Here are ten poetry/craft/art related things that will be taking place in 2018. It’s going to be an intense year for sure!
1. I head off for a writing residency in Paris in late Jan. It’s a space for me to work on a number of projects, but most importantly to shape my submission for the next stage of my PhD. Yup, I’m doing a practice-research based PhD with RMIT. I’m exploring different forms and facets of artistic collaboration, and I’m very honoured to be journeying along with fellow students Alvin Pang, Sandra Roldan, Laurel Fantauzzo and Jhoanna Cruz.
2. I step back in a junior college for the first time in six years, this time to be a poet-in-residence at Eunoia Junior College. Looking forward to dreaming up a lot of fascinating workshops and working with bright young minds to spread the seed of poetry.
3. The Arts House has invited me to curate Note for Note again in 2018, but this time, there’ll be three different showcases throughout the year. Poets for the first session in March include Theophilus Kwek and Charlene Shepherdson. (And me!)
4. Three books are going to come out in 2018!! The first is Waypoints, published by Math Paper Press. This is a collaborative photo-poetry book between Tay Tsen-Waye and myself. I respond to 36 film images of travel from all around the world with 36 poems of my own. The book will be launched during the BuySinglit Campaign weekend in March.
5. A dream of mine is finally coming true! I’ve had the incredible good fortune to work with a bunch of crazy talented artists such as Dan Wong, Neo Anngee and Chen Yanyun, among others, and they are all working to illustrate and produce a small book based on my rewrite of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence! Auguries of Modern Innocence will be an exhibition and a zine and it’ll be launched during the BuySinglit Campaign weekend as well. The exhibition will run until early April at the Arts House.
6. Come August, Ethos Books will be launching Vital Possessions, a brand new collection of poetry that has been lovingly worked on over the last three years, through two residencies and with the help of editors Mrigaa Sethi and Aaron Lee. You could say this is my fourth ‘major’ title, after Along The Yellow Line, Chai and Postal Code. Each of these books took three years to realise, and I’m very excited, to say the least.
7. In between all this, I’m busy recording and hoping to release a new spoken word album, tentatively titled ‘No Place Like This’, sometime in the middle of the year. Collaborators who will be on this include Dawn Fung, Deborah Emmanuel, Lydia Tan and Daniel Tan.
8. In March, Intersection will be headed to Yangon. Nicola Anthony and I will be staging a two-week long exhibition at MyanmArt and will be giving talks and workshops. And we’ll be making brand new work on the spot as well.
9. As part of my PhD research/practice, I’m embarking on an ambitious prose-poetry/dance project with Sudhee Liao, titled A Manual Performance. We hope to showcase this in HK end 2018 and SG sometime in 2019. Fingers crossed for funding! Actually, I should say fingers crossed for funding for a number of these projects.
10. Finally, work continues apace as Joshua Ip, Chong Li-Chuan and I continue to lay the groundwork for Farquhar: The Musical. Coming soon (hopefully sometime in 2019) to a theatre near you.
