Celebrating Words Again (Session 1)

By Benjamin Lin

About a week ago, I attended the first session of Celebrating Words with poetry readings from Lee Tzu Pheng, Gwee Li Sui, Edwin Thumboo and Paul Tan. The event was opened by speeches by the Master of Ceremony, Assoc Prof Vincent Ooi and the Guest-of-Honour, Prof Brenda Yeoh.

Prof Yeoh’s opening speech began with a few confessions, which became a running theme throughout the rest of the event, as the following speakers opened their reading with a confession of their own. Their confessions were of similar substance, which went, “I was initially a science student and then I made the switch to literature (though in the case for Prof Yeoh, it was Geography)”. While I was not surprised by such a confession, since I believe it to be a fairly common experience for many students in FASS, I was certainly perked up by the choice of the word, “confession”. The word might have be a casual choice to lighten the mood of the symposium, however it certainly conveys a sentiment that literature is sort of a guilty pleasure, enjoyed by the unconventional few who have fallen off the established tracks of the education system.

With the common experience of floating between the structural limitations of the education system, it was perhaps only fitting that Lee was the first of the poets to read, whose poem ‘Sing Sing Sing’ certainly conveyed and satirised the rigidity of the education system. The forced rhymes in the silly little “ditty” that the speaker recalled certainly contrasted the fluidity of the rest of the lines and brings across to the reader/listener a sense of the non-sense (“non-sense” being a title of another of Lee Tzu Pheng’s poems) in the overly structured education system.

One of the sources of inspiration that Lee mentioned during the symposium is in the change in the meaning of words, not just in the context but also how words have changed in their meaning over time. An example is in the word, “cloud” in her poem “Cloud Computing” or “eye-pads” in “The Cybercreative Plug-in”. She highlighted the change in the lexical priming of these old words that made the old meanings seem unfamiliar and awkward in our minds, which certainly hold true with the perception of the rigidity of the education system as falling behind times in her poem “Sing Sing Sing”.

Yet while Lee appears to herald the coming of change in her contemporary subjects of technology, Thumboo took a different approach with his poetry in reminiscing the days of “years and years ago” (from his poem “Leaf”). Nevertheless, Thumboo too laments the regularity and the unnaturalness of the present in the “regular N-Park rows” (Leaf) or the “regulated jungles” (The River). Hence with different nuances, both Lee and Thumboo approach the rigidity of the structures around us, where Thumboo revelled in the past while Lee looked at the restrictiveness of the past in the present. On a lighter note, Thumboo also related to the audience his longstanding disappointment in the natural limitations of the Singapore landscape, where the landscape defies all known definitions of the terms like river and lake. Yet in spite of the lack, Thumboo did write a poem entitled, “The River”.

Gwee and Tan on the other hand, had rather different foci as compared with the older poets, Lee and Thumboo. Moreover Gwee and Tan seem to provide a contrast to each other, as Gwee remains fairly centred upon Singapore in his poetry and even lamenting Singapore society’s seeming detachment from world politics, which inspired his poem, “Dream Sequence”, while Tan gives a truly cosmopolitan perspective to Singapore, with his Japanese inspired poetry, “梅”, “高山病” and “Naked in Japan”. This last poem did strike me as peculiar in its uniqueness in form, where it appears almost prose-like on page, yet coincidentally Gwee also read a poem of his that shared a similar form, “Jurassic Gardens”. The younger poets then seem to have moved away from traditional forms of poetry, unlike the older poets who used more conservative forms, which perhaps reflects an overall movement that Singapore writing is taking to create an identity of its own.

This liberating sentiment was perhaps carried over into the Q&A session, where questions seem focused on the structures surrounding poetry, namely what are the implications of being labelled a poet? And another question from one of the younger students, which continues to tickle me and in truth a question I ask sometimes, are poets conscious about using the literary devices and techniques while writing their poems? Both questions were answered with similar enthusiasm from the poets, who advocated writing true the poet’s sentiment and intention and not in artifice to suit the needs of others. With that, the session was hastily concluded for us to satisfy our empty bellies with the refreshments before the next session.