Stop! Have you heard a strange story, come across an unexplained phenomenon or been weirded out by someone or something in Yishun!
Crispin Rodrigues and I are putting together a geo-mapped online anthology of the uncanny things that go on in Singapore’s strangest neighbourhood.
Full details of the open call are up on the blog: https://uncannyyishun.wordpress.com
but suffice to say, we’re looking for original poems, flash fiction and flash creative non-fiction.
Some people start the year binge drinking at a manic New Year’s Eve party. Some start it with a list of neatly written resolutions. And others start it with an early night in bed, ignoring the festivities and fireworks to face the new year bright and early.
I spent the first week of January in hospital.
How did I get there? It all started with an ill-fated calisthenics workout. Not having done anything like this before, I went for a beginner class, which turned out to be an advanced form… of torture. It was tough, to say the least. And the instructor should really have modified the exercises that he made the beginners (Carolyn and I) do versus the rest of the class, who were regulars.
The thing about exercise is that it needs to be gradual; muscles need conditioning to get accustomed to increasing weight and stress. You don’t climb Everest on a whim. Or tackle 45 pull-ups in thirty minutes.
The day after the workout. I could not straighten my arms. I was like a velociraptor, dangling my useless arms and roaring at everyone. I thought it was the usual muscle fatigue after a particularly strenuous workout.
Two days after, my arms started to swell up. I was pleasantly surprised at first to have such large forearms after just one round of calisthenics. But as the day wore on, they ached and I started to feel acutely dehydrated. That’s when I knew something was really wrong.
Saturday night. A&E at Tan Tock Seng Hospital. The attending doctor looked a bit worried after she got my urine and blood test results. She put me on a drip and said I had to be warded. I had done some googling beforehand and found that the worst case scenario was a rare, but not unheard of condition called rhabdomyolysis. Here’s what WebMD has to say:
Rhabdomyolysis is a serious syndrome due to a direct or indirect muscle injury. It results from the death of muscle fibers and release of their contents, mostly an enzyme called creative kinase, into the bloodstream.
And one of the causes of rhabdo is extreme muscle strain, for example, an overdone calisthenics workout.
So there I was, waiting six hours in a bed in a room full of hacking old men for a bed in a ward. One gentlemen even pooped in the gurney next to me. The smell was… incredible.
The results for my creatine kinase levels came back. My worst fears were realised. Rhabdo the Terrible had come. It was 70,000 units per litre (U/L). In a normal person, that level should be between 20-200 U/L.
Day 2 in hospital!
The colour of my pee (definitely not normal)
This was my forearm at its most swollen. Yikes!
My arms were like jelly. I was unable to prop myself up. An IV line dripped lifesaving fluids through my veins. I downed up to 5L of water daily. In the days to come, the CK level spiked to 80,000 U/L before steadily dropping.
The view from my window. Rain…
and sunshine.
There was lots of time to read, to worry about my PhD research and to dwell upon the vagaries of life in a hospital ward. I had opted for B2 class, which meant a 5-bed ward, but due to a shortage of space I was (fortunately!) offered a single room in a recovery ward which used to house the CDC. It wasn’t exactly quiet though, as nurses frequently yelled to each other down the length of the hallway and a very noisy old man yelled “OI!” at regular intervals to get attention. I assumed he was in pain, but he frequently followed it up with a string of choice curse words, so I wonder whether he was simply chafing at the ignominy of being in hospital.
When I did feel better, I went for a walk down the corridor…
and peeked outside, feeling hemmed in like this fleeting glimpse of the sky.
Fortunately, after a week of this, my levels dropped to 7,000 U/L. Still very high by regular standards, but good enough for me to go home. So I said goodbye to my bed for a week and celebrated with a soy ice-cream from Mr Bean.
The last time I was warded was almost thirty years ago, and it felt like a combination of being confined to the bunk during ICT with room service (including blood pressure tests) being offered at all hours. Not terrible, but not something I would like to repeat anytime soon.
After an intense ten days at the Singapore Writers Festival I’m back to considering the role of text and image in my work in a couple of events that are coming up this weekend.
Most of the time, the image is made first. It occurs from a way of looking, an intense gaze in search of something striking. It does not have to be spectacular or manufactured. The image is often found at the intersection between light and chance.
The frame is always deliberate, and what is excluded is sometimes what is unnecessary; an abundance of sky which fills too much of the frame, or cropping out what’s distracting, which could be something as simple as one person too many, or simply a brightly-coloured object.
The void deck, spotless; where not even doggies dare to leave barks behind
The poem almost always comes afterwards, a kind of reflection to the image. The poem is a mirror held up to the image, translating that striking moment into its own composed shape.
The frame line sits between, an unused space that separates two adjacent images, or frames. If one considers the image and the poem as two successive frames, then the frame line is what divides and connects them.
So join me this Saturday as I talk about my solo photohaiku exhibition, Slide and Tongue, at Intersections Gallery, 34 Kandahar Street at 2pm. More details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/258257094880173/
And the very next day, I’ll be speaking on Today at Apple at the Apple Store on Orchard Road! It’s a talk/photo walk where I share a few ideas and approaches to photography and then we’ll all go for a photo walk together around the Emerald Hill area to take a few images and write a poem based on them.
