In Conversation: Alvin Pang with Stephanie Chan on Poetry Communities Beyond Borders
No man is an island, and neither is any literary community--even if it does exist on a tiny island nation-state. Singapore has seen a rich community of poets and readers of local English language poetry taking root and blossoming over the past few years, helped in no small part by reminders to #BuySingLit and #SupportLocal. One might almost be forgiven for thinking that it’s a national duty to buy books by Singaporeans and prioritise writing “Singaporean” poetry about “Singaporean” issues, for Singaporeans.
However, Singapore’s poetry scene also owes its richness to decades of connections and cross-pollination with literary scenes around Southeast Asia and beyond. And we still have a lot to learn from and share with poetry scenes around the region. I spoke with poet Alvin Pang to discuss the history of Singapore’s transnational poetry connections, as well as why we need to keep building bridges with writers and readers around the world in order to keep evolving.
Stephanie Chan To start off, what transnational poetry projects have you been involved with? How did it all start?
Alvin Pang 1996 / 1997 was when I had my first individual book out. Very soon after that I realised there were other people writing in Singapore. That’s when I got interested in anthologising work. It was partly a way to pull together and acknowledge a loose collection of people who were privately writing stuff, and have a sense of a scene or a sense of people writing [in Singapore]. And I have to say that my going abroad is part of that want to build a sense of a Singapore poetry writing community. Because once we had a book out (No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry, pub. Ethos Books, 2000) and it was very local. It was very us. But in those days, there was no internet, so there was no real sense of what this meant. So we took the book to Kuala Lumpur, which was a bit like taking a boat and exploring the Pacific Ocean. Is anyone else out there? we thought. Would they be interested in what we had? Because we had a book, we had something to show and share, right? So we went and did that in KL and it was very successful.
SC How did you organise that?
AP There was a bookstore called Silverfish in KL. It’s always meeting individuals. And we already knew there were people [in KL] writing here and there. So first it was KL and making friends with the bookstore there. A bunch of us — Yi Sheng, Qian Xi, possibly Shu Hoong, Beng Liang — a whole bunch of us took the train, did a reading there and realised, “Oh yeah, this could be a thing. We could actually have a readership. We can actually have people listening to us. Even though they are elsewhere.” And so it gave us a taste for doing this.
SC So you found Malaysian readers.
AP KL, specifically.
SC KL readers and poets that could connect to your work.
AP Yeah and you know, we had not made that kind of connection for years. Decades ago, people were still doing it. And for our generation, we had no guides. We had no one to tell us, “This is how it’s supposed to work.”
So yah, KL was our first taste, and for me it was always part and parcel of community building. There wasn’t a local-foreign community divide for us. For us, it was like, let’s find our tribe, you know? Because Singapore was small, not just in terms of market but in terms of mindset. So for us it was about finding our tribe, more broadly, wherever we could find it.
In 2001, we were invited to go to Manila by the writer / friend Krip Luzon, and he introduced us to the Filipino writing scene, right when they were having People Power II and sort of cutting out their president. So we were immersed in this very euphoric, political time in the Philippines. And of course it was very good for writing, a very exciting [time]. People were reading political poems, students skipped classes to go… It was very cool, and Singaporeans will never experience that kind of thing.
Every trip we took just gave us more and more confidence to do the next one. We were learning things, we were seeing new countries, we were meeting kindred spirits outside Singapore. And just expanding our sense of what poetry can do in different communities. We started touring Australia. And then in 2002 we went to tour the US. And I went to IWP, the Iowa International Writing Program. IWP was the moment I realised that poetry scenes all around the world were the same, with the same politics and lack of resources, which was incredibly comforting. It made me feel a lot less like a freak in Singapore. And ironically it made me more determined than ever to connect internationally because I realise that the tribe of poetry is global. By connecting globally we can accelerate our learning and also find our kindred spirits. I would say everything else out there has flowed from this… these early experiences.
SC Singapore is a great scene: it’s growing so quickly and I find myself writing more for Singapore audiences, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you just write in Singapore about Singapore for Singapore, that it can get very…
AP Parochial.
