Interviewing Jee Leong Koh

Interviewing Jee Leong Koh

Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK's Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the USA. He has published three other books of poems, a volume of essays, and a collection of zuihitsu. His work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, Russian, and Latvian. Originally from Singapore, he lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound. 

You may read him here.

JF: At the age of 15, a poem you wrote on the rain was broadcast on Singapore radio. For it you received a cheque for $20. The relation with Singapore seems to be easier when one writes about rain or the Merlion than when one writes poems such as ‘Come on, straight boy, and make gay love with me.’ 

That’s funny! I love the way you put that. You are referring to a time, back in the early naughts, when the Singapore government banned the reading of my poem in a Pride event. Things have changed since then. I can now wear a tank top with the words “Gay But Not Yet Equal” to a local gym and not be thrown out for it. Small steps. The LGBTQ+ rights movement has gained greater visibility and support over the years, although the opposition has also increased. The state still refuses to get rid of the anti-sodomy law on the books, which stands in the way of all other rights. 

My quarrel with Singapore has grown beyond LGBTQ+ rights. When the state banned the public screening of a political documentary film (“To Singapore with Love” by TAN Pin Pin) and withdrew a grant from a politically critical graphic novel (The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chyeby Sonny LIEW), I decided to stop working with the state’s cultural agencies so that my work could not be used to bolster the state’s efforts to repress freedoms within the country and to conduct diplomacy without. The government was, and still is, using the flourishing of the arts in Singapore as an argument for the benignity of what is actually a very repressive regime. In Singapore, one person protesting in public can be considered an illegal assembly and be arrested and charged. 

Because of this political situation, I have stopped applying for state funding for my own writing and for the work of the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound, which I founded and still head in New York City. Singapore Unbound is dedicated to the struggle for freedom of expression and equal rights through literary exchange and political solidarity. From New York, I try to keep a close watch on developments in Singapore and to give whatever support I can to the burgeoning progressive movement. I also travel back every summer to organize events and stage interventions.

JF: You have mentioned how the label “postcolonial queer poet”—printed at the back of Steep Tea—is useful but does not define you. In an interview you say you consider yourself “a lyric poet living in an anti-lyric age”. Which would be more accurate?

All and none, I suppose. One tries to find a self-description that fits where one is in the journey. This is not done cynically, for marketing purposes, but existentially. How can I define myself if I do not wish others to define me? For a poet, the task is even more acute, I would argue, than it is for a novelist. Postcolonial, queer, lyric—all tentative and improvisatory attempts at defining not just the self, but also the forces arrayed against the self—(neo)colonialism, patriarchy, chaos. 

JF: As a poet and reader of poetry, is there something in language or poetry that annoys you?

Recently I was reading a book of poetry by a youngish American poet and the language was very beautiful but for the life of me I could not grasp what he was saying, what he was describing. I was in his head, but I wasn’t in a world that we had in common with other people. That was kind of fun for a while, but very soon I grew tired of it, especially if the head was not all that interesting. 

I like to believe that one of the chief functions of poetry is to defamiliarize the world, to help us to see the world anew, to renew our hackneyed sense of it. In order to do so, poetry must believe that there is, in fact, a world outside of itself. A world that is hard to describe, even to prove exist, but that is still accessible, in glimmers, to words. I want to know whether I am reading about the Thames, or the Hudson, or the Yangtze, or the Idea of Rivers. I want to know whether I am reading about the death of a father, or that of a daughter, or that of a pet, or about all deaths or Death. And not just reading words.

This is the peeve of one who hears Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. The problem is also one of our times. Wallace Stevens puts it this way: “What happened, as we were traversing the whole heaven, is that the imagination lost its power to sustain us. It has the strength of reality or none at all.” Now I cannot read poetry that has lost the strength to confront reality.

JF: Are there any words, poetic forms or figures of speech you value above others?

For some reason I cannot pin down, I go to the word “soft” often in my poetry. It does not only speak, it also touches and tastes, and it does all this while meaning, variously, listen, gentle, vulnerable, honest, subtle, strong, tender, comfortable, pre-erection, post-orgasm, receptive, sympathetic, malleable, formal, transformative. It is not the opposite of hard, but is a state of hardness, just as hard is but a state of softness. It appears in conjunction with “ware,” “water,” and “power.”   

JF: Do you usually read literary criticism? 

I have always loved reading literary criticism since I studied English as an undergraduate at Oxford University. Lit crit opens my eyes to the many dimensions of a literary work and its reception. At Oxford, I was heavily influenced by the criticism of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot. I also read Marxist, feminist, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic critics, but resisted them somewhat in the name of literature. 

On Singapore poetry, I would read anything and everything written by the poet and critic GWEE Li Sui. Since moving to America, I have discovered the important critical work of Dorothy Wang and Timothy Yu on Asian American poetry, and the book by Jahan Ramazani on the hybrid muse, and finally got around to reading Walter Benjamin, who is fascinating because of his self-contradictions.

But, really, any strong body of poetry is itself a form of criticism since it upholds and fulfils certain poetic values, and minimizes others. Contemporary poets who come to mind include Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, Eavan Boland, Louise Glück, and Carl Phillips. Then prose fiction writers often have interesting things to say to poetry: Borges, Nabokov, Bolaño,and the Filipina American novelist Gina Apostol. They speak to literary form.

JF: In Payday Loans, sonnet ‘April 25’ places the Shakespearean couplet at the beginning of the poem with a Chinese rhyming verse. ‘Reversi, Also Called Othello’ (Steep Tea) also alludes and plays with Shakespeare and the notion of form. How is Shakespeare an influence? 

You cannot escape Shakespeare. He is everywhere in the English language. It is a function of English colonialism, of course, but it is also a function of the individual poetic imagination. What Keats said about Shakespeare remains a touchstone for me: his genius lies in his negative capability. He is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.” I like things to be clear, to be distinct, but I also believe in ultimate mysteries. My problem is with those who make unclear what should be clear, or make clear what should remain unclear. There is tremendous clarity in Shakespeare and there is profound mystery. 

JF: Larkin and other contemporary Anglophone poets also appear but you have stressed the importance of knowing poetry from other places of the Globe. Who would be your favourite non-English-speaking poets?

Constantine Cavafy, Wisława Szymborska, Yosa Buson, and Marina Tsvetaeva. With these four poets, I feel that the spirit of their poetry survives translation. I also think of the zuihistsu writer Sei Shōnagon as a poet.

JF: In your blog you first publish drafts of poems and then the revised edition. This is particularly helpful for the critic who wishes to better understand your poetry (Laughs). Are you thinking about what critics will say one day? 

Oh, yes! I like the idea of providing work for the Jee Leong Koh industry.

JF: You are also a teacher. How would like poetry to be taught?

With a great love for it. All the rest will follow.

End