By Kristina Tom

Sample and Loop: A Simple History of Singaporeans in America
Jee Leong Koh
Gaudy Boy (2023) / 162 pages / SGD 22

Since publishing his first collection of poems nearly two decades ago, Jee Leong Koh has steadily built a career as a major contemporary Singaporean writer. His recent volume Sample and Loop is yet another ambitious project, each poem taking a real-life Singaporean as a subject, and most based on individual interviews Koh conducted with fellow Singaporean expatriates in New York. Using these interviews as raw material, the poems – which we might describe as found poetry, or perhaps a hybrid of lyric and documentary poetry – demonstrate Koh's proclivity for writing in conversation with other voices, as seen in Steep Tea (2015) or the more recent Inspector, Inspector (2022). This time, however, instead of paying homage to other poets, Koh attempts to give voice to the varied life stories of Singaporeans living in America while capturing the shared, ambivalent heartache of a community far from home.

Take for example, the introductory poem 'The Host', in which the eponymous Host works with the speaker on a festival of Singaporean literature in New York:

To rally interest, Paul did what he does
so well, hosted a party in his home
in the South Congregational Church, hoisted
in early Romanesque Revival style,
at the intersection of Court and President.

The grandiose description of The Host's home exemplifies a prominent characteristic of found poetry, in which an erstwhile unremarkable detail, simply by being curated by the poet and presented to the reader in verse form, takes on additional layers of meaning. Court and President, for example, are street names, but the evocation of offices of governmental power, in addition to the religious and academic connotations of the architectural descriptions, lend the subject's home an air of grandness and officialdom. It's an apt description: "Paul" is Paul Rozario-Falcone, a writer and editor in his own right, whose efforts at providing creative discussion and exchange among a certain writerly community in New York might just be the modern-day Singaporean equivalent of Gertrude Stein's salon.

But 'The Host' takes on significance for the rest of the collection not because of its subject's work, but for his far less successful efforts to grapple with the essential problem that the poems posit all emigrants share. Dedicated to "…all who live away from where they were born", the poems are linked by a theme first articulated in 'The Host':

…the expat body
expects its altar-hearth, the give-and-take
between the body and no, not the soul,
the building. Not just hermit crab and shell.
Not Brunelleschi and his lofty dome.

No building or creative effort – whether the 15th-century architectural marvel that is Florence Cathedral's dome, the grand salon provided by The Host, or his exuberant plans for a Singaporean festival – can replace the "altar-hearth" found in one's original home, a place intrinsically linked to family, ancestors and, perhaps both literally and figuratively, the gods of those ancestors. Singaporeans may travel far, choosing to live a peripatetic life embodied in the image of the hermit crab and its succession of borrowed shells, but nothing, the poems reveal, can supplant the sense of home inextricably tied to Singapore, their land of birth.

It is in this context that the pathos of the poems can be truly understood as they document the myriad reasons their Singaporean subjects have felt driven to uproot their lives and, like so many before them, seek their fortune in a foreign land. Each person profiled – and the shorter poems, some based on single interviews, do read like profiles in verse – has their own.

Take for example the grief of a Singaporean who feels compelled to give up his citizenship in 'The Columnist'. The poem opens with a description of the paperwork The Columnist must file while renouncing citizenship: "The questionnaire required him to rank / his top three reasons. Children's education. / Property prices. NS. CPF." The actual rationale for The Columnist giving up this last official tie to Singapore doesn't fall neatly into the proffered categories of what he deems "acronyms / for the good life defined by Singapore". Instead, he selects 'Others', and the poem proceeds to list, in a process of elimination, all the reasons The Columnist could offer but doesn't: 9/11, Tate's Cookies and homophobic friends back home. An openly gay man, The Columnist ultimately writes "the criminalization of homo… / quantifie[s] those hours as 377 / and grade[s] his own answer with an A". Of course, this refers to Singapore's Penal Code Section 377A, which criminalised oral and anal sex between men until 2023 and wasn't yet repealed at the time the poem takes place. The Columnist renounces citizenship because of the generations of gay Singaporean men whose lives were ruined by this law, and whom the poem depicts as "drowned mouths", men who "fell each night / into their drinks and could no way be dried".

