By Toh Hsien Min

An unusual request landed in my inbox in the past quarter.  Theophilus Kwek, who served as President of the Oxford University Poetry Society in the mid-2010s, got in touch to introduce some current and recent members who were keen on developing a more concrete history of the society, with the aim of both preservation and continuance, as it was accompanied by some dark hints about poor handover years putting the society into abeyance.  

Besides referring them to where in the university library system they could find a "how to run the society" manual that I had put together in 1998, expanding from a version done by a predecessor who is now a management consultant, I confessed to having a pretty good archive of materials, and that all I had to do was to pull them out from wherever they were.  The most valuable material had to be the photographs I took of society events; as this was well before cameras on phones, my pottering around with 35mm SLRs then meant that I had more such photographs from that era than anyone else, even while footnoting that photographs cost money to print and I was trying to fit to a budget.

The challenge began obviously, with the laborious scanning of a couple of dozen photographs that I had compiled into albums, but it became clear to me quickly there were probably as many photographs again studded among stacks that I simply hadn't seen through into order, buried in a corner cupboard in my parents' home.  Over my next few weekend visits I began trawling through them, first to identify the photo lab envelopes from the right time and taking them home with me for more processing.  And then it struck the obsessive in me that I didn't want to share just a Google drive of contextless photographs, so I took upon myself the archaeological effort of unearthing old event flyers and term calendars and braving the incredibly tiny handwriting in the diaries I used to keep in order to ally precise dates and guest poet identities to the photographs.

And then the whole undertaking went off on a tangent.  I found the photographs of my BA graduation from October 1999, fully twenty-five years ago now, along with others from celebrating the end of Finals and some from regular life in the Arco Building where I had spent my third year.  Even with the package of society materials sent off to the petitioners, I started scanning more and more photographs, reading more and more diary entries.  Realising that some events did not transpire as my memory was so sure they had.  I even found a whole trip that was missing in a central log of travels I had some years ago compiled from passport stamps, in which I roamed the Cote d'Azur with a girl I had hoped would become a life partner.  The photographs had a lovely, grainy, diffuse yet oddly intense cast to them, often one-quarter way towards sepia but also capable of the most heart-aching blues - nothing like the pixel-precise digital photographs we have today.  If saudade was a colour schema, these photographs were it, given how they "contract my heart by looking out of date".  Bringing them into a digital format makes them more accessible, and yet there is a sense almost of betrayal to it, that some of the value of these photographs consist in how difficult it is and has been to arrive back again in a past whose imagined futures are now clearly out of reach.

I've written more eloquently on the nature of memory elsewhere in my creative practice, so perhaps it's timely to get back to the present, yet going on about how difficult it was been to birth this issue would be something of a stuck clock.  (For lawyers out there, all I need say is "live transaction".)  Nevertheless, Diwali morning broke on a couple of hours spare, soon used for furiously getting all the last details in place.  The poems in this issue are few, but well formed.  Kai Chai and Shu Hoong - who has his own "live transaction" (how do you do it?) - have come through with their sections, but I'm also pleased and saddened to have Stephanie accept my essay celebrating John Burnside, who I met during those Oxford years and who has now sadly passed.  We will never see his like again.

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