By Yong Shu Hoong

I'd met Filipino poet Conchitina Cruz in Singapore twice. The first time, I figured, must be during the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) 2014. Today Online reminded me that she was the "first-ever non-Singapore-based guest to have ever been invited into the annual lion's den that is the SWF Closing Debate" whose proposition for that edition was: "True art is always ugly."

But "The Prospect of Beauty" (which was incidentally that year's festival theme) or ugliness aside, the second time I met Cruz was as fellow judges of the 2017 Golden Point Award, together with Singapore author and academic, Rajeev Patke. By then, a friend had given me a copy of her 2004 chapbook, Disappear.

Cruz received her MFA in writing from the University of Pittsburgh in the United States. She currently teaches creative writing and literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Poetry collections that she has authored include Dark Hours (winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in the Philippines), elsewhere held and lingered, and There is no emergency. A new collection, Modus, is forthcoming in March.

Cruz also helps run Paper Trail Projects, a small press dedicated to poetry "and other investigations in language driven by the poetic impulse" that she founded together with Adam David. But she has continued to maintain her ties with Singapore. As recently as 2019, she was on the external panel of esteemed industry fellows, also featuring Singapore poet Aaron Maniam and Singapore academic Koh Tai Ann, for Sing Lit Station's Manuscript Bootcamp to ready new poetry manuscripts for publication.

  1. What are you reading right now?
Memos, e-mails, student papers. Daphné B.'s Made-Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture Under Late Capitalism, Sophie Calle's The Hotel, and A Poetics of the Press (edited by Kyle Schlesinger). I'm in the middle of proofreading Faye Cura's book of poetry, punan (fill), and about to proofread Glenn Diaz's non-fiction, When the World Ended I Was Thinking About the Forest.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
I would be the speaker in Lydia Davis's 'Losing Memory' and 'Spring Spleen'. Their situations pretty much describe my pandemic state.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
I have no idea. I don't (and would rather not) know what people think of me.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
Anne Boyer is often able to articulate what I sense or feel or think but can't put into words. I feel affinity toward Emily Dickinson's complicated feelings about publishing, at least as recounted in the last book about Dickinson that I read (Martha Ackmann's These Fevered Days). 

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I think there are lulls in writing. I usually just keep reading. It helps to find texts to converse with (however obliquely) and get my mind going.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
I admire writers who are able to combine complexity and clarity, who are playful with language and form. I think writers who are speaking out against the Duterte regime and participating in efforts to thwart the grave possibility of a Marcos presidency are doing the right thing.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Self-importance.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
Not advice, but questions. From Anne Boyer's 'The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock': "Also, how is Capