“Early and Late” and “Every Poet Wants to Be Your Dog”

By Chris Huntington 

Dawn Ng - Installation shot of MONUMENT MOMENTO (2019), Stone Engraved, size variable
Image description: An installation shot of five rectangular stone blocks in front of a white backdrop. Each block is differently sized with varying colors and textures, and each is engraved with words. The chosen words are often steeped in irony and are emblematic of the balance between binaries and dualities. 

Early and Late

One of my students turns in her paper, but she accidentally gives me one for another class too. As a result, the online portal marks her work as EARLY and LATE, which I tell her is how I’ve felt my entire life. She doesn’t laugh because she’s nervous and maybe because I’m not funny. Lydia Davis called her book CAN’T AND WON’T which is also a good title, but not for me. I want to tell my student that when I was in seventh grade I joined the track team, and forty years later my father still chuckles about how I came in not just last, but so far behind that the coach waved for me to get off the track so they could get the next racers started. In high school, I had a crush on a girl, but I was afraid to kiss her even when she sat beside me in her running shorts with her chin on her knee. And then I resolved to kiss her, but she took a year abroad. I wanted to wander the earth and now here I am. When my mother was born, there wasn’t a term for “Chinese girl born in Dallas,” so people just called her a Jap. Years later, I lived in Taiwan where I was asked why I had a nose like a white guy, and I said, “one half,” ( 一半) which is how I described myself because I wasn’t fluent. Sometimes I think I can speak English but the feeling passes. In Gabon, I left a woman’s house by the back door when unexpected headlights filled the window of her bedroom. I frightened all the chickens in the yard, so it was a terrible getaway, but then again, no one came looking. This was a relief at the time but also like a knife in the heart. I suppose I can laugh about it now, but with whom? My student apologizes again for the mix-up. I smile. How seldom we say what needs to be said. How seldom we can. I want to tell her: There is nothing to apologize for. All my life I have felt early or late. I want to tell her: Timing is everything when you write a poem. Or tell a joke. You have to know when to be silent. 

Dawn Ng - Sleep, MONUMENT MOMENTO (2019), Stone engraved, 730 x 280 x 280 mm
Image description: A rectangular block made of black marble sitting against a white backdrop with the words “WHAT A SPECTACULAR WASTE OF TIME/ TO SPEND A THIRD OF LIFE IN SLUMBER/ A REHEARSAL OF DEATH OVER AND OVER”engraved on one of its surfaces. 

Every Poet Wants to Be Your Dog

Dogs don’t see well enough to read, which makes me sad. Dog words would have to move like rabbits, like squirrels, like birds on the white sky of a page. Letters would have to smell like rivers, like old beer cans, like pavement. Dogs are color-blind, too, which makes me sad when I think about all the bright green they miss out on in the spring, but they probably feel the same way about me in the fall, when leaves are burning and the earth is a breezey open hand, a song made of compost and damp bark. Emily Dickinson had a dog named Carlo, who had no idea what a writer was or that she was one. When Carlo died, Dickinson wrote that time was no remedy for her loss, but this wasn’t entirely true, of course— because eventually she also died. Time puts an end to everything. Emily Dickinson wrote poems her whole life: faintly, in pencil, on the backs of envelopes hidden in her pocket. I’ve always been in love with poems, but I am fifty-three and I find poetry to be more and more unreadable. Not because of the language. But because the small presses print the words so small, in thin-armed serif that looks to me like frost on a chain-link fence. Is this how a dog feels? A friend of mine did Shotokon karate for years, so long that his black belt turned the color of chalk. I feel that way about poetry. I feel like all poetry is turning into a white page. All my life, I have been told to say less or maybe even nothing. The world doesn’t need my poems. I should find some happiness in this. As I get older, it feels more and more urgent that I go for a walk, even in the rain. The world is waiting. 

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Chris Huntington is the author of the prize-winning novel Mike Tyson Slept Here. His non-fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and outlets, including National Public Radio and The New York Times. His poetry has been featured in Rattle, Solstice, Peatsmoke, Singapore Unbound, and elsewhere. More information is available at www.chrishuntingtononline.com.

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Dawn Ng is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, who has worked across a breadth of mediums, motifs, and scale, including sculpture, photography, light, film, collage, painting and large scale installations. Her practice deals with time, memory and the ephemeral. Often characterized by lyricism and a nuanced use of colour, Dawn’s work has been acquired by the Singapore Art Museum, and exhibited at the Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, and the Lille3000 art festival, France. She has had solos in Art Basel Hong Kong and the Art Paris Art Fair, and shown in London, Sydney, Seoul, Shanghai, and Jakarta. In 2016, Dawn was commissioned by the Hermes Foundation to inaugurate their Singapore gallery with a solo installation, and was also part of the Jeju Biennale, Korea in 2017. In 2019, Dawn was commissioned to fill a wing of the ArtScience Museum for their Floating Utopias exhibition, and opened a commissioned solo at the Asian Civilisations Museum in 2020.

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