Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: a Letter” is about love and separation. It is a lamentation of lost love.
It is possible to link the theme of the inevitability of separation with the impossibility of the marriage of different language systems, the impossibility of the encounter with the elusive other. The work was adapted from Li Po’s poems and based on interpretations by Japanese scholars and notes from an American scholar. If we read the line “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours” as the speaker’s attempt to bridge the divide between cultures, the inevitable separation shows its impossibility. The chain of transmission of form raises the question, can a poet assume the identity of another? Is the assumption of another voice inevitably tied to the alienation that we see in the poem?
We are aware that the poem is an experiment in other forms. This tempers the authenticity of the voice in the poem. I remember when I was rewriting Rafiq Kashwari’s ghazal into another form for the last assignment. I felt powerful while writing it to be able to exercise the creative license to assume another identity, I also felt guilty for unconsciously imposing preconceived notions of race, gender and identity into the poem, and thoroughly distorting the original voice.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
The Politicization of Poetry
(nb: in case you read an earlier verson, this blog entry has been changed, I felt the first entry didn't really adequately capture what I wanted to say.)
Just a year ago, I was very taken by the poetry of Adrienne Rich. She became my model as a writer and a thinker. There are many similarities and mutual influences in Rich’s and Rukeyser’s work. Both their voices are beautiful, passionate and urgent. Both set out with the project of rewriting an official history. We see moments of prosaic reality interspersed with lyrical bursts of song, the exploitation of the italic, the placement of the language of officialdom and capitalism into verses. The documentation of history through poetry doesn’t only illuminate history, it’s a subversive move that undermines officialdom and causes the language of officialdom to fall apart. The placement of official language into verse has the effect of fragmenting and satirizing it. It becomes integrated into the speaker’s consciousness and takes on a new voice. The title, “The book of the dead” aptly portrays the attempt to capture the voices of those who have been silenced. Writing, like embalming, serves an an act of preservation and a tribute to the dead.
I have ambivalent thoughts about the politicization of poetry, just as I have ambivalent thoughts about Adrienne Rich, and Alfian Sa’at, and any other political writer that I’ve read. Sa’at is a Singapore poet who has been labelled as a political activist. Sa’at writes about the contaminating influence of the shipwrecks that are washed onto shore on a sleepy island. Mario Petrucci sets out in his book Heavy Water to show the effect the Chernobyl disaster had on the people. Poison, radiation, debris—all become metaphors for the moral corruption that plagues our age. On one hand, it is necessary for poetry to be relevant to life and history, to be a point of resistance against the hypocrisies of our day and age. Undeniably, we’re all political entities, and definitely, it doesn’t make sense for art to assume ignorance of this. But I am uncomfortable about politics colonizing the literary sphere. While I am not advocating a separation of politics and art, I think it’s important that art, poetry doesn’t become the tool of propagandists. When you move a political struggle into art, to what extent are you undermining the struggle when you reduce the cause to an artistic aesthetic subject? Can the liberal arts educated poet really take on the voice of the working class miner? Is the exploitation of another voice an imposition of another kind of insidious power relationship? I'm not providing a critique of Rukeyser here, just thinking out loud about poetry, and the dangers of a naive reading of poetry.
It's too easy to be emotionally exploited by the lyrical voice. But poetry is not innocent, neither is it noble. Even if it sets out with the noble task of rewriting history. When you use a specific incident to illustrate a broader political theme, you invite people to say “oh, this reminds me of another incident, and etc, and etc.” Historicity becomes collapsed within the concerns of today, or poetic metaphor. Dehistoricization and deconstextualization is another imposition of silence. It is violence, a different form of violence from the violence it protests against. But violence, nonetheless. And a blind art is one that is unable see its own limitations, that mistakes violence for the honorable political struggle.
Just a year ago, I was very taken by the poetry of Adrienne Rich. She became my model as a writer and a thinker. There are many similarities and mutual influences in Rich’s and Rukeyser’s work. Both their voices are beautiful, passionate and urgent. Both set out with the project of rewriting an official history. We see moments of prosaic reality interspersed with lyrical bursts of song, the exploitation of the italic, the placement of the language of officialdom and capitalism into verses. The documentation of history through poetry doesn’t only illuminate history, it’s a subversive move that undermines officialdom and causes the language of officialdom to fall apart. The placement of official language into verse has the effect of fragmenting and satirizing it. It becomes integrated into the speaker’s consciousness and takes on a new voice. The title, “The book of the dead” aptly portrays the attempt to capture the voices of those who have been silenced. Writing, like embalming, serves an an act of preservation and a tribute to the dead.
