Hello Everyone!
I have a treat for all you poetry and culture lovers. My poetry guest blogger is Chris. Chris lives in Australia and Singapore and has a list of writing accomplishments.
“His newest collection: ‘The Bearded Chameleon’ explores cultural adoption as a convert to Sikhism. ‘The Laughing Buddha Cab Company’ (2007) looks at Asia through a series of taxi rides. Mooney-Singh’s fiction has appeared in ‘The Best of South-East Asian Erotica’, ‘The Best of Singapore Erotica’, ‘Love and Lust in Singapore’ and ‘Crime Search: Singapore’. Has several guest appearances at festivals. “Two short plays were produced for the Singapore Short and Sweet festival in 2008 and 2009. He was a guest at the Austin International Poetry Festival (2003), the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival (2004) and the Kuala Lumpur International Literary Festival (2007), the Salt of the Tongue Festival and the Melbourne Overload Poetry Festival in 2010.”
Chris was kind enough to answer some questions for me and share his knowledge, experience and one of his poems. Enjoy.
1) Chris, you are
currently attending Monash University, Melbourne as a post-graduate research
scholar. Could you please explain in detail what exactly you do for your
post-graduate studies?
A PhD on the Emergence of Asia in Australian poetry. My
basic research explores how Australian poetry bears the influence of
orientalism from the early 19th Century. Yet these influences internally found
in the literature have not been accorded more significance, perhaps due to
Anglo-European fears of Asia still felt up to the time of Australia’s White
Australian policy which formally ended only as late as the late 1970s when the
first Vietnamese refugees flooded into Australia after the end of the Vietname
War. Since then, there has been a rising increase of poets engaged with
traveling to and writing about Asia and also now Asian diasporic writing within
Australia itself. This is a significant trend I believe. Now more than 10
percent of Australia’s population is of Asian origin and within 3-4 generations
we may be in part a Eurasian society, perhaps the first of its kind in the
world due to our small population and the reality of demographic mixing now
occurring here.
2) You state that you travel between Singapore and
Australia. It must be very interesting to experience two different cultures.
Since I’m not familiar with either culture, could you name a few cultural
differences between Singapore and Australia?
One is predominately a huge island continent western in
outlook, but geo-economic realities are I believe pushing it to create closer
cultural ties with the Asian region as it has economically done already. China
is Australia largest trading partner for example. Singapore is the 3rd biggest
banking hub in the world, and although only a tiny island of mixed Chinese,
Malay, Indian and Eurasian population is for its size one of the richest and
most progressive countries in the world. Meanwhile, other than its indignenous
tradition, Australian literary history dates from 1788, the beginning of the
creation of the first British colony. Singapore formally a part of Malaysia has
a modern history of less than 50 years. Both have English language literatures
of contemporary sophistication, equal to other world literatures in English,
despite the fact of domination by London and New York publishers do not work in
their international favour. As Asia rises in economic importance and dominance,
I believe these things will balance out. For example, Asian e-publishing
alternatives are developing quickly and although Amazon is a huge monster
dominating the web, it may not always be so.
3) Along with your
writing endeavors, you’ve been involved in many festivals in Singapore and
Australia? Could you explain the differences between Singapore and Australian
Literary Festivals?
Basically all literary festivals, especially officially
government funded ones are the same all over the world, except that each country
emphasizes different literary agendas according to its national and cultural
interests. I am also the co-director of an emerging writers’ festival in
Singapore
http://litup.sg which annually
celebrates and supports the expression of new writing and performance. This is
organized under The Writers Centre Singapore which is a body I and my
co-directors set up as a non-profit arts organization.
http://thewriterscentre.org
4) “The Laughing
Buddha Cab Company” expresses the excitement of culture shock, which teaches us
many lessons as well as shakes up our realization. Much of the book focuses on
your experiences traveling in cabs from different perspectives. This is
definitely something many people would love to hear about. Can you recall the
most interesting perspective you encountered while gathering this book together
and what was the subject matter?
The taxi cab poems are set mainly in Singapore and India.
The taxi is both a real experience and a metaphor for what I see as intense
capsule moments in time, not unlike the slowed down movement of the speeding
bullet of a poem, looking at that moment’s human experience against an urban or
developing world backdrop. Ours is moving so fast, and, in a sense human
experience is the soft target that is a fragile and profound thing ironically
under threat, given the global pace of things. I am interested in looking at
core human experience and inherent spiritual poignancy in the world, asking the
fundamental questions of who we are and why we are here, but in a contemporary
and engaging time and way. Just like climate change issues, we are being pushed
by globalization to ask the hard questions even more dramatically. A developing
country like India throws up dualities and things in opposition again forcing
us back on our existential selves. Many choose to ignore or block it out
though. I have taken a lot of taxis in Singapore where I don’t own a car and
never fail to learn something interesting about the driver, the place where we
are driving, the relationship with myself and my co-passengers. Just as Blake
says to cleanse the window of perception, being inside a taxi cab’s like being
inside an all seeing eye. It’s a detached space moving from moment to moment
and one can look through and see what is really happening. Catch a cab next
time and become a ‘passenger’ in a life moment, become detached as a Buddha in the
backseat and learn.
