean no disrespect to any of the writers in the collection with my criticisms.

Despite what I have written, I do happen to believe that the collection shows lots of promise and if these writers start to use their own voice, then there is a bright future for the third generation of writers in Singapore.
Later,

Ray"
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