I have ambivalent thoughts about the politicization of poetry, just as I have ambivalent thoughts about Adrienne Rich, and Alfian Sa’at, and any other political writer that I’ve read. Sa’at is a Singapore poet who has been labelled as a political activist. Sa’at writes about the contaminating influence of the shipwrecks that are washed onto shore on a sleepy island. Mario Petrucci sets out in his book Heavy Water to show the effect the Chernobyl disaster had on the people. Poison, radiation, debris—all become metaphors for the moral corruption that plagues our age. On one hand, it is necessary for poetry to be relevant to life and history, to be a point of resistance against the hypocrisies of our day and age. Undeniably, we’re all political entities, and definitely, it doesn’t make sense for art to assume ignorance of this. But I am uncomfortable about politics colonizing the literary sphere. While I am not advocating a separation of politics and art, I think it’s important that art, poetry doesn’t become the tool of propagandists. When you move a political struggle into art, to what extent are you undermining the struggle when you reduce the cause to an artistic aesthetic subject? Can the liberal arts educated poet really take on the voice of the working class miner? Is the exploitation of another voice an imposition of another kind of insidious power relationship? I'm not providing a critique of Rukeyser here, just thinking out loud about poetry, and the dangers of a naive reading of poetry.
It's too easy to be emotionally exploited by the lyrical voice. But poetry is not innocent, neither is it noble. Even if it sets out with the noble task of rewriting history. When you use a specific incident to illustrate a broader political theme, you invite people to say “oh, this reminds me of another incident, and etc, and etc.” Historicity becomes collapsed within the concerns of today, or poetic metaphor. Dehistoricization and deconstextualization is another imposition of silence. It is violence, a different form of violence from the violence it protests against. But violence, nonetheless. And a blind art is one that is unable see its own limitations, that mistakes violence for the honorable political struggle.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
A Midsummer's Night Dream--Self-conscious Theatricality
I attended the Durham Shakespeare Company’s Production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream at the Cornell plantations last Friday. There was a half-moon, and you could hear animals shuffling in the trees and the sound of crickets. I felt curiously distant from the mechanisms of life for a moment. But the play took me away from reality, and back.
Watching Puck’s final prologue adds a curious postmodernist dimension to a Renaissance play. Rather than asking us to suspend our disbelief, Shakespeare entreats us to be aware of the highly wrought theatricality of the play, a reflection of a highly self-conscious art: “If we shadows have offended,/ Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber'd here.” The Durham Shakespeare Company reinforced the theatricality of the play by putting its characters in ludicrously over-the-top costumes—Puck and the workmen were dressed like characters out of X-Men, complete with that punk, androgynous, grungy look.
The self-satirizing reflects an awareness of the propensity of art to employ smooth sugar coated endings and its all-too-easy reconciliation of the tensions of real life, “Give me your hands and if we be friends, / And Robin shall restore amends,” “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended.” The prologue also demystifies the nature of stage as existing outside the real world: “I am an honest Puck” hints at Puck’s assessment of his social status as a workman, the addressed title “Gentles” makes a reference to the aristocratic gentry, enacting a return back to the hierarchical structure of the Renaissance.
Puck denies his theatrical art, “you have but slumbered here”, reducing it to a series of “visions,” “[a] weak and idle theme,” isolated from the sphere of the real world. The iambic tetrameter and paired couplet add a sense of poetic flourish and provide the illusion of artistic completion to the poem, while its contents deny its significance as art. The staged persona remains standing, while his dramatic signification flees from him. In the production, the same actors who played Oberon and Titania—symbolizing art, anti-reason, youth—played Theseus and Hippolyta—symbolizing reality, reason, hierarchy, and political leadership. Theatricality and reality are not necessarily mutually exclusive poles; both deconstruct each other. And it is in deconstructing one another that they reach a mutual formulation of each other, and themselves.