The poems proceed in this manner, offering portraits of Singaporeans based on original interviews and publicly available information, each with laconic titles like 'The Host', 'The Columnist' and 'The Porn Star', with specific dates and locations listed for interviews. The titles are convenient handles, as a journalist profiling a subject might say, but the poems go on to undercut these ultimately inadequate labels, instead presenting expansive but curated details in an attempt to fit the complexity of their subjects into short, essential portrayals in verse.

This goal is the premise of the entire collection, and yet the long poem 'The Dying Nurse', which serves as both the structural and emotional anchor of the book, presents this as an exercise in futility, even as it attempts, through multiple interviews, a much more comprehensive treatment of its subject than the rest of the poems. At one point, The Nurse describes an encounter that, although not about the speaker, serves as a clear parallel to their relationship as artist and subject:

Then he said, I can't figure out your accent,
[…]
now wishing, with his wits, to pin me down,
as if the world needs pinning down. Or up.
Maybe it does. Maybe we all need either
a map or else, what is far worse, a net,
but matters are not so easily sorted[.]

When the line "but matters are not so easily sorted" appears earlier in the poem, it refers to the decisions that The Nurse must make over the course of her life, and the complications those choices invite, complications that this long, biographical poem attempts to make sense of. But as the line is repeated, as it is in the above excerpt, it takes on the sound of a refrain, questioning the very documentary aim of the poem. Throughout the poem, images of a map, bridge and net recur, each a different symbol for the poem's attempt at meaning, charting a path or bridging a gap to a Platonic ideal of its subject, represented by the image of "distant diamonds" that recurs throughout 'The Dying Nurse'. But the image of the net invokes the dangers of such an attempt – a reductionist understanding of the subject is just as likely as a transcendent one.

The speaker more plainly lays out the limitations of the interview as a means of fact-finding while describing a dinner at The Nurse's home:

Linda looked thoughtful. Was she thinking of
Tatum and the highest court she knew,
Linda the girl-bride winning her reprieve,
her cancer-stamped career, her Brian O,
or just the curry chicken? No way to tell.
Even if there was a way, what would it say,
but it was what she thought in that split second?
Another second, and another thought,
the distant diamonds of the heaving sea.

Here we see a reflexivity that is typical of documentary poetry. The subject is viewed through the speaker, who, even after months of interviews, can only guess at the interior life of his subject. And while he can record the moments in her life that The Nurse herself has identified as the most pivotal, who is to say if any one of these is the "key" the speaker seeks to unlock the answers represented by those "distant diamonds" or, if after all this observation, investigation and conversation, the speaker ends up documenting anything more significant than the present dinner of "curry chicken"?

Not only is the success of these efforts called into question, but also the ethics of the whole endeavour. Although The Nurse is dying, her death is not the most important one of the poem, but rather the suicide of her son Tatum: "Is this it? A son's suicide? The house key?" Tatum's death seems to the speaker a possible "key", a way into an accumulated tangle of biographical detail. In later interviews, he frets over this – "when should I bring up Tatum" – and admits a voyeuristic impulse as he "lean[s] forward" at The Nurse's next mention of her son. Most damning of all, the speaker confesses his disregard for Tatum's own poems compared to the one he himself is writing:

I thought I should have asked to see his poems,
but what could they be but sentimental scribblings
just to purchase the hearts of a sweetheart
and of a doting mother. I turned down
42nd and walked toward Times Square.
Good for a tag sale but not for Broadway.

By this measure, Tatum's own life story is valuable only insomuch as it sheds light on The Nurse's, and the poem implies that the speaker is appropriating Tatum's story to further his own creative ends. That the poem questions the morality of such an approach doesn't deter its search for a proper "ending of this tale", a conclusion that the speaker ultimately draws not from reality, but from a dream. In the final section of the poem, the speaker dreams of The Nurse as a child, walking to school and carrying

a pyramid of sugar for the bake sale
[…]
except she had been pulling at a corner
and dripping sugar all the way from home,
a tiny trail of crystals, sharp as glass.
[…]
I woke up at this point. It was my birthday.
I was fifty. The morning foggy first,
then sunny in the afternoon, then rainy.

