Wong, Cyril

Flinders Academic Commons

  Cyril Wong. ‘The Singaporean Poet'. Transnational Literature Vol.10 no.1, November 2017. http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html    The Singaporean Poet   Late reply to a writer that asked, “What are our poets like?”   Let’s begin with an elder who called our colonisers “perfidious albion” and wrote like Yeats to outdo them.  The religious poets, both old and young, so full of pity for everybody else unwilling to meet heaven. The ones for whom obscurity is a metaphor  for the closet. The ones that shun the topic of selfhood because their lives are boring; with no interest in parsing individual suffering and its transcendence. The lyrical flâneurs, the masters of irony and detachment, the intellectuals with their love of form and their ability to convey just about everything and nothing at all. Confessionals with their scars and unsteady hearts. The multi-hyphenates on social media, spreading the good word about their good work, their artistry  and their relevance, locally and abroad. Champions of minority languages, proudly indignant for taking second place to the lingua franca; fanning the flame of their mother tongue  in the hearts and minds of the young.  Migrants who remain determined to matter.  The rebel and the marginalised, preaching to the converted so they never feel alone; or howling in the echo chamber of themselves, walled in by censorship and indifference. The ones who refuse to perform their work and those who choose only to perform. Those who never publish or have stopped,  given up, moved away; who nonetheless write  with or without readers to love or condemn them. The poets who are some-of-the-above or none-at-all. The poet for whom the poet is but an image  amongst images; who crosses the mountain of the ego and never looks back;  Cyril Wong. ‘The Singaporean Poet'. Transnational Literature Vol. 10 no. 1, November 2017. http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html   2 leaving words behind like the moon still irradiating that long way ahead into an infinite morning – this poet doesn’t exist.    Cyril Wong  

The Singaporean Poet

https://dspace.flinders.edu.au/xmlui/bitstream/2328/37631/1/Wong_The_Singaporean_Poet.pdf

The Singaporean Poet

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