Watching Puck’s final prologue adds a curious postmodernist dimension to a Renaissance play. Rather than asking us to suspend our disbelief, Shakespeare entreats us to be aware of the highly wrought theatricality of the play, a reflection of a highly self-conscious art: “If we shadows have offended,/ Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber'd here.” The Durham Shakespeare Company reinforced the theatricality of the play by putting its characters in ludicrously over-the-top costumes—Puck and the workmen were dressed like characters out of X-Men, complete with that punk, androgynous, grungy look.
The self-satirizing reflects an awareness of the propensity of art to employ smooth sugar coated endings and its all-too-easy reconciliation of the tensions of real life, “Give me your hands and if we be friends, / And Robin shall restore amends,” “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended.” The prologue also demystifies the nature of stage as existing outside the real world: “I am an honest Puck” hints at Puck’s assessment of his social status as a workman, the addressed title “Gentles” makes a reference to the aristocratic gentry, enacting a return back to the hierarchical structure of the Renaissance.
Puck denies his theatrical art, “you have but slumbered here”, reducing it to a series of “visions,” “[a] weak and idle theme,” isolated from the sphere of the real world. The iambic tetrameter and paired couplet add a sense of poetic flourish and provide the illusion of artistic completion to the poem, while its contents deny its significance as art. The staged persona remains standing, while his dramatic signification flees from him. In the production, the same actors who played Oberon and Titania—symbolizing art, anti-reason, youth—played Theseus and Hippolyta—symbolizing reality, reason, hierarchy, and political leadership. Theatricality and reality are not necessarily mutually exclusive poles; both deconstruct each other. And it is in deconstructing one another that they reach a mutual formulation of each other, and themselves.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Thoughts on Shaped Poetry: Interfering Forms
I was thinking that there is a distinction between saying that “physical form coincides with a poem’s meaning” and “physical form shapes a poem’s meaning.” Does the form of the poem merely support a poem’s meaning, or does it shape the meaning of the poem?
In Herb’s “Mother and Child,” it’s not clear which mechanism is at work. On one hand, the strategic placement of “child” inside the “O” in “mother” seems to be shaping our perception of the categories “mother” and “child”. The mother is on the outside, giving life to the child, who is on the inside. We are aware of the biological category that “mother and child” is, because the “child” nestled within “O” resembles the fetus in a womb. We get the sense that the “child” is becoming subsumed within the mother—suggesting that the meaning of “child” is intertwined with that of mother. They are a collective entity and one cannot understand the meaning of “mother” without establishing her relationship to a child. The absence of “father” suggests that “mother” can be defined without association to “father.” Yet on writing all this, I come to the realization that all these formulations are socially conditioned, and one can just as easily understand this by thinking a little bit about what “mother” and “child” mean.
Perhaps one must come to the conclusion that form guides the meaning of a poem, while the meaning of a poem guides our perception of the form. “Form” and “content” are a bit like the categories “mother” and “child”—we need the category “mother” for us to come to the definition of “child”, as we need the category “child” for us to come to the definition of “mother”. As with the relation between "form" and "content."
I think that when you read a poem in print without shapes, metrical or rhyming patterns, there is an isolation of the senses—tactile, visual, olfactory sensations are glimpsed purely through the filter of the printed word. “Seeing” becomes a process that takes place, purely mediated through the written word. A poem that is read out loud is also a “mediated” poem. There is something about how the human voice is able to accommodate the metrical patterns, yet there is something about how the human voice is also able to defy it. The form of a poem shouldn’t be seen as just “guiding”, “reinforcing” the content—it can interrupt, alter. I’m not sure if you agree about this reading of Herbert’s “Easter Wings.” There seems that tension between how the poem seems to be a prayer to glorify God’s redeeming powers, while we are aware that the sense of redemption seems to be something the narrator himself is executing. The form of the poem shows the speaker enacting a certain reality, mapping despair (with short lines that denote spiritual impoverishment) quickly followed by hope (with longer lines denoting spiritual enrichment, a broadening of one’s spiritual vision). The form shows the control of the speaker, rather than the power of God. Here we get how form interrupts the content.