SC Yes.
AP I wanted to ask you, precisely because you had that UK and international thing — how do you see yourself balancing the two? Do you see yourself having a UK face and a Singapore face?
SC It’s a weird thing because I do believe if I stayed in Singapore I would not have become a poet. It was only when I went overseas, in a city where I didn’t know anyone, that I dared to try performing [my poems]. Then I came back to Singapore for a summer and won the [national] slam here, and even then it felt like, oh shit, why did I win? I’m not part of this community. It feels wrong that I should win…
AP One thing I’ve always tried to say is that the local-international divide is arbitrary. Singapore is also profoundly international in every way. You can say you pepper your work with very localised references, but even global literature does that increasingly. Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings — that Creole, that’s what makes it interesting. I can imagine Singaporean patois (not necessarily Singlish) travelling well too. And when I’ve done Singlish pieces they work extremely well around the world. So what does it mean to write local vs global? To me, it’s like: write well and it will cross. If people don’t get the references, they can google it.
SC And travelling, bringing your work abroad can really teach you that there’s more that resonates than we think, especially if it’s specific.
AP Which is a basic quality of writing. The better you get to the point, the more particular [the writing] is, the more resonant and interesting it is… and of course learning goes both ways. It’s about finding readers, finding your audience. But also learning from what other people have done, right? How are readings organised in Australia? How do writers centres work? How can we bring back some of that work? From that, we can see where SingLit Station is explicitly learning from things we’ve seen elsewhere…
SC So… structures.
AP Structures and all that. The Philippines and all the amazing writers’ workshops that have been running for decades and grooming generations of writers: Manuscript Bootcamp is based on that, based on the Silliman Writers’ Workshop in the Philippines. Explicitly. So it’s a win-win. So these are direct connections, acknowledged connections. Are you telling me that’s not valuable? I think that’s just stunting ourselves.
SC Even the open mic Destination: Ink was partly inspired by Nabilah [Husna]’s experiences of going to London and performing at poetry open mics there.
AP Exactly! So our scene already is and has been built on what we have learnt from elsewhere. We already, in that sense, are global. Which is normal for literature.
SC One argument that people have, that I heard a lot growing up, is that there is no market for Singapore books or art, or that no one in Singapore wants to read Singapore books, they only want to read Western books.
AP But if you’ve done your homework as a poet, if you’ve travelled around the world, you’ll know Singapore’s poetry scene is far healthier than say, London or New York. In terms of book sales we tell people our numbers, their jaws drop... you tell people you sell 4000 copies of a poetry book — I’ve been published in the UK, I know what the numbers are like — the numbers we get in Singapore, you have to be Carol Ann Duffy to sell that number of books in the UK.
SC In the UK spoken word scene, one business model that allows them to sell books is to go on tours and sell it around the country.
AP Like concert tickets.
SC Exactly. Singapore is a much smaller country; we can’t go on tours, but in some ways we have it better in that we are able to sell many books to so many people even without multiple cities with multiple scenes.
AP The fact of the matter is, I don’t think we should be shy about what we’ve achieved. If you ask me, it proves we have something to offer and we have something to learn. Both of these I think call on us to just engage more widely, you know? Break our comfort zone a little bit, scare ourselves a bit, figure out what the big conversations are around the world and figure out what speak to us, and decide which ones speak to us, and figure out which ones we have a moral, political response to, to understand what’s going on.
SC The argument when it comes to [English language media and literary art] is always: You’re either with Singapore or with the West. But there are also all these amazing regional authors with their own histories.
AP There is just so much being produced, including work that is in translation, work that is in at least one language you can read. But even if we restrict it to English there is such, so much… We are very uneducated. And in some ways the moral, aesthetic and cultural imperative to do that, to know your neighbours — it’s not there.
