By Jonathan Chan

The Mischief of Ordinary Things
Felix Cheong and Sam Lay
Marshall Cavendish Editions (2024) / 120 pages / SGD 22.70

Since his debut with his poetry collection in the 1990s, Felix Cheong has distinguished himself among his contemporaries in Singapore for his multi-generic interests and malleability. Cheong has authored an eye-popping 25 books, including his debut Temptation and Other Poems (1998), his novels The Call from Crying House (2006) and The Woman in the Last Carriage (2007), his Singapore Siu Dai series of short stories, a variety of poetry anthologies and picture books for children, and the graphic novels Sprawl (2021) and Goh Keng Swee: A Singaporean for All Seasons (2023).

These speak, perhaps, not to effort or attention being spread thin, but the creative restlessness that has compelled Cheong over his decades-long career in creative writing. In contrast to some writers that have honed a relentless focus on single genres, such as poetry or fiction, Cheong finds himself in the company of other multi-generic practitioners that have distinguished themselves skilfully, including Alfian Sa'at across poetry, prose and plays, Gwee Li Sui across poetry and graphic novels, Marc Nair in poetry and photography, and Amanda Chong across poetry and theatre. In some senses, one might consider such multi-generic fluency as being emblematic of Cheong's beginnings as a published writer, having transitioned from a career in television to embracing a life of writing, editing and lecturing.

The Mischief of Ordinary Things is another entry in Cheong's oeuvre that reflects an interest in experimentation and cross-genre collaboration. The collection relies on defamiliarisation as its core conceit, primarily as presented by Sam Lay's drawings from his Life in a Notebook series, to which Cheong responds with poems. Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky's notion of defamiliarisation sought to "distinguish poetic from practical language on the basis of the former's perceptibility", a principle at the heart of all art and poetry. The notion that art can render everyday objects fresh or strange has influenced a variety of artistic practices in the 20th century; one thinks of Marcel Duchamp's 1917 readymade 'Fountain' or Andy Warhol's embrace of daily iconography such as soup cans in his prints.

Lay brings a cartoonist's eye to his transformation of household objects through his illustrations: a pair of glasses turns into a swing for a woman, a screw becomes the horn of a unicorn, a plastic straw can be deflected as an energy beam by Captain America, an AirPod case can turn into a piece of luggage, while AirPods themselves become the gloves of a boxer. Lay describes how this "inclination toward commonplace objects" is a result of each providing "a silent witness to the fabric of our lives". Cheong, having come across Lay's illustrations on Instagram, has taken something of an ekphrastic approach, responding to these drawings in poems stitched with witticisms and meditations. They are not so radical as to centre, say, an object-oriented ontology or thing theory. The objects retain the meanings they hold while receiving new meanings conferred by Lay's drawings; that is to say, both layers of significance remain anthropocentric. Cheong's task, as he writes in the collection's introduction, was to ensure his poems could "rise to the challenge" in "refreshing, even off-kilter, ways", because Lay's illustrations are "so ingeniously constructed".

One might see The Mischief of Ordinary Things in the light of Cheong's epigraph, borrowed from Pat Schneider's 2019 poem 'The Patience of Ordinary Things'. The latter half of Schneider's poem goes:

I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish
, And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

The poem's sentiment is that of a kind of gratitude: that objects do not make demands or impositions in the way that other daily pressures might, that there can be a kind of beauty that lies in the order that structures everyday life. It is a sentiment that was magnified under the conditions of restriction and enclosure during the Covid-19 pandemic: a momentary cessation of frenetic movement, the confining of daily life to one's room, the renewed attention to the micropolitics of the home. I was reminded as well of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), in which Robinson's protagonist Ruthie declares, "That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind."

This is the attention that Cheong and Lay have accorded to their objects of focus, though rather than beauty or patience, Cheong has found mischief. Ostensibly, it is a mischief that Cheong finds primarily in the whimsy and creativity of Lay's illustrations. Take, for example, Cheong's poem 'Jacob's Ladder':

Part of you, still stuffed
Like a small reason in bed, in situ,
Insistent that all's well ends in hell
When this was your dream, only yours
For the taking, tasking, asking, God
Knows you have learned it, earned
The ropes, so you are now coined and coiled
Around the eve of your heart –
No, not when it is too true to be good
And too far for your reach as awake.

