Mercuneutics

At the close of his well-written study, The Death of the Critic, Ronan McDonald repeats a quote from the playwright Brendan Behan and the gist of this is that literary critics are eunuchs in the harem. McDonald regrets this point-of-view and the decline of criticism into a dark place, almost a grave, where it is seen as uncreative. Bite Harder Open Letters and Close Readings by Koh Jee Leong could almost be a reply to McDonald's book. It is not a book written by a eunuch: it is sexy, savvy, incisive, cultured, and ultimately creative.  Ethos Books have taken a leap into the dark with this book and their bold jump is a challenge to dreary criticism-- to the conservative tongue-in-cheek writing in Singapore that tows the governmental line and to the dull, polyglottal theories of reading that avoid authorship and close, textual reading. The twenty essays are collected into four sections, each building into a unity, and they fold around a central interview with the author ab

Tea is that beverage which joins East and West. It serves as the exact cultural metaphor for a poet who spans two hemispheres: the UK and USA on one hand; Singapore and Japan on the other. As the connoisseur of moral literary criticism, Dr Johnson, observed: "tea amused the evening, solaced the midnight, welcomed the morning." Literary taste and tea are fused historically and the awareness is well-infused in Jee Leong Koh's latest work. There is continuity in this volume of poems with early work, sexual identity, what gay writing might be, a mature understanding of the tensions between cultural history and the individual self, and the place of form in contemporary poetry. There is also a significant change in that  Steep Tea  is a seasoned work. The poems of Jee Leong Koh are always crafted, in fact meticulous craftsmanship is a hallmark. But these poems have the feeling of being worked at through time. Fine edits have been made during the editorial process

The Pillow Book sleeps on the zuihitsu tradition, on the writings of Sei Shonagon. Her work may or may not have been intended for publication. But even if a writer does not write for publication, they write with an awareness of a reader in their head, even if that audience of one is the writer. This, I would argue, is the breathtaking quality of this chapbook: its equivocal voice, its ability to be internal and external, at once a writer speaking to himself and a voice speaking to a readership. Stephen Fellner is an astute critic and his review of The Pillow Book is to be applauded: yes, he has the nerve to risk reading the new. But he does, so often, hit a wrong note. “As a reader, you begin to want there to be more arbitrariness.” Really, The Pillow Book isn’t about randomness, just repeating the Japanese tradition. It’s a book about two cultures, East and West, and the conflict/agreement between intention and indeterminacy, what is made and what is found in this life

Jee Leong Koh’s new book of poetry is a significant work. But significant in how many ways? The literary critic, Nicholas Liu, describes it as a “mighty book” for Singaporean literature . This he is well qualified to judge. I believe it is no less a great book in terms of gay poetry— a statement which needs explanation given the current dissatisfaction with the term gay poetry. And a forceful book in terms of Hermeticism— a claim which is probably going to need just as much clarification. Reginald Shepherd said almost everything that needed to be said in his attack on identity poetics. A poetics that exists to push a gay agenda serves the wrong god. The Greeks ascribed poetry to Apollo, not Eros. A poet must be first and foremost a poet. His allegiance is to creativity, not fucking. But a writer who is prepared to push his sexuality to the margins and declare himself a writer who happens to be gay, as if his core is an accidental, also makes an error. In the High Renaissance, Her

The term gay poet recognises an ordering of the creative agenda. And that ordering implies much more than writing about gay sex or writing with a gay sensibility. The gay poet draws from a desire for a defining style/Hermes/Thoth, god of the stylus , creates through technique/Apollo, and includes sexual experience into what is created/Eros. This “giving style”, for Nietzsche, involved bringing all contradictions under “one yoke”, a kind of discipline that exerted pressure on many unequal points and brought them to a single focus. (Very Poundian). This dedication to style and identity is something that characterises the gay poetic tradition as it runs through the hands of Robert Duncan, H.D. and Reginald Shepherd. (Duncan and H.D. are unquestionable Hermeticists and Shepherd follows a decidedly hermeneutical bent). In his truly perceptive review of Seven Studies for a Self Portrait , Nicholas Liu’s claims that Jee Leong Koh’s project, in SSfaSP, is “Elotian”. I think this is an ov