In Herb’s “Mother and Child,” it’s not clear which mechanism is at work. On one hand, the strategic placement of “child” inside the “O” in “mother” seems to be shaping our perception of the categories “mother” and “child”. The mother is on the outside, giving life to the child, who is on the inside. We are aware of the biological category that “mother and child” is, because the “child” nestled within “O” resembles the fetus in a womb. We get the sense that the “child” is becoming subsumed within the mother—suggesting that the meaning of “child” is intertwined with that of mother. They are a collective entity and one cannot understand the meaning of “mother” without establishing her relationship to a child. The absence of “father” suggests that “mother” can be defined without association to “father.” Yet on writing all this, I come to the realization that all these formulations are socially conditioned, and one can just as easily understand this by thinking a little bit about what “mother” and “child” mean.
Perhaps one must come to the conclusion that form guides the meaning of a poem, while the meaning of a poem guides our perception of the form. “Form” and “content” are a bit like the categories “mother” and “child”—we need the category “mother” for us to come to the definition of “child”, as we need the category “child” for us to come to the definition of “mother”. As with the relation between "form" and "content."
I think that when you read a poem in print without shapes, metrical or rhyming patterns, there is an isolation of the senses—tactile, visual, olfactory sensations are glimpsed purely through the filter of the printed word. “Seeing” becomes a process that takes place, purely mediated through the written word. A poem that is read out loud is also a “mediated” poem. There is something about how the human voice is able to accommodate the metrical patterns, yet there is something about how the human voice is also able to defy it. The form of a poem shouldn’t be seen as just “guiding”, “reinforcing” the content—it can interrupt, alter. I’m not sure if you agree about this reading of Herbert’s “Easter Wings.” There seems that tension between how the poem seems to be a prayer to glorify God’s redeeming powers, while we are aware that the sense of redemption seems to be something the narrator himself is executing. The form of the poem shows the speaker enacting a certain reality, mapping despair (with short lines that denote spiritual impoverishment) quickly followed by hope (with longer lines denoting spiritual enrichment, a broadening of one’s spiritual vision). The form shows the control of the speaker, rather than the power of God. Here we get how form interrupts the content.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
In Another Country: The Location of Poetry
The poet’s struggle to adhere to difficult forms—like the ghazal, sestina and villainelle—is a metaphor for a larger greater struggle to reconcile himself to the world. The completion of poetry is the triumph of mind over matter. Yet ultimately the rough rhythms, parenthetical statements or juxtapositions that manifests within the lines show the difficulty of using art as a plane for resolution.
In Bruce William’s “End Without World,” the speaker aims to find worldly meaning through the lover, despite the deformities and bleakness of a materialistic and exploitative world. But the enjambments highlight the difficulty of reconciliation. The enjambment in between the verses “We shall be God/for forgiveness” highlights the difficulty of displaying magnanimity and acceptance of the order of things.
In Rafiq Kathwari’s “In Another Country,” we see the speaker’s attempt to conjure his mother and possibly, regain a lost faith? The successive lines “in the rain” become a desperate chant or prayer to reach the mother. But the line that “In Manhattan, I feel her presence in the rain” juxtaposes absence and presence, memory and present, art and reality. The poem becomes the emotional space that transcends the boundaries of geography and the physical landscape. The progression through the poem records the speaker’s increasing proximity to his mother. If the first stanza sharply delineates the different physical locations of the mother and son, “In Kashmir, half asleep, Mother listens to the rain. / In Manhattan, I feel her presence in the rain,” the last few stanza’s confuse the locations of mother and son and depict a landscape where spatial boundaries do not matter, “I hear her call over the city din.” The title “Another Country” aptly reinforces the idea that poetry is the opening of another space where imagined realities and desires, needs are fulfilled.
In Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina”, the poem seems to execute a sort of intervention with memory. Immediate, daily routines and rituals force their way into the poem. The repetition of “stove” and “child” points to the duties that the old grandmother has to attend to, distracting her from loss. The repetition of “almanac” shows a valiant attempt to see loss as an event intrinsically intertwined with fate and inevitable. The last stanza is the beginning of a new sestina, and possibly marks a change in heart. Yet the sestina has the effect of repeating words like “tears”, “grandmother”, seem to arrest the poem in a type of melancholia, accentuating and prolonging grief. Time seems to stand still in the hypnotic world of the sestina. The title of the poem “Sestina” suggests the recovery is only a process enacted in the realm of art.