There is a seeming solipsism at work in the poem, even as it is told in second person. The image it accompanies is that of an individual in a biblical robe climbing a ladder, arm outstretched towards the power-on button of a tablet. The poem's title is a reference to a vision of the biblical patriarch Jacob in the midst of exile, wherein a ladder that stretched from earth to heaven was planted and on it, angels were ascending and descending. The ladder forms a bridge between the immanent and transcendent, earthly and heavenly. It is a way for Jacob to be positioned as the link between a chosen people and the divine, the recipient of the promise accorded to his grandfather Abraham from God of the founding of a nation.

Cheong seems to inscribe his poem within this narrative through its titling, but the poem itself is light on nouns and operates within a didactic register, not dissimilar to Alvin Pang's What Gives Us Our Names (2011). There seems a kind of inertia – "Part of you, still stuffed / Like a small reason in bed, in situ", a seeming immobility from the overriding pessimism that "all's well ends in hell". Cheong plays with internal and half rhymes, the playful turns of "taking, tasking, asking". The organic pairing of "asking" and "God" is severed by a comma, the next line turning instead to the notion that God "Knows you have learned it, earned / The ropes". Again, Cheong inverts idioms – "learned it" rather than "earned it", earning rather than learning "the ropes". A seeming narrative of covenants and inheritances gives way to something that is "too true to be good", "too far for your reach as awake". Does this suggest a depiction of waylaid ambition, or perhaps of rescinded promises? Of unrealised aspirations despite conditions being right and ripe? Mischief seems to operate at the level of the poem's diction, in its play with proverbs and attention to sounds in alliteration and rhyme.

This seems to hold for many of the poems that Cheong composes in response to Lay's illustrations. While Lay's drawings inspire a kind of delight in the reimagining of daily objects, somehow, they seem to draw from Cheong a kind of sombre contemplativeness. One might imagine some of these as poems of middle age, concerned as they are with career goals, office politics and relational breakdowns, not unlike Paul Tan's When the Lights Went Off (2018). If 'Jacob's Ladder' seems to submerge a narrative of scuppered career ambitions, 'Scholar Scholar', with its incantatory quatrains, is more explicit about the pessimism of an academic vocation. Lay's drawing is of an illustrated figure pushing an actual eraser through a thickness of pencil shadings, clearing a path behind him. Cheong responds as such:

Scholar, scholar,
Here's the way.
Cleared road straight
On any day.

[…]

Scholar, scholar,
Turned around.
Dark was here
And broke the ground.

Scholar, scholar,
Now it's late.
Past your time
And now the gate.

A seemingly innocuous depiction of a man clearing a path, erasing the dark etchings of thick pencil, is reimagined through the prism of a certain disillusionment. One imagines Cheong, having served and continuing to serve as an Adjunct Lecturer in various universities in Singapore, fully immersed in the discourse of academic envy, stagnation and frustration. The syllabic rigidity of the poem – with each quatrain's lines having a pattern of 4-3-4-3 syllables – draws to mind William Blake's 'The Tyger', often taught in schools in Singapore as well. Themes of scholarly inventiveness and freshness are first embraced in images of path making and ground breaking, before the sudden turn to obsoleteness. The cruellest consequence of the passage of time being the onset of redundancy. One sees here a parallel to Gwee Li Sui's Death Wish (2017).

For Cheong, the scholarly vocation seems to lie less in contrast with that of corporate aspiration than is generally assumed, at least in the context of Singapore. Career disillusionment and feelings of effort not being commensurate with reward seem to be similarities that unite the 'Scholar' with his, perhaps more materialistic, counterparts. If we are to imagine the optimism that arrives with the 'coming-of-career' narrative, with maturity coinciding with the commencement of full-time work as theorised by Cheryl Narumi Naruse, Cheong presents the lives that follow, under the grip of primarily white-collar work, the gears of the structures sustaining capitalism and neoliberalism. One of Lay's illustrations is of a unicorn, drawn around a metal screw that has taken its place as its horn. Cheong's poem in response is titled 'Success', which seems to have little to do with unicorns:

Suck it up, smell the green
When the bosses slap your back
Your talent is like nothing they've seen.
You're now paid goods on their rack.

