Shared Terrain

By Theophilus Kwek

Review of State of Play: Poets of East & Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation, edited by Eddie Tay and Jennifer Wong (London: Out-Spoken Press, 2023)

Readers leafing through State of Play, Eddie Tay and Jennifer Wong’s new anthology of correspondence between poets of East and Southeast Asian backgrounds, may be forgiven for finding themselves lost in this rich landscape of poetic dialogue. Towering figures like Li-Young Lee and Arthur Sze are included, alongside brilliant young voices including Troy Cabida, Felix Chow, and Mukahang Limbu, who have yet to publish their first full collection. The book’s six sections – expansively titled ‘heritage’, ‘everyday life’, ‘writing’, ‘reading’, ‘language’, and ‘home’ – stand as all-too-generic  signposts to exchanges that, on closer examination, touch on topics as varied as rest days for domestic workers, first encounters with snow, and the ever-present spectre of the pandemic. But there is also plenty to reward the determined traveller. Not only in their gems of honesty and advice, but how these letters point us back to conversation, that most tender of art forms, as a way of knowing and caring for each other, of slowly turning a well-traversed personal terrain into a shared one.

Conversations are made infinitely richer by context, and it is unfortunate that the editors have chosen to divulge little in their introduction about the genesis of the project, the logic behind each pairing, or the initial prompt or invitation posed to these poets. Figuring out what might have transpired before each conversation, or even the medium that it took place in, thus becomes the reader’s riddle. Fortunately, the poets (paired two by two except for Li-Young Lee, whose correspondence is with both editors) leave an extensive trail of breadcrumbs, referring often to contemporary events and works-in-progress, that allow us to piece together where they are writing from, and how and when. Some exchanges were obviously conducted over email, while others betray the spontaneity – and awkwardness – of a long-distance Zoom call. It is also for this reason, however, that the five solo contributions sit oddly within the book’s construct. While sparkling with their own insights, they contain far fewer clues to the questions and imagined audiences that frame them, and seem to come edgeways at the ideas that emerge organically from the other featured exchanges.  

Structural issues aside, these conversations are a pleasure to read in their own right, thanks to the generosity of the interlocutors and the intimacy of the form. Near the beginning of the book are two (transcribed from long-distance calls between Troy Cabida and Theresa Muñoz, and between Sarah Howe and Monica Youn) that are suffused with the thrill of discovery, as the poets encounter each other’s lived and imagined landscapes in easy, erudite conversation. Reading Cabida wax lyrical about the allure of big-city living in the 90s romcom One Fine Day, and Youn describe Howe as “not one of those macho pentameter dudes”, as they puzzle through notions of English tradition, feels like snagging a seat at the world’s best dinner party. Other conversations, edited from email exchanges (such as between Victoria Chang and Nina Mingya Powles), are often more proper at the start – “I hope this email finds you well” / “Nice to meet you here” – but soon delve into the inescapable lived detail surrounding each writer’s work. If Powles describes herself as “always writing about the different ways language(s) can inhabit the body”, there’s perhaps nothing that says this more clearly than having a beloved new puppy snoring by her desk in Aotearoa New Zealand, named ‘Kaya’.

With several pairings, between more established and newer poets, there is the unmistakable feeling of instruction; not of the didactic sort, but characterised instead by the patience and possibility of mentorship. In the course of their conversation, California-based Ethan Yu shares a recent poem with Kit Fan in York, England, who offers perceptive comments alongside reflections on Stevens, Kierkegaard and Homer’s Odyssey. Laura Jane Lee, arriving in Singapore via Hong Kong and Oxford, sends a series of urgent, probing questions (“Do I dare think about sinking roots?” / “Do you think somebody could be home?”) to Alvin Pang, on residency in Italy, like a novice pilgrim to an elder. Most moving, in these exchanges, is the senior poets’ palpable excitement as they ponder their counterparts’ ideas and urge them onwards. “As I was listening to you, my synapses were firing with the names of texts and quotes that I wanted to share”, says R. A. Villanueva (via old-school voice note) to undergraduate Eric Yip. There is humility, gentleness – in spades – and a comradeship of craft, extending beyond technique to encompass all that it takes to make a life, if not a living, with words.

Conversations among peers take a different tone. Some find common cause amid the contusions of the present, like Marylyn Tan and Mukahang Limbu who draw adroit parallels between the circumstances of Gurkha families and other sidelined, migrant, and queer voices in Singapore. “Stay dangerous!” – hollers Mukahang, having returned to the UK – “the cold winds of spring are cray here”; one intuitively grasps that it is not only the English weather that he is referring to. Others, like veteran poets and old friends Leong Liew Geok and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, mark common milestones in a long road spanning different times and territories, from an upbringing in what was still then the ‘Straits Settlements’, via “digressions” (to borrow Lim’s word) through the US, Australia, and elsewhere, to where they have respectively found “a recognition of place and home” (to borrow Leong’s). Although they have trodden quite different paths, what is evident is their deep and mutual admiration, as is the sharpness of their shared, ambivalent, retrospective gaze as they confront the personal and poetic choices they have each made. Reading this exchange, one thinks of Chen Chen’s line in his letter to Lora Supandi: “Why is it that running away from ache just leads to more right around the corner? Ache knows how to find us. Maybe because ache is life, too, alongside non-ache”.

This, ultimately, is the joy that comes from the anthology: how the poets’ letters jostle with and shed light on each other, not unlike threading through a party full of your friends, and realising that the snatches of conversation you overhear add up to a map of the room you’re all standing in. The music’s loud and the voices clamorous, but as you slip with your glass from group to group, each circle parts ever so slightly to let you in – with a look of recognition, a smile, and a river of conversation that enfolds and welcomes you, as only words can.

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Theophilus Kwek has published four full-length collections of poetry, two of which were shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. In 2023, he was the youngest writer and first Singaporean to be awarded the Cikada Prize by the Swedish Institute, for poetry that “defends the inviolability of life”.

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