Each poem seems a sort of speech-act, an attempt to interfere with immediate reality. Ultimately, despite how each poem seeks to open up a new space, outside reality, the tensions in the poems show how loss, poverty and distance still interfere with the poetic project. Each work is still suspended between its ideal and reality.
In Bruce William’s “End Without World,” the speaker aims to find worldly meaning through the lover, despite the deformities and bleakness of a materialistic and exploitative world. But the enjambments highlight the difficulty of reconciliation. The enjambment in between the verses “We shall be God/for forgiveness” highlights the difficulty of displaying magnanimity and acceptance of the order of things.
In Rafiq Kathwari’s “In Another Country,” we see the speaker’s attempt to conjure his mother and possibly, regain a lost faith? The successive lines “in the rain” become a desperate chant or prayer to reach the mother. But the line that “In Manhattan, I feel her presence in the rain” juxtaposes absence and presence, memory and present, art and reality. The poem becomes the emotional space that transcends the boundaries of geography and the physical landscape. The progression through the poem records the speaker’s increasing proximity to his mother. If the first stanza sharply delineates the different physical locations of the mother and son, “In Kashmir, half asleep, Mother listens to the rain. / In Manhattan, I feel her presence in the rain,” the last few stanza’s confuse the locations of mother and son and depict a landscape where spatial boundaries do not matter, “I hear her call over the city din.” The title “Another Country” aptly reinforces the idea that poetry is the opening of another space where imagined realities and desires, needs are fulfilled.
In Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina”, the poem seems to execute a sort of intervention with memory. Immediate, daily routines and rituals force their way into the poem. The repetition of “stove” and “child” points to the duties that the old grandmother has to attend to, distracting her from loss. The repetition of “almanac” shows a valiant attempt to see loss as an event intrinsically intertwined with fate and inevitable. The last stanza is the beginning of a new sestina, and possibly marks a change in heart. Yet the sestina has the effect of repeating words like “tears”, “grandmother”, seem to arrest the poem in a type of melancholia, accentuating and prolonging grief. Time seems to stand still in the hypnotic world of the sestina. The title of the poem “Sestina” suggests the recovery is only a process enacted in the realm of art.
Each poem seems a sort of speech-act, an attempt to interfere with immediate reality. Ultimately, despite how each poem seeks to open up a new space, outside reality, the tensions in the poems show how loss, poverty and distance still interfere with the poetic project. Each work is still suspended between its ideal and reality.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Ironic laughter Mixed with Tears: The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was “the flowering of African American literature, art, and drama during the 1920s and 1930s. Though centered in Harlem, New York City, USA, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States.”
I’d like to discuss the problems of reading approaches to the art of the Harlem Renaissance. If we view the art of the Harlem Renaissance within the larger framework of “mainstream America”, the Harlem Renaissance would reinforce rather than challenge racial stereotypes and appear to be the depiction of a culture in disarray. “Me & My Chauffeur Blues” throws up the stereotype of the sexually avaricious male “Yes he drives so easy, I can’t turn him down” and also hints at a violent streak “I’m gonna steal a pistol, shoot my chauffeur down”. “Morning After” alludes to alcoholism and bad bootleg alcohol. In this we see that rather than lifting the community, it could simply naturalize the community to certain traits and create a culture of resignation rather than a push for change.
If we adopt an alternate reading approach, reading the work of the Harlem Renaissance by closing an eye to “mainstream America”, we can see “Black literature” by legitimizing a language of difference, opens up a space where artists are free to reconstruct Black identity free from the interventions of political and economic structures. In “Me & My Chauffeur Blues”, we see hints of autonomy, initiative. “Well I must buy him”, “I don’t want him” – which points to a kind of triumph in spirit. But a reading approach that ignores that Black identity in the 1920s-30s was constructed by political and economic structures is a naïve reading. By claiming that the work of the Harlem Renaissance exist as separate categories on its own is to cause it to become an excluded and pigeonholed category of its own. This would reinforce binaries of “black” versus “white”, “us” versus “others”.