Out of such days, your head will arise,
Guiding that conveyor belt of smiles
Towards canapes, tokens of praise,
Your sullenness password-locked in a file.

Later, stutters will come, in good time,
In the shower or battle with wine.
The screw may come off but never you mind,
A good night's cry and you're fine by nine.

The image of the unicorn activates in Cheong's mind the sense of a young, fresh hire being told they're a unicorn – a particularly unique talent. Cheong's imagery recalls an industrial corporatisation – "paid goods" and "conveyor belt". The trappings of a well-paying job are apparent in "canapes" and buoyed by "tokens of praise". Any resentment, suitably, is "password-locked". As with 'Scholar Scholar', the imminence of age shatters this vision – "stutters will come". Themes of ageing and obsolescence occur in some Cheong's other poems – 'Old Tricks and New Ways', which responds to an illustration of a nozzle as the head of a dog, 'Performance Review', responding to renderings of one-dollar coins as plates being lifted by weightlifters, 'The Inventory of Letting Go', with an image of a man burying his face in his hands and knees (though his calf is a Swiss Army Knife), and 'Techniques in Cost-Cutting', with a karateka breaking through rows of mechanical pencil lead like boards – echo themes of white-collar travails and stresses. "A good night's cry" is the salve for such frustration.

Or take the suggestions offered in 'The Well-Heeled Class', written in response to Lay's rendering of a pair of scissors as the buxom buttocks of a woman from behind:

It grows on you, doesn't it, the good life,
The six-got-it-figured-out salary
That locks into what your folks had once
Denied themselves, fought shy to owe.
But now, you reward yourself for years
Of neglect, time cashed out in killer heels,…

Temperance, self-denial and sacrifice give way to decadence and lavish spending. One detects in these lines the shade of cultural change in Singapore following its breakneck economic development – the memory of poverty relegated to another generation, the normalisation of consumerism and materialism as just reward. Perhaps it is a sentiment that reached its apex in the 1990s, when then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong declared in one of his speeches the centrality of shopping in the Singaporean identity. Such reflections seem to recall some of the pleasures of and generational distinctions in wealth described in Toh Hsien Min's Means to an End (2008). The meanings of wealth, and the means by which it can be accumulated, have transformed in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a flush of new capital in family offices and the growth of financial service's hub. Perhaps these are dimensions of wealth that will come to rest uneasily beside the experience of rapid economic growth that many Singaporeans have lived through.

Alongside poems of professional disillusionment, many of Cheong's poems dwell in relational breakdown as well. In both themes, one sees parallels with Cheong's life, from his movement from a successful career in television to writing full-time, from his own experience of divorce. Inevitably, these cast a shadow over the poems Cheong has composed in response to Lay's illustrations. Some of them are titled 'If You Leave Me Now', 'There are Other Fish in the Ocean', 'And so, Goodbye' and 'Till Love Do Us Part' coming alongside poems like 'Revenge Overhaul' and 'One Nightstand', each seeming to represent the stages of grief that follow a romantic separation. 'Things' is perhaps the strongest of this suite of poems. It responds to an image of a man chopping down a tree, though the falling tree is instead a pencil. The poem proceeds:

There are days only an axe would do,
within earshot of an alarm
As frightening as who gives a fuck
While you hack through memory
Screaming from its hold –

That fitted shirt she had bought
That cut your silhouette to her liking;
Anniversary cards with the choppy
Patience of her poetry;
That boat of a magnet from Phuket
Broken in two when you fisted the fridge;

Things, things so many, things
Of many, so many things,
From the first flush of ignorance
To the last right of cremating them all,
Just so you could certify them dead.

But at night, while your eyes lie awake,
Ears alert to small sounds
Inside the false ceiling, or maybe
The back of your head out of reach –
There, etching, scratching, scraping –
Things you can't quite place.