We don’t think about going to KL, going to the Philippines, which are the obvious counterparts because Anglophone writing is so strong. Let’s say the Philippines, for example, where clearly writing in English is so strong: no one here knows their work. There’s a phenomenal amount of quality work that we don’t know. We cannot be so self-satisfied in our little…
The question is not even about what we stand to gain; the question is about what we are losing by not looking beyond our own blinkers. I have heard one argument recently from Annaliza Bakri that even in Singapore, Malay writers are marginalised resource-wise, attention-wise. I have another friend who realised at SWF that Malay writing is very ghettoised. So in that sense their argument for not going abroad is: Can we pay attention to the othered writers in our midst? And I agree. I think it’s the same impulse actually. It’s about recognising that diversity and the importance of that. It’s not about the national border. The “Other” might not actually be out there it might be in our midst.
SC In 2014 I went to KL for a weekend of spoken word. In some ways, meeting poets from KL was even more incredible to me than discovering the UK and European spoken word scenes. I thought, wow, there are all these people who are so much like us, who are writing like us, who have similar narratives, under our noses and very close…
AP They are only under our noses because we hold our noses so high. The fact that we find it surprising is kind of our bad. Our collective bad. I include myself.
SC There was a similar thing in London. Many people who live in London, myself included, get stuck in this mindset that the most important events, projects, happen in London. So they ignore whatever is happening in other UK cities. For it was only when I went to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2012 that I suddenly got introduced to all these poets from around the UK, and realised again, wow, there are all these other scenes and people in the country who are doing exciting work.
AP Uh, yes.
SC In London it was always like, “Oh it is too big to leave, too big to think about what’s going on outside…”
AP So we must be sure never to fall into that trap. I fear that we already have fallen into that trap a little bit. I think there is corrective tuition to be done, just for the next decade or so. I don’t know how many people are up for it but I really do feel like we need to just educate ourselves on what’s happening. It’s not about liking, it’s not about, “Oh, they have better poets.” It’s about knowing what the hell is going on.
SC Yeah.
AP And then seeing what that means for us; do we care, do we not care? I think lots of people won’t. There is still a lot of work to be done. So much bloody going on. And we are just seeing our own tiny little chunk of it.
SC What do you suggest?
AP Pool together and go out. I am willing to put money into this. Get a group together and go to KL, the Philippines. Just get out more. Even one experience.
The point is to see that the world is a big place and to make whatever corner of the world one lives in a little better. But yeah my sense is to get as many people to experience that part of the world as possible and see what it means to engage outside. Because I think a lot of people still don’t have a good point of comparison. I have always said, I want our writers to grow up with other writers. That sense of growing up together. It’s not either/or. It’s not about the Singapore scene vs the Australian scene vs the Malaysian scene. In this complicated, messy place called Southeast Asia, or the human race, or whatever you want — figure things out together. We don’t have to stay in these boxes. It’s really that. What do you think?
SC I think there could be more collaborations around the region, more meaningful dialogue, bringing people from other countries here.
AP And festivals are not the best way to do this. Very performative.
SC These poets fly in for a weekend, then fly out again, don’t really get to know the country.
AP Bring a small tight group, sit around, hang out, drink booze, talk — things like that. And it doesn’t have to be huge. 4-5 people, party sized, every year or whatever, fly them in, talk, go visit them… that’s how we started. And you need to keep doing it. That’s one thing I realised. Once Robert Yeo asked me, “Eh, how do you get invited to all these festivals and things? How come ah? Especially when I know all these people?” I’m like, you know all these people, but have you gotten in touch with them over the past 20 years? All the people who invite me to conferences and festivals are your friends whom you have not spoken to in ten years…. what do you expect?
SC It’s about staying in touch.
AP it’s about human relationships. You can’t make a booty call if you’ve not called a person in five years. It’s wrong. You need to keep up ties, stay in touch. And as people die out, get older and busier, that’s life, maybe you don’t have time to do as much as you used to…
But we should never feel like we’ve arrived. The day we feel like we’ve arrived and have a scene of our own is the day we stagnate. We must always feel like we are going somewhere, always evolving, can always do better. I would hate to be so self-satisfied.