By Toh Hsien Min

One day in June, as I was settling down into a morning of financial modelling, my phone buzzed. There, on its screen, was the message confirming the news I had been dreading for a while. It blew my day to pieces. Arthur Yap had passed away.

Arthur Yap had been an inspiration to my writing practice ever since I began to take it seriously, and even now he still is. I was a student in junior college when I first commenced a mentorship attachment with him, and the way he gently helped me to discover what poetry was and what mine could be - without being prescriptive, by guiding me in my exploration rather than in taking me down any one path - has been at the core of how I have understood poetry ever since. Some of this I wrote about that very day, in a tribute published in the Straits Times later in the week, but despite receiving some good words about that piece I've still not shaken the feeling that it has been somehow inadequate, that Arthur Yap has been beyond the reach of that - and possibly any - tribute.

The reason I have come to feel the tribute to be inadequate is that so much of what made Arthur Yap successful as a mentor for me arose from what he was as a person, but paying tribute to him as a teacher did not quite do justice to the person he was. When I published my first collection, he was quoted in the Straits Times as saying of me: "He was prone to a lot of self-doubt, which was good, rather than being so sure of himself." Intuitively I knew that to be true, and I recognised also that it was a good teacher who could see how a student related to his subject. But Arthur had done more than most in helping me to bring out my first collection, his recommendation helped me to win the Shell-NAC Scholarship for the Arts to study at Oxford, and his continual support helped me to surmount the weakness he had identified. All this went beyond a mentorship attachment, and if it showed what a great teacher he was it also showed his generosity; and from our correspondence I know that until the last he was thinking of what he could do for others more than what he could do for himself.

I've heard others describe him as self-effacing. Although the adjective is not misplaced, how much more accurate would it be to say how gentle, humble and charitable his spirit was. His strength in the face of his illness is borne of what has become for me a touchstone of courage, and until the last he was at peace with God. And even though I am unable, still, to unlock how I have come to know Arthur Yap as more than the best poet Singapore has had but also a better person than most, I know that I would become a better person if I could learn to be more like him.

I could start by learning to be a little more patient with some of the obstacles QLRS faces. As regular readers would know, the site has had a rough couple of months. From mid-May through to mid-July, the site was on the blink with distressing regularity. This was because our domain name registrar, Verio, had done a migration that required us to do certain things to ensure the continuance of service, but we never received the email and it took a number of hair-tearing weeks after that for us to resolve the problem with Verio. It didn't help that these issues occurred during an especially busy time for me, filled with exams and b-trips to Beijing, Tianjin and Hong Kong. This led to rumours - which were even reported in the local press - that we were shutting down QLRS.

Now I may be personally not keen on running QLRS indefinitely, but what Kai Chai, Cyril, Rui, Elaine, Wei Chian and myself can commit to as a collective is, in Kai Chai's words, "to deliver... QLRS in good faith", for as long as we're able to. For this issue, we've had to make adjustments. The site problems meant our submissions received fell by half. We don't have any usable criticism this issue, which disappoints me somewhat as it's the section I look forward to the most, no doubt in part because it's outside my editorial duties! Along a similar line, Cyril has had to take over the poetry editorship for this issue, because I've been simply inundated. It has been an interesting experiment: I've read his selections, and they're markedly different from what I would have selected. Nevertheless, it's good for the site to experience this sort of renewal every now and then, which leaves me much tempted to leave the poetry rotated out for the October issue. We still have some good stories, a strong Extra Media section, and another retrospective on Arthur Yap, but we hope to deliver a better October issue. That's where you come in. Keep writing - because you keep us going.

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