We’re back! This Saturday at the Arts House Play Den, for just one night. But got two show lah, 6.30pm and 9pm – to cater for those who wanna eat dinner before, those who wanna eat dinner after and those who have to catch a flight.
After .gif, Wu Jun Han and I played to a capacity crowd at the ArtScience Museum for the first run of Green is the Colour of my Heart, we felt bad that people actually came (albeit, late) for the show and had to be turned away! So we decided to stage it again, with the generous venue support of the Arts House.
I would like to say that the second time round, we’re definitely more comfortable and confident with our material, plus, it’s a different space, so it allows for some variety in staging. Some people liked the show so much they are coming back again! That’s truly moving, and I’m thankful that poetry still has a place in my peoples’ hearts.
Tickets are available here: greenisthecolourofmyheart.peatix.com Use discount code: GREENHEART for a 20% discount.
I’ll also be selling Vital Possessions, which contains several poems from the show as well as Auguries of Modern Innocence, which will be performed together with a kickass soundtrack by .gif. as well as visuals from the amazing artists who illustrated the poem.
Vital Possessions is my ninth (ninth!!) book of poetry. The roots of this book came about through the Gardens by the Bay residency in 2015. I had the opportunity to spend hours walking and thinking in the grounds of GBTB. Initially, I wasn’t enamoured by how planned and fake the gardens seemed to be. I am more a fan of wide-open moors and natural forests. But gradually, I came to see the gardens as that perfect synthesis between nature and nurture. It is, in many ways, the epitome of our garden city. The Supertrees are like our skyscrapers, inhabited by a variety of human flora, and the grounds of the garden are much like our planned estates, neatly segmented while still keeping a semblance of nature and enough variety to keep us sane.
The poems in the book began to be shaped by this overarching theme and along the way, they expanded as I explored and visited other green spaces. I also considered the way we interacted with our environment. Along the way, the title of the book morphed from Naturebiotics to For Yours Is The Garden to Vital Possessions. It became a treatise on what we believe and hold dear to in an age of uncertainty, where our faith is frangible and our knowledge fractured.
The book reads like one long narrative and dips in and out of the following themes: our relationship with nature and natural spaces, how technology interfaces with our lives and the votive value of nature. Haiku accompanied by photographs intersperse the poems. They function as pauses, a breath of image; quirky and quiet reminders of the unnoticed quotidian.
Ethos Books, my publisher, has been very patient with the manuscript over many moons of editing and piecing together the book. The cover proved to be especially tricky, because with such a title, it was truly difficult to find an image that would evoke a similar state of feeling.
The book launch is at the Esplanade Concourse on 11 August, at 5pm. I will be doing something rather different, and invite all of you to come and join me as Vital Possessions finally emerges into the world.
After a productive residency in Paris, it’s back to more gigs, launches and the general melee of being a writer, producer and performer in Singapore. All of which is always a blast, but it does get kinda intense sometimes!
At the upcoming #buysinglit campaign weekend, which also merges with the Textures festival organised by the Arts House, I’ll be producing and performing in Note for Note.
And from 9 March to 1 April, I have the greatest pleasure of exhibiting alongside some of Singapore’s most exciting visual artists. Auguries of Modern Innocence is an exhibition that is a modern rewrite of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence. Visual artists worked on various stanzas, creating a striking series of tableaus that conjure up visions of modern dystopia.
The exhibition opens from 10 am on 9 March, but drop by for the official launch on 10 March at 6.30pm.
There will also be an interactive workshop on 10 March from 2.30 to 5.30pm.
Come by to modernise your own bit of Blake and get a piece of artwork custom-made by the artists in the exhibition.
And on 17 March, we’ll be having an artist talk in the space from 4-5.30pm .
More info here: https://www.theartshouse.sg/whats-on/auguries-of-modern-innocence
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.
Toa Payoh Central is a quintessential microcosm of life in Singapore’s HDB heartland. It is a melange of commercial enterprises, peopled by older folk as well as a slew of younger people who work in the HDB Hub that links to the MRT station and the bus interchange and becomes an all encompassing multi-level strip mall.
These are common moments; pauses to buy 4D, to check messages, to while away work hours.
Starbucks is contemplated by a small group of statues of uncertain provenance. Security cameras exchange safety for privacy.
Sharp corners of buildings jut out, trying to add a touch of post-2010 into the landscape.
A row of spiral staircases are surprising spectators in a nondescript car-park.
Courts rises out of the shimmering afternoon heat, a bastion of A/C and relevant home appliances.
Older folk pause in the middle of their perambulations, stopping to think and dream, to remember what no one else sees.
Photographed with the Fuji X-T2 and Meike 28/f2.8.
So there I was, waiting six hours in a bed in a room full of hacking old men for a bed in a ward. One gentlemen even pooped in the gurney next to me. The smell was… incredible.
and peeked outside, feeling hemmed in like this fleeting glimpse of the sky.
Fortunately, after a week of this, my levels dropped to 7,000 U/L. Still very high by regular standards, but good enough for me to go home. So I said goodbye to my bed for a week and celebrated with a soy ice-cream from Mr Bean.
Courts rises out of the shimmering afternoon heat, a bastion of A/C and relevant home appliances.
