By Yeow Kai Chai

Like the person himself, there is a quiet discipline coupled with curiosity to Tse Hao Guang's verse.

The attention to what he calls "form and formation, creativity and quotation, lyrics and line breaks" paid off handsomely in 2016 when his first full-length poetry collection, Deeds of Light (2015), was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. Taking its title likely from his Chinese name, the book contains perspicacious poems which work as prisms through which insights are drawn. It came two years after his debut – an intriguing chapbook, Hyperlinkage, in which each poem contains an image which recurs in the next.

The formal rigour is not surprising considering he graduated from the Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in 2014 with a focus in poetry and creative writing.

After attending the University of Iowa's prestigious International Writing Program in 2016, he now runs a manuscript bootcamp and outreach workshops for the literary non-profit organization Sing Lit Station as its senior associate. He is also a co-editor of the cross-genre, collaborative literary journal, OF ZOOS, as well as the newly released Unfree Verse, an anthology of Singapore poetry in received and nonce forms. He blogs at tsehaoguang.com.

1) What are you reading right now?
Szilárd Borbély's Berlin-Hamlet, poems from the Hungarian; what I can only describe as shards of text scattered throughout that city, picked up and strung together. From "[Allegory 1]": "The pierced heart, in which lovers / believe, recalls me to / my task."

2) If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
I would be King Lear's Cordelia, if only because she didn't know when to keep her mouth open.

3) What is the greatest misconception about you?
Er… I don't know what specific conceptions or misconceptions others might have about me, but when I introduce myself as a writer, people often assume I lead a romantic or exciting life. Stop that right now!

4) Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
I've completely stopped identifying with other writers, mostly for my own sanity, but I used to really admire Marianne Moore's quirkiness, and how she seemed like such a reluctant writer. In living writers I see this tendency most in Wong May, who published nothing for over 30 years.

5) Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
It's not a block, it's my mind telling me that I need to do something else, at least for now. I'd go get dinner, or something.

6) What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
Self-awareness, but not too much.

7) What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
Sentimentality, especially in my own work.

8) Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
This is from Auden's 'Lullaby,' which I memorised, to my shock.

"Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful."

9) Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
…never had a literary or even a particularly angmoh upbringing. In primary school, I would edit my mum's work PowerPoint slides.

10) At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
People really should make more tragicomic action thrillers…

11) What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
I'll tell you one word I happen to enjoy at the moment and one word I happen not to. You can decide which is which.

Mnemonic.

Corpuscle.

12) Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three items: Archibald, hammerhead shark, creole.
Upon adding a hammerhead shark to Wingdings, a so-called
creole in its own right, he died, the only Singaporean Archibald.

13) What object is indispensable to you when you write?
My mind, when it is empty of my own agenda. And a computer I guess, ugh.

14) What is the best time of the day for writing?
Any time people aren't imposing themselves on me, which is usually after midnight. Recently, having more flexibility at work, I've been able to write properly in the day as well.

15) If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
I'd much prefer to invite close friends, who may or may not be literary, and are unlikely to be figures.

16) You recently co-edited Unfree Verse: Singapore Poetry In Form, drawing poems from 80 years of print and online material. What were the greatest surprises you gleaned from plowing through the works?
I got the most pleasure out of coming across good work by unknown or unexpected names, and uncollected work by more established writers. I found a short story by Wang Gungwu, and another short story by Arthur Yap (which was not included in his Collected Short Stories). I found a couple more free verse poems by DPM Tharman Shanmugaratnam which were not included in his anthology, but we have no legends. All these things don't fit UnFree Verse, of course. I had already known about Cécile Parrish and Lo Kwa Mei-en, but re-reading them re-surprised me.

A secondary surprise was when the editors decided to arrange the first two sections of the book in chronological order, and interesting juxtapositions emerged. Bidadari was mentioned twice by different writers in the first section. In the second, Edwin Thumboo's 'Friends' is followed immediately by Arthur Yap's 'some friends'; anon's 'EXIT' by Ee Tiang Hong's 'Epilogue'; Angeline Yap's 'Newel of a Stair (Haiku)' by Arthur Yap's haiku sequence 'paired stills'. It's almost as if something is or was in the air—either that, or we editors were subconsciously consistent when choosing poems. Either way, something we didn't plan for.

17) What would you write on your own tombstone?
"I can't go on, I'll go on," something ridiculous like that.

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