Day 1 - 6

Senior Moderator: nor

Pick one prompt from your week. What was your process in coming up with this prompt?

The Lost in Translation prompt was tied to the giveaway of my poetry chapbook, Ginsberg, sing me a jiwang song. When I began the work on the chapbook, I would excerpt lyrics from Malay rock ballads from the 1980s as an exercise of translating Malay poetics into English. 

What were you looking out for and the kind of poems you were expecting?

I was hoping to be moved by the limitation of language, and possibly introduced concepts that were maybe foreign to the English medium.

Can you share 1-2 poems that surprised you and why?

How to translate the gay word for “love” to a bisexual boy to a bisexual boy in a straight culture by kwl3000 took me by surprise! I had completely forgotten that code-switching as a queer person is also a kind of translation as well and that queer yearning is one of the most difficult things to translate!

Select 1-2 poems responding to your favourite prompt.

I Dare You To by Conan. The Botanic Gardens poem isn’t my fave prompt per se, but it was the prompt I had to brainstorm hard for.

Were there any lines/poems you wished you had written yourself?