           There is an unmistakable masculinity to this voice. The absence of an ex-lover makes itself an inescapable presence, not only as represented by the items and articles of domesticity that the speaker lives with, but also within the field of the imagination. These are violent images: axes hacking through memory, screams and sirens. These do not reveal a mind at peace with relational destruction, but an almost traumatised response. The "things" that the speaker retains no longer serve any purpose; nostalgia is poisoned by new realities of divorce. What persists after both an imaginative and physical violence lingers at the back of the speaker's head. Surely, this is not the sort of 'mischief' Lay anticipated when Cheong took to his illustrations. Some mischief lies in the continued playfulness of Cheong's language, but they also reveal in no uncertain ways the scars, hurts, lessons and ruminations that accompany a poet, and an older man, later in life.

The collection's final movement makes this attention to regret clearer, though it weaves between Cheong's more meditative poems as well as the poems that might be considered the most mischievous – a series of haikus responding directly to Lay's illustrations. There is the curved hook turned saxophone, to which Cheong responds in the haiku 'Night Bird':

My riff runs off cliff,
Night on the fly, soul adrift
As a hook-billed kite.

Or the pair of scissors turned into the eyes of Ultraman, with Cheong responding in 'Holding out for a Hero':

No superpower
Like wearing suit swelt but make
Light work of kaiju.

Or a stencil of numbers and letters, repurposed for a painter painting block numbers on the sides of buildings, with Cheong writing in 'Painter Man':

Horizon thins out
When boilerplates churn numbers
Into art. I sneer.

These haikus are less concerned with the form's origins in capturing a feeling of ephemerality. Rather, they are repurposed as pithy aphorisms of sorts. Lay's illustrations play on whimsy and cleverness, to which the brevity of the haiku form lends itself in Cheong's handling.

The collection ends with Cheong's more focused reflections, some on mortality, some on age. Cheong's poem 'Cogito Ergo Sum' riffs on René Descartes' famous assertion regarding the nature of self-awareness. Lay's illustration is of a man having disembarked from his car amidst a winding road into a desert, sleeves rolled, head scratched, map unfurled. The figure is looking at a real compass on a desk. Cheong's speaker writes:

Any which way you turn, it is always
You, the end and beguine, even when
Your compass points elsewhere, nowhere else but
Your heart. You follow it to fallow ground,
Every step a planted seed. Sometimes,
Something grows, growls; you pluck, pick, pack it –
Rosary, meditation, yoga, when
The emptiness is in need of heeding –
For the next trip. But no, know that you
Never leave, not completely. Every thought
Becomes you, as Descartes famously said.
You are the switch you can't turn off,
Light that burns from the inside out.
Deal with your self as you think fit.

Cheong returns to a didactic mode, one that leads the "you" through the compulsions and directions of one's heart. There is a hint of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Cheong's employment of alliteration – "Something grows, growls; you pluck pick, pack it". It is a pinprick of conscience, a kind of irritation, the "emptiness" that one cannot ignore. Rather than a characterisation of a self-reflexive agent as the foundation of a philosophy, this level of self-awareness becomes "the switch you can't turn off". "Every thought / Becomes you". There is a gnawing that occurs as a result of an inescapable, persistent introspection. Rather than resolving in a place of serenity, say as in Aaron Lee's poem 'Just Some Found Words', the poem leaves the speaker in a place of reckoning.

'Coming Apart', the longest poem in the collection, details the hospitalisation and increasing isolation of its speaker, an older woman named Goh Mee Lian. Surrounded by doctors and nurses, eyes sore from the sharpness of bright light, the speaker mourns:

My name is no longer important.
I give it only to grant permission
For entrance of needle, volumes of blood,
a turn of drip, a peel of sheets.

Where is that young man whose eyes
had promised I would be home last week?
Why am I still this weak after months
waking to wake on the same bed?

I have lost count of the days
between dusk and ward when sleep
Does not make dreams flight
But grounds when you least expect it.