Wikipedia’s characterization of the Harlem Renaissance brings out the contradictory impulses of African Americans in the 1920-30s:
Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be represented in the idea of the New Negro who through intellect, the production of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes of that era to promote progressive or socialist politics, and racial and social integration.
On one hand, there is an “overt racial pride” and the desire to assert one as a “New Negro” – this awareness and recognition of one’s own diversity is a reflection of the resistance to dominant discourses dictating what defines an American. Yet on another hand, there is the desire for “integration” and assimilation – a word that implies the desire for erasure of differences. The tension within the word “Harlem Renaissance” reflects the dilemma of the African American.
The diversity of African American culture and the art of the Harlem Renaissance makes a single unifying term “Harlem Renaissance” misleading:
There would be no set style or uniting form singularly characterizing art coming out of the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, there would be a mix of celebrating a wide variety of cultural elements, including a Pan-Africanist perspective, "high-culture" and the "low-culture or low-life," from the traditional form of music to the blues and jazz, traditional and new experimental forms in literature like modernism, and in poetry, for example, the new form of jazz poetry. This duality would eventually result in a number of African American artists of the Harlem Renaissance coming into conflict with conservatives in the black intelligentsia who would take issue with certain depictions of black life in whatever medium of the arts.
Even within styles, there are variants. Steven C. Tracy says that it is important to note that blues is a diverse form and varies based on location, thus “one must consider the type of blues Hughes encountered in the various environments in which he lived, keeping in mind that none of the blues environments had absolutely and exclusively one style”. According to Norton, Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in Missouri, Kansas, Illinois and Ohio. He attended Columbia University then traveled extensively in South America and Europe before moving to Washington. The blues styles in his pieces vary.
The “intellectual” quality of much of the art of the Harlem Renaissance is not about intellect in the conservative form of the word, i.e., erudition or analytical rigor. Rather, the intellect is an emotional intellect that is closely intertwined with the realm of desire, the body, memory and the visceral. Because this intellect is an “emotional intellect”, it has a greater outreach to the majority within the community and does not exclude non-intellectuals. In this way we see how art, by making itself accessible, ensures its ability to reconstruct identity.
In “Morning After”, we see a blues form that is more characteristic of the “classic” blues style – highly arranged, stage-influenced, and almost vaudeville-like. The blues form is accessible. The repetitiveness and easy sound of the words reflect Hughes desire to reach out to the lowest common denominator. According to literary critic, Steven C. Tracy, his use of the blues form was also a means of celebrating what he considered one of “the two great Negro gifts to American music”, the other which was spirituals, an earlier precedent of the blues.
“Ironic humor mixed with tears” is how Hughes characterizes the blues. “Morning After” provokes laughter without overshadowing the bleakness of the piece. Yet to laugh at the ugliness in life – in this case, as symbolized by the grotesque open mouth of the sleeper – is cathartic. It also indicates a kind of strength in the ability to look beyond immediate circumstance. The admonition not to “snore so loud” is seems a response to the strain of self-victimization and melodrama that is sometimes present in minority representations in literature.
Sources: Wikipedia, "To the Tune of Those Weary Blues: The Influence of the Blues Tradition in Langston Hughes's Blues Poems", Tracy, Steven C., MELUS, Vol. 8, No. 3, Ethnic Literature and Cultural Consciousness. (Autumn, 1981), pp. 73-98.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
The First Blog Entry: Fictions and Facts
I’m from Singapore. I left the country for Manhattan a year ago, studied in New York University through fall and spring, before coming to Ithaca.
I feel that so much has been written on and romanticized about Manhattan that when one arrives there, it is almost impossible to distinguish between fact and myth when looking at Manhattan. Different faces of New York inspire different feelings, from Harlem to Greenwich Village to midtown Manhattan. It is impossible to be partial about the city and every New Yorker has a love-hate relationship with his city.