Here the poem acknowledges the impossibility of coming to any objective conclusion about The Nurse's life and instead offers the speaker's own imagined narrative, the previous grasping for "distant diamonds" now replaced by a trail of sugar dreamed up by a biographer committed to authenticity but hampered by his own bias and limitations. The poem's ending, a summary of the weather on the speaker's 50th birthday, foregrounds The Nurse's life in the speaker's own, a reminder that the poem portrays a mediated reality. It might be a surprising ending were it not for another moment from the aforementioned curry chicken dinner, during which each guest

described our hostess
with just one word. And so we went around
the table with our succinct judgments. Thea:
Plucky. Vance: Headstrong. Sophia: Elegant.
[…]
Every assessment also an assessment
Of the assessor. How could it not be?
Thank you for your misjudgments, Linda said.
I thought you knew me well.

Similarly, the poem, for all its labour and craft, is merely one person's understanding of another, possibly misjudged, and one that arguably says more about the writer than the subject. And though this current of self-critique runs through the entire collection, this project of portraiture in verse (in which both interviewer and interviewee curate the details that are meant to present an entire life in short verse) seems too important for the poems to abandon. The subtitle of the collection, 'A Simple History of Singaporeans in America', speaks to this confident ambivalence. Together, the verse portraits form a history of a community, but they remain "simple" – snapshots of particular lives in a particular place. It is a documentary and poetic project with inherent limitations, but nonetheless worthwhile.

Although the poems are presented as interviews, the main comparison made is not necessarily to a profile piece or even a portrait, as I have suggested here. It is a musical one, made evident in the collection's title Sample and Loop. Electronic and hip-hop music, both genres with large scenes in New York, often incorporate sampling, in which a short musical phrase is borrowed from another song, and looping, in which that phrase is repeated and layered to create a new and often ambient soundscape. In a similar manner, the poems sample the words of their subjects, repeating and layering key phrases and images. This is done to heightened lyrical and thematic effect within poems, most effectively in 'The Dying Nurse', and also across poems, especially those that grapple with issues of identity that Koh has previously explored in more personal works touching on issues of gender, sexuality, race, displacement and belonging.

This sampling and looping, however, is not consistently compelling, and some poems seem to lose their way in a hodgepodge of biodata, most notably when recounting their subjects' academic and career history. The final line of the 'The Columnist', in which the subject "…grade[s] his own answer with an A", is one of many jabs at a school-obsessed Singapore that occur throughout the poems. In this case, the joke is purposely unfunny and, in fact, devastating. But in others, both speaker and subject seem strangely uncritical of their obsession with school pedigree as a means for explaining a person and their life, a quintessentially Singaporean but also curiously uncareful shorthand for an otherwise meticulous poetic gaze. Is it absolutely necessary for the reader to know that The Conductor was "a monitor in Rosyth and RI", The Analyst attended Chinese High and Hwa Chong, The Father worked his way from a "No-Name School to RJC", or that The Comedian went to St Nic's? Even when educational history seems important for reasons of theme, should The Theater Director's unexpected educational trajectory, for example – RGS and VJC, only to fail into Pacific Union College – be given equal weight as the fact that she failed her final NUS exam because she refused to take it on a Saturday, a day "…sacred / to Seventh-day Adventists"? Many of the poems allude to the golden handcuffs (or in The Nurse's case, a "gilded cage") that some Singaporeans find themselves on track for as early as secondary school, an important aspect of the Singaporean and particularly Singaporean scholar expat experience. But one quickly loses patience with this as a poetic theme, especially when a stanza starts to resemble a CV, with details no more evocative than a list of top-tier schools and scholastic achievements. Imagine the usual annoyance that an unaware expat might inspire in a still-in-Singapore audience when bemoaning those golden handcuffs and the journey to cast them off, but now consider the dramatic exaggeration this might achieve in verse.

Despite such blind spots, or perhaps even because of them, one has to admire the simultaneous scope of ambition and lack of hesitation in Sample and Loop, both hallmarks of Koh's work. Earlier collections like Payday Loans (2007) and Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (2011) saw the poet exploring the possibilities and limits of the sonnet and the ghazal, respectively. Many of the volumes Koh has since published are driven by the same deep, methodical exploration of form, using a collection not to brandish mastery of a familiar form, but as an opportunity to plumb the depths of a new one. Writing in free verse in Sample and Loop, Koh assigns himself a challenge not so much rooted in technical exploration, but in testing the limits of the documentary poem to capture the essence of its subject. In that regard, the poems are a remarkable success.

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