Interviewing Anne Lee Tzu Pheng

Interviewing Anne Lee Tzu Pheng

Anne Lee Tzu Pheng is a retired Associate Professor in English Literature from the National University of Singapore, she has won numerous awards for her poetry including the Singapore Cultural Medallion (1985), the S.E.A. WRITE Award (1987), the Gabriela Mistral Award (from Chile, 1995), the Montblanc-CFA (Centre for the Arts) Literary Award (1996), and the Singapore National Book Development Council Award for Poetry, three times. She has seven collections of poetry, a book of reflective essays, and a book for developing reading-readiness in children. Published and studied internationally, some of her poems have been set to music. She has mentored many of Singapore’s young writers.

JF: How was it to start writing in the early days of Singapore as a country? 

Singapore became an independent nation in 1965. 1965/66 was when I started writing. There was pressure to find our “national” voice, and it was not conducive to good writing.  I paid very little attention to the call for such national poetry, and was more intent on finding my own identity as a person in that historical time, when suddenly we had become “Singaporeans”.  Moreover, there was little public interest in poetry, and few readers. My main motivation for writing came from within.  I was at an age (21) when I needed to explore aspects of my life through writing and finding my “voice”.

JF: In an interview, you mentioned how in these early days writers still had their imaginations “locked in a foreign landscape"? Which foreign landscape is that?

Singapore was, until 1965, a British colony. Generations of us were brought up on a diet of English literature which was itself a vessel of British culture. Many young writers in Singapore tended to set their fiction in an English landscape, using objects and references to things British.  The landscape of home – Singapore, and Malaysia which had always been culturally close to us – did not feature comfortably in our writings.  The landscape had not yet been “ratified” in our imagination. 

JF: With the imposition of English as language does not this foreign landscape remain?

To an extent this is true.  The early writers struggled to forge a language we could call our own, based on English.   Those who used it in their creative writing felt the need to make an indigenous variety of English.  Early experiments were very self-conscious and artificial, and ultimately unsuccessful. Many, like myself, kept to a plain English that did not have much of the flavor of the “British”.  Gradually, we evolved our own version, and in that way gradually removed our imagination away from the English and became more “at home” with our own landscape.

JF: One of your poems, ‘My Country and My People,’ was banned by the Singapore government. Would you like to tell us something about it? I suspect this took you by surprise.    

Yes, indeed; the poem was not allowed to be on the airwaves!  To be honest, to this day I have no idea why; no one who was in the broadcasting authority gave any reason then as now.  It was a poem in which I explored my own identity from childhood to adulthood, in relation to what my country meant to me.  I clearly and in all honesty could not yet feel like a “Singaporean”, whatever that was.  (This was the time the government was calling for nation-building in newly-independent Singapore.)  Perhaps the poem was not nationalistic enough, voiced too many doubts about identity – but, then, it was a very personal and honest questioning of myself! I was not advocating anything to anybody.  I can only surmise that there were so few competent readers of poetry in the government at the time, they simply misread, with alarm, anything that did not praise the country but seemed to be questioning.

JF: As a poet and reader of poetry, is there something in language or poetry that annoys you? You have mentioned an antipathy, which I share, for “displays of ostentatious brilliance, self-indulgent meanderings and irrelevant linguistic puzzles”. Are there any words, poetic forms of figures of speech you value above others?    

I value whatever sounds genuine in poetry – that is, the sense that the poet is struggling to find a way to say something worth saying, that is difficult to say but which s/he cares enough about to want to find the words to say it.  The best poetry is when this struggle does notseem like struggle, but the natural, easiest way of expressing its thought.

JF: You mentioned how "If you are too focused on the technical elements - getting the how and what right - you can forget the why. The why, for me, is what makes the poem succeed”. Would you like to speak about this a littlebit? 

I find that asking “WHY was this poem written?” gives me a good indicator of the value of the poem for me.  Although intention may not always be achieved, the sense of why a poem came into being tells me something useful about the creative impulse and workings of its author.  It tells me what the author cares about; it is something over and above linguistic skill.  In some sense, it is what the poem does not say, or does not dareto say, that engages me.

JF: Some of your poems have been set to music for choral performance. Do you enjoy listening to them?

Yes, I do! So far, the composers have caught quite accurately the ambience of the poems. For example, my poetry is often meditative, seldom loud.  The musical settings have been sensitive to that.

JF: In 1989, you adopted the Catholic religion, which has influenced your latest poetry collection. Would you like to speak a little about this?

If I am a Catholic poet, I am a poet first, when I am writing. The Catholic is secondary. If the Catholic in the poems comes through, it is naturally to be expected; but I am never one to propagandize.  If the poetry does not succeed, nothing else will.  So it is always the poetry first; whatever is Catholic comes later, if at all.

JF: You wrote a book for children. Were there technical challenges you weren’t expecting?

I wrote a book for parents, not children.  It is about preparing very young children to be readers and to love reading.

JF: In an interview you mentioned how amongst your favourite authors are “quite often somebody called Anon”. Would you like to give us some examples of anonymous poems you appreciate.

I often find I like anonymous poems; but the one that sticks in my mind is a 13thcentury English song called ‘Sumer is icumen in’.

JF: In ‘Blue print’ you mention one of Singapore’s many contradictions: how the destruction of West Coast Park and its environment is followed by a poster with the saying “From now on Singaporeans will be going green”.  You have been regarded as a mentor for younger writers. Who are your favourite poets from Singapore?      

These may not be “favourites’ as such, but their work resonates the most with me: Arthur Yap, Boey Kim Cheng, Alfian Sa’at, Aaron Lee. 

JF: ‘Grimm Story’ is a favourite of mine. It has a grim moral. Would you like to comment on it?

Folk tales which grow out of an oral tradition and are part of a community’s treasure of story and history, are some of my most beloved literature of the world!  I wrote ‘Grimm Story’ because I thought the pun upon the word “Grimm” (like “grim”) captured very well the sense of how the moral truths espoused in the folk tale reflect some of the grim realities of our world.

JF: Do you know poems by heart? Which poems?  

Yes, I do. Strangely enough, I know many songs by heart, some word for word, even from childhood!  The poems I remember best tend to be nonsense, funny poems, such as from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear!  I consider all these the trivia my brain is stuffed with!