The first sequence in Seven Studies for a Self-Portrait has the same title as Jee Leong’s Koh’s book. This sequence of ekphrastic poems, in which poetry speaks to visual art and portrait speaks to poet, sets the tone for the volume. The seven studies follow a biographical order, 1500-1996, from Durer to Morimura, and they gradually change in tone, in response to art history. Durer’s portrait of himself as Christ is an affirmation of representational art and Christianity. God created Man in His image, so Durer, as new-Adam, paints himself as Christ. At the other extreme, Morimura’s appropriation of Marilyn Monroe shows how unstable self-portraiture has become in Modern Art. Morimura becomes Monroe to create an illusion that is neither Morimura nor Monroe. If Durer’s self-portrait suggests incarnation, Morimura’s suggests implantation. Nicholas Liu makes a brilliant perception when he observes that these ekphrastic poems have Morimura as “the presiding spirit”. He notes that Morimur

As already said, Seven Studies for a Self Portrait contains seven sections. The sections are of even lengths, apart from the seventh section which constitutes almost half of the book. The sections which follow “Seven Studies” expand in difficulty, opening to what is the tour de force among the short sequences: “Bull Eclogues”. There is an enigmatic quality to “Seven Studies”. And this is followed by three further puzzles. These sequences could be compared to musical studies, short pieces that create a single mood or mode of expression. The best musical parallel I can think of would be the piano studies of Satie, at once mystical, poised, and singular— but whereas Satie can become eccentric, Jee Leong Koh is elliptical. The title “Profiles” immediately suggests an ambiguity. A profile is a short description and a figure painted from the side. Each of the poems in “Profiles” describes a “He”, an unknown man viewed in miniature and from a side-view. The poems are oblique shots of h

Currently, on Lambda Literary Blog , Saeed Jones has opened up a debate on the connection between gay identity and poetry. His article emerges from an interesting debate that ran on his blog about a year ago: What makes a poem gay? A debate to which Jee Leong Koh contributed. This debate has some bearing on “Bull Eclogues”. An overview of that debate looks like this. According to Jerome Murphy, the gay poet is fragranced with “lavender”. Such intimates a weak stereotype. Think "Cavafy". (A contestable start indeed). He wishes for a stronger image and suggests that the gay poet is a “trickster” with “double vision”. That is worth considering. The double vision was literal in Robert Duncan’s case…which became a metaphor for his double-meaning world of Hermeticism. For Duncan, puns opened up depths within language, crossways at which the divine entered. Yes, the gay poet has always been a “trickster”, in the sense explored by Lewis Hyde in Trickster Makes This World . The g

In 2005, Times magazine listed Ted Haggard as one of the most influential Evangelical leaders in the USA. At that time, he was the leader of the National Associations of Evangelicals and a public figure welcomed at The White House. In 2006, a scandal broke which exposed him as a homosexual— a great setback for his Evangelical homophobia. This is the context for “Bull Eclogues”, a sequence in which its author presents the spiritual crisis of Haggard and by painting a portrait of him sketches his own personal concerns, as a gay man, about Evangelical Christianity. Durer casting himself as Christ in “Sketch #1” mutates into Haggard’s tortured view of himself as Christian martyr. This sequence is a wonderfully energetic analysis of the sins of Christianity. The “Bull Eclogues” are written with a sharp sense of irony. Nicholas Liu, with true insight, observes that Jee Leong Koh’s sonnets are Petrarchan. (They have the familiar turn of mood as octet becomes sestet). The Petrarchan sonnet