Though the activation of an older, female voice might seem contrived in parts, the poem nevertheless reflects the restlessness, languishing and fear that accompany a long, seemingly endless period of inpatient care. Again, the speaker is at odds with their body which is "coming apart", echoing poems of age and debilitation in previous poems. Lay's image features paperclips as the soles of the shoes of a figure, plunging beneath the surface of the water, drowning.

How then does the collection seek to resolve these questions of age and obsolescence, vanity and materialism? Cheong's poem 'In the End' offers some clues, responding to Lay's illustration of a man in office wear on a deserted island, looking at a sea of coins. The poem proceeds:

After all your grains of sand have been
Counted, your chances taken with the world,
As it did with your worth; your last-drawn
Pay washed up like driftwood that
Kept body off soul, making possible
The home you had grown a life on,
Creature comforts that bind and blind you
In equal pleasure; causes, losses, crosses
You've shouldered up the hill down the long road
Of could-haves, should-haves and might-have-beens;
Those you've loved, given, forgiven, forsaken,
Forgotten, gotten in your palms but slipped,
Flotsam of love remembered like a dream;
After these, and nothing more,
What is the weight of soul you'll carry with you?

It continues and lengthens Cheong's rebuke and critique of the crass materialism, perhaps as observed by the speaker of a certain generation of Singaporeans. The soul, that metaphysical conceit, the entity essential to belief in an afterlife, is the poem's ultimate anchor. Regrets, mistakes, possibilities, as well as the pitfalls and travails of being seduced by wealth and comfort. Cheong continues to cast a desultory eye towards materialistic desire in the poem 'To be Loved I':

To be Loved I
(After Raymond Carver's "Late Fragment")

What was it you wanted most
But didn't get?
It was enough
Not to want for less.
Just this, to be loved
And know when I am only bones,
Still you.

'Late Fragment', itself a remarkable poem, resolves the question of desire in the wish to "feel myself / beloved on the earth". The sensation of assurance that comes with being beloved is what one desires at the end of one's life. Cheong's poem proceeds from it, accompanied by an illustration of a woman with a leaf as her lips. It is a slight inversion, for the poem indicates that yearning resolves not only in the sensation of being loved, but in being able to love another, "still you", when the speaker is "only bones", even if it does not quite match the power of Carver's original.

The collection ends, perhaps fittingly, in a life beyond mortality, situated beyond. For all of Cheong and Lay's focus on 'ordinary things', Cheong's imagination seems to drift continually beyond them, into the realm of the non-material. His final poem is 'Afterlife Vertigo', responding to an image of an angel floating on a cloud made of tissue:

With your barely-there wings of such light
Material they could be hand-me-downs,
You doubt you will travel far in this white
Space for the dearly-beloved. On the ground,

A highflyer you might have been but here,
Inertia is benign, a God-given.
No future to stride to, strive for, where
Only the dead are home, in spirit and element.

In the beginning was the Word,
But since you've not followed anyone's to the letter,
You lose your voice among the faithful herd.
There's time to grow into eternity, no matter,

The way light will get used to your halo,
Turning that shade of tarnish angelic whole.

Aspirations and pretensions of careerist ascension are summarily discarded. Any suggestion of similarly linear progress cannot exist in heaven. The subject the speaker addresses seems to have barely met the requirements needed to enter heaven, with "barely-there wings". Eternity holds a permanence, without "future to stride to". The whims of individual compulsion, disregarding obedience to "the Word", derived from the Greek logos, meaning divine reasoning or intelligence as well as the figure of Christ. The speaker intuits the possibilities of growing "into eternity", of "that shade of tarnish" turned an "angelic whole".

Cheong chooses not to end on a note of despair, presenting the possibilities of a final sanctification in the afterlife, one for which the harangued Singaporean cannot work for. Unlike Philip Larkin, publicly chastised by Czesław Miłosz for seemingly succumbing to despair in his poem 'Aubade', Cheong cannot help but resist it in spite of the disillusionments, regrets, pains, turmoil and disgust that seem to emanate from the contemplations of middle-age. If ordinary things can be reimagined through illustration as mischievous, mystical, wonderful, so too can the complications of lives already lived give way to new possibilities, far away from the vanities that have already tarred them. A kind of hope is what delivers ordinary things to mischief.

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