By Toh Hsien Min

One of the trends that just might be coming into being is what I think of as "peak wine", because between the evidence of sales falling by consecutive double-digit percentages at the large wine conglomerates and the lakes of wine and spirits building up in Australia and France there is evidence building that what has seemed to be an inexorable rise of wine in the past three decades is finally stalling.  There are numerous factors underlying this; for instance, the generation now coming into the age of majority are not drinking as much in pursuit of healthier lifestyles.  The wine industry has also reaped all the benefits of Gen X getting rich and learning to indulge, but this makes it a victim of its own success - when the finest wines have gone from three-digit pricing to five-digit pricing in my lifetime, short of inherited cellars that younger generation wouldn't get to taste the touchstones of winemaking, leaving them with a constrained idea of what wine can be, which also means they are less likely to encounter the sort of eureka wine that sends them down the rabbit hole.  

I think of this because after a night at the SSO with a friend, as we were discussing the joys of listening to live music, he bemoaned the decline of jazz, saying that in his view there would never be a Miles Davis again.  I suggested that the reason was the emergence of the pop song - Elvis, the Beatles, the Beach Boys - relegating jazz to a niche.  Just as, in a way, classical music might never have as rich a flowering again as in the 19th century.  Each of these came to prominence for a reason, and each became marginalised when new replacement arts arose with different factors driving their growth.

These observations got me wondering what else we could have whose time has come and has gone or is going.  In France, perhaps the French bistro; in Singapore, I don't imagine hawker food will ever be what it was even a decade or two ago.  And then I realise with a shock that what also fit all the criteria was poetry.  Poetry was the original literary art because the techniques of prosody were its recording technology - wandering bards could recite Beowulf, the Iliad or the Kalevala because of prosodic features such as alliteration or rhyme - in a time when parchment was rare.  But as paper and the printing press came into prominence, a large chunk of the purpose of poetry hived off and became the novel, leaving us with the lyric poem as residue.  Now we may be entering the end of an era, with the advent of the smartphone meaning that reading capacity and appetite is rapidly shrinking.  While one might hope that the shorter form poetry has some hope amidst the attention deficits of today, it is more likely that by being closer to the miniature grabs for attention offered by TikTok or Insta it is also more likely to be displaced.  In place of Yeats, Eliot, Pound and even Larkin and Hughes, who is coming to the fore?  Amanda Gorman?  Lang Leav?

At QLRS we keep fighting the good fight, doing whatever little we can do to help the next generation of talent to emerge.  Alas, this issue's poetry is somewhat curtailed from what it could have been.  We had a couple of contributions that needed a little more polish to sparkle, but at press time the authors were still considering what their best responses were - which is understandably not a process that should be rushed.  The short stories are as robust and various as ever, and the essays include a bold effort from Jacqueline Chang to tackle grief with an element of jocularity.  While Shu Hoong's criticism is section is smaller than it's been for a while, we note that it contains only one review of poetry; is this another sign of the times?  But particularly in these challenging times with the old world order being up-ended by warmongers on either side of the Atlantic Ocean (see Dylan Kwok's review of Nuclear War), we may well note the continance of the W.H. Auden quote:  "For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper [...] it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth."

_____