The final sequence of SSfaSP is "A Lover’s Recourse". Technically, this includes 49 ghazals. Each ghazal is made from 7 shers (couplets), includes a radif (mono-rhyme at the end of each couplet), and concludes with a maqta (poetic signature or tag). (The form, as used by Jee Leong Koh, does not include a set metre and a set rhyme that runs through all the odd-numbered lines). This variation on the ghazal is effective, allowing both openness and closure, a sense of variation and linkage. The sequence itself alludes to Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1978). This text was defined by its author as a “running here and there”, an apt description for the work is deliberately without style, is not allowed to unify into a portrait of Barthes or to become a love story. In choosing Barthes as a point of departure, and it is a point of departure, not agreement, the ghazals further Jee leong Koh’s interest in portraiture. The change of “Discourse” to “Recourse” intimates a di

In 1979, Simon Lowy’s Melusine and the Nigredo (Carcanet) achieved the annual London Poetry Society award. Heralded for its wit and originality, the volume was the work of an author who was primarily an alchemist. Lowy was announced by Carcanet as a poet “far from the mainstream of contemporary verse.” Melusine and the Nigredo was published at a time when UK poetry was expanding and Lowy was one of the many new poets on Carcanet’s expansive list. But in 1985, serious critical revisions began and Lowy was one of a number of poets singled out by Martin Booth, in British Poetry from 1964 to 1984 (1985), as an example of the lunatic poets who were technically weak, “pretentious and pompous” (p.167). Booth was scathing in his attack on Michael Schmidt, as director of Carcanet, for diluting the poetry world by publishing bad poetry by one-hit wonders, such as Lowy. In truth, Michael Schmidt rejected further work by Lowy because it did not meet the standard of Melusine and the Nigredo

It is true, Hermeticists see Hermeticism everywhere. There is an inbuilt bias to over-read. If Blake saw the Universe in a grain of sand, the Hermeticist finds Hermes in every light particle. Even so, as in the poetry of Thom Gunn, Hermetical ideas exist throughout Equal to the Earth , as a meaningful under-current. I have read quite a few interpretations and responses to “Brother”, one of Jee Leong Koh’s finest lyrical poems in Equal to the Earth . The latest interpretation (from a radio interview) places the poem in the context of Darwinism. All life originated in the sea and the sea provides the origins of this poem. Interesting, but I don’t think so. Darwin’s evolutionary theory does not walk with Plato! Pope heralded the glories of Newton. Jee Leong Koh doesn’t view Darwin with the same enthusiasm. “Brother” begins in the womb. Two brothers are given life. The “ultrasound”, says the speaker, “found us as one.” The act of creation is “monozygotic”, one divides into two. As

Jee Leong Koh’s new book of poetry from Bench Press is introduced to the reader/buyer (hopefully) by an appropriate image. The photograph by Kent Mercurio (a coincidental hermetical name) shows a shoreline, the solidity of matter, and beyond this the sea caught in a swathe of light. Equal to the Earth is a compelling new volume of poems. It investigates with wit and intelligence questions about identity and how an individual finds his or her place upon Earth, how an outsider, oblique to the terrifying norm of life, can become equal. Throughout the collection, the sea surges as an image of the subconscious and the eternal. As in alchemy, the sea represents the solutio . In the words of Dorn: “ Ut per solutionem corpora solvuntur, ita per cognitionem resolvuntur philosophorum dubia.” “As bodies are dissolved through the sea, so philosophical doubt is resolved through thought.” The sea engulfs and protects. In the embryonic sea, identity and yearning are born...tides of

Payday Loans (Poets Wear Prada, 2007) is a short selection of poems by Jee Leong Koh. It is offered as a chapbook of 30 sonnets, all of which were written as part of Poetry Month, 2005, at the rate of one per day. Jee Leong Koh, judging from the content of his blog, Song of a Reformed Headhunter, his numerous poetry readings in New York, and his elegant emails in my direction, is a scrupulous and intelligent poet committed to the poetical voice: not just the structure on the page, but the form in the air. The blurb to Payday Loans points out that “April 13th, Wednesday” was banned by the Government of Singapore: it sanctioned the printing of the poem, but not the performance (as required by Singapore law) because of its overt gay content. But this should not put a reader off because Jee Leong Koh is not a “dangerous” poet as he read English at “Oxford University” and studied writing at “Sarah Lawrence College”. I have to say that this made me chuckle — such a blatant attempt t