When people ask me about Singapore, I often find it difficult to describe a country that is changing its face to swiftly, a country where utopian ideal is confused with reality by the press and policymakers. Surrounded by developing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, the government has ambitions to set apart the country Singapore as a first-world nation. While money is being pumped in to develop the country as a biomedical research hub, the country is in the midst of a huge casino development project. The drive for modernity in Singapore has caused it to lose its street side hawkers and various Chinese dialects, emblems of history and culture. The liberal trade policy has caused Singapore’s bookshops to be flooded by foreign literature, and the local literary scene has suffered. The literary publishing scene is unprofitable, causing publishers to say they are carrying out “community service” when they publish local writers. Artists struggle to articulate a Singapore identity, and often fail because of the diversity of a multiracial society, the pace of change and the increasingly mobile nature of the Singaporean. In school, I was exposed to little local poetry, studied Shakespeare and Chaucer for my British 'A' levels. One of the first poems I read was Blake’s "Daffodils", although I had never ever seen one in that equatorial, humid city-state.
I am studying English literature here. As a discipline, English satisfies my desire to apply scientific analyses and exercise my skills at dissection while allowing me appreciate writing as an aesthetic object and the voice of the heart. But beyond that, literature lies at the intersection of disciplines like politics, history, religion and economics, playing a crucial role in the building of a cultural identity. I hope to study literature through the lens of critical theory – examining how code words of power and signs operate in texts to buttress political and cultural structures in the real world. Literature through a critical gaze forces us to look at how mechanics of how a literary work operates to condition us to certain realities. I like literature because it forces me to live an examined life.
My rather various interests include cooking, modern dance, digital photography and jogging. I try, when I can, to spread the love of the word to others. I enjoy teaching and reading to children and have done this as a volunteer in China, Manhattan and Singapore. I want to do photojournalism and work in the print-publishing industry. I write poetry, was part of a student poetry circle in Singapore, and hope to eventually become more active in its small, but expanding, literary scene.
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Good writing on literature has a central angle or focus. It is not composed of a shopping list of scattered ideas. It should be able to reconcile different layers of meaning and conflicting viewpoints. It should be able to recognize complexity, but make the complexity simple. Stylistically, it is marked by precision and an economy of words. However, memorable writing is able to captures the writer’s intuitive and visceral response to a piece of work. If writing can be both impart the writer’s sense of surprise, wonder or rage, while retaining an intellectual complexity, academic writing can be almost beautiful too.
My paper on Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning” was titled “The Limits of Writing”. It zoomed in on line ten: “(Still the dead one lay moaning)”. I wrote about how that line captured the speaker’s attempt to reverse the plight of the voiceless subject by giving him a voice in his writing. One can sense the insistence on the dead man to speak in that line, and “moaning” could suggest him speaking in an individual language free from conventional codes. However, that line simultaneously undermined the poem because it drew out the distance between the writer and the dead man by reverting from first person point-of-view back to a third person point-of-view. I said that line revealed that that the speaker’s poetic project to give the voiceless a voice was undermined because the line pointed to the fact that writing that occurs in the subject’s absence is merely an artificial representation of individual speech.
I liked how I was able to move beyond the poem to illustrate a broader concept. I also liked how its analysis was quite meticulous. However, I felt that the introductory paragraph could have better outlined the essay’s structure and better summarized the paper’s thesis. It did not bear specific reference to the poem. I also felt I could have better compared the line to the rest of the poem in order to show the contrast. I also felt that I could have broken up the longer paragraphs to distinguish different ideas. I think the paper was too much in love with the concept I wanted it to illustrate, rather than an analysis of the line in itself. It was too theoretical and not sufficiently analytical. This is probably the largest criticism I have of the piece, and my writing in general.
Coming from New York University, where the literature department’s academic style emphasized style, the visceral response and personal voice, I hope this writing seminar frees me from the trappings of the writing culture there and gets me into the more academic writing culture in Cornell. I am also taking this class in tandem with a “Literature and Theory” class. I hope to have a chance sometimes to play with and bring the critical theory concepts of that class into this class. I hope to be more aware of the weaknesses and strengths in my writing style, so I may draw on strengths and brush up on my weaknesses.
I feel that so much has been written on and romanticized about Manhattan that when one arrives there, it is almost impossible to distinguish between fact and myth when looking at Manhattan. Different faces of New York inspire different feelings, from Harlem to Greenwich Village to midtown Manhattan. It is impossible to be partial about the city and every New Yorker has a love-hate relationship with his city.
