Day 19-23

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

Day 20: The Artsy Prompt 

I started this prompt considering how art and poetry often co-exist and interact within the same sphere, how any distinction between them is as diaphanous as we allow it to be. Much has been said about how art transforms our writing—I was particularly stricken after reading Victoria Chang’s With My Back To The World, which is inspired by the artist Agnes Martin, and how her words in the poems have been shaped by paintings and geometry to speak another depth of language to grief and loss. This then led me to the thought, if we were to be writing this much about our intimate connections with art, would it come to influence our perception of our own personhood and reality as well? How much have we allowed art to transform our inner selves—and to what extent—and how much have we allowed of ourselves to chase that transformation? The influence between art and life are cyclical. It begs the question, how much of life is our own and how much of it has been led down a certain trajectory because of the art we have encountered? Maybe, at the end, what we perceive is not truly our own but what has been taught to us through art.

What were you looking out for, and what kinds of poems were you expecting?

I was looking out for poems about lives that have been shaped by the art the poets have encountered, and about the tension between art and living.

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

living in the edit by Deanna surprised me because of how poignantly it captured the tension between art and living, reflecting on Singapore Dreaming in a way that reads like the scenes of a movie unfurling across the page. Are we living a life because art (or media) has told us it was desirable to, or has it exposed the horrors of the reality in which we live? In striking, vivid imagery, the speaker undergoes a deep transformation, thanks to the movie, to perceive his life in a different light, moving from disaffection to tender resolution in a pseudo-cinematographic narrative arc.

Select 1-2 poems responding to your favourite prompt. Were there any lines/poems you wished you had written yourself?

I enjoyed metonymy of lost years by Pamela Seong Koon in response to the Insomniac Prompt (Day 22) because of how it reads like a stream-of-consciousness narrative that mimics the disorientation of being awake at unearthly hours in the night. The metaphors are intriguing—“i count the duvet creases slatted against my spine like a puzzle” and “when a place is quiet you can hear the whir of their bones”.

The poem immediately draws you in in half-stupor, ferries you through a journey in the night, holds a finger up to your lips and tells you to stay silent and listen.

“I walked past it some mornings just to hear something—the angsana leaves turning in the wet heat, a mynah’s argument three floors up, the blue benches holding nobody”—Block 18 by Ian Ong

“a poem defines me as ink tattoos to paper—another me, sinewed piecemeal into homunculus” –from involuntarily nocturnal by Low Kian Seh