5) Below is your poem, The Bearded Chameleon, which I
love, love, love. The way you describe a chameleon is fantastic, “Prehistoric,
spiky, punk”. I also enjoyed the way you worked in the way you took shape in
another place and time. These are great lines: “as I feel my oddness avalanche
/ into a vast primordial past / where man and lizard were one caste.”
When you sit down to write such a poem, do you already
know how you’ll write it, lines and rhyme, or does this occur over edits?
The title poem of my new book was born from an actual
experience in a Punjabi compound, but it evolved over several years (coming
back to it several times) out of strongly cadenced verse into metical 4 beat
tetrameter verse with rhyming couplets. The short metre and strong rhymes
helped accentuate something of the lightly worn understanding and expressed
with a sense of humour. Writing about
spirituality and religious themes is risky and this helped to make this approachable
for myself and I believe the general reader. It was a kind of watershed poem
where I addressed for the first time my conversion to Sikhism and also the long
practice of metrical and formalist poetry skills I worked hard at improving
from 2002. I put myself back into self-study to understand prosody and
scansion, believing that a good poet should know the rules he or she might then
break knowingly when writing open or free verse. I place as much importance on
skill, technique and craft as I do on having original subject matter and thinking
and now write in a mixture of open and formal ways according to inclination and
occasion. If the message of Eliot and Pound is that we live in a wasteland of
broken traditions, ie camping at ground zero between the ruins, we also have
built modern skyscrapers and brick veneer suburbs there. Old and new coexist
and my aesthetic view is that post modern poets can use it all, just we are
forced to live lives through various changing identities like colour-shifting
chameleons.
The Bearded Chameleon
1
A sci-fi thing, you shoot a tongue
above the compound, floored with dung.
Your sucker feet were born to grip.
Prehensile tail, a coiled whip
is clinging to the pipal trunk.
Prehistoric, spiky, punk
with membrane beard (a he or she?)
you blend in with the Buddha tree.
2
My sun-cracked soles have drawn some sap from green
Punjab. An Aussie chap,
I chew on sugarcane each week
and sport this beard—a convert Sikh.
Now turbaned like a maharajah,
I‘d pass for Ranjit Singh, the Padshah—
a bit like you, chameleon—
a colour-shifting charlatan.
3
Yes, since I came in my blue jeans
to do write-ups for magazines
your form has been my best touchstone
on how to live here in The Zone.
A decade later, more or less
I still reside at your address
with farmers, trades-folk, holy men
who can‘t read books, or use a pen.
4
Neighbours greet me in the lane
from buffalo cart, stacked with cane
or two old uncles call: ‗Come, sit
beside the hand pump.‘ There we spit
and chat of wheat and sugar‘s price
or winter‘s crop—basmati rice.
I wet my tongue, pretend what‘s best
and they are kind, pretend the rest.
5
A mascot white-man, or crackpot,
I walk to view the chilli plot.
You are a comfort on the branch
as I feel my oddness avalanche
into a vast primordial past
where man and lizard were one caste.
I‘ve learned to stand, chameleon.
My feet, like yours can now stick on.
6
I‘m changing colours far from home:
here nothing‘s shot in monochrome.
Suburbia was a dumb cartoon:
here, typhoid sweats through each monsoon;
and though dung-fires choke the breath
I feel alive as I breathe death.
A beard‘s the symbol of the sage.
In lizard-time—mine‘s under-age.
7
Sun-bathing is the reptile‘s art.
Daily, I make a clean, fresh start:
lather hair and beard with soap,
then wring it out as one wet rope;
next, oil and comb and wind the bun
and check my topknot in the sun;
I tie a turban, high with grace,
chameleon-ness—all now in place.
8
Our artery is the market lane—
village life is one food chain.
Strolling here, I bear the heat—
my adaptation seems complete.
I‘ve learned your culture-blending knack.
Have I moved up, or ten lives back?
After a walk, I will sit and stare—
I am king of an old cane chair.
9
My pen is like your sticky tongue.
I snatch my image-flies among
the geckoes, birds on tree or plant,
or dogs and pigs in excrement.
If I could train my mind or hand
not just to write, but understand
your stance and poise upon the tree,
chameleon, I might step free.
10
Dear dinosaur in miniature
who blends in well with any weather
yes, you have mastered with sharp eyes
the yogic art of catching flies.
Perhaps, I will, one-day, be free
to blend in with the Buddha tree.
I bow, pranam, dear bearded friend—
my weird barometer till the end.
Sent with Writer.