When people ask me about Singapore, I often find it difficult to describe a country that is changing its face to swiftly, a country where utopian ideal is confused with reality by the press and policymakers. Surrounded by developing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, the government has ambitions to set apart the country Singapore as a first-world nation. While money is being pumped in to develop the country as a biomedical research hub, the country is in the midst of a huge casino development project. The drive for modernity in Singapore has caused it to lose its street side hawkers and various Chinese dialects, emblems of history and culture. The liberal trade policy has caused Singapore’s bookshops to be flooded by foreign literature, and the local literary scene has suffered. The literary publishing scene is unprofitable, causing publishers to say they are carrying out “community service” when they publish local writers. Artists struggle to articulate a Singapore identity, and often fail because of the diversity of a multiracial society, the pace of change and the increasingly mobile nature of the Singaporean. In school, I was exposed to little local poetry, studied Shakespeare and Chaucer for my British 'A' levels. One of the first poems I read was Blake’s "Daffodils", although I had never ever seen one in that equatorial, humid city-state.
I am studying English literature here. As a discipline, English satisfies my desire to apply scientific analyses and exercise my skills at dissection while allowing me appreciate writing as an aesthetic object and the voice of the heart. But beyond that, literature lies at the intersection of disciplines like politics, history, religion and economics, playing a crucial role in the building of a cultural identity. I hope to study literature through the lens of critical theory – examining how code words of power and signs operate in texts to buttress political and cultural structures in the real world. Literature through a critical gaze forces us to look at how mechanics of how a literary work operates to condition us to certain realities. I like literature because it forces me to live an examined life.
My rather various interests include cooking, modern dance, digital photography and jogging. I try, when I can, to spread the love of the word to others. I enjoy teaching and reading to children and have done this as a volunteer in China, Manhattan and Singapore. I want to do photojournalism and work in the print-publishing industry. I write poetry, was part of a student poetry circle in Singapore, and hope to eventually become more active in its small, but expanding, literary scene.
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Good writing on literature has a central angle or focus. It is not composed of a shopping list of scattered ideas. It should be able to reconcile different layers of meaning and conflicting viewpoints. It should be able to recognize complexity, but make the complexity simple. Stylistically, it is marked by precision and an economy of words. However, memorable writing is able to captures the writer’s intuitive and visceral response to a piece of work. If writing can be both impart the writer’s sense of surprise, wonder or rage, while retaining an intellectual complexity, academic writing can be almost beautiful too.
My paper on Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning” was titled “The Limits of Writing”. It zoomed in on line ten: “(Still the dead one lay moaning)”. I wrote about how that line captured the speaker’s attempt to reverse the plight of the voiceless subject by giving him a voice in his writing. One can sense the insistence on the dead man to speak in that line, and “moaning” could suggest him speaking in an individual language free from conventional codes. However, that line simultaneously undermined the poem because it drew out the distance between the writer and the dead man by reverting from first person point-of-view back to a third person point-of-view. I said that line revealed that that the speaker’s poetic project to give the voiceless a voice was undermined because the line pointed to the fact that writing that occurs in the subject’s absence is merely an artificial representation of individual speech.
I liked how I was able to move beyond the poem to illustrate a broader concept. I also liked how its analysis was quite meticulous. However, I felt that the introductory paragraph could have better outlined the essay’s structure and better summarized the paper’s thesis. It did not bear specific reference to the poem. I also felt I could have better compared the line to the rest of the poem in order to show the contrast. I also felt that I could have broken up the longer paragraphs to distinguish different ideas. I think the paper was too much in love with the concept I wanted it to illustrate, rather than an analysis of the line in itself. It was too theoretical and not sufficiently analytical. This is probably the largest criticism I have of the piece, and my writing in general.
Coming from New York University, where the literature department’s academic style emphasized style, the visceral response and personal voice, I hope this writing seminar frees me from the trappings of the writing culture there and gets me into the more academic writing culture in Cornell. I am also taking this class in tandem with a “Literature and Theory” class. I hope to have a chance sometimes to play with and bring the critical theory concepts of that class into this class. I hope to be more aware of the weaknesses and strengths in my writing style, so I may draw on strengths and brush up on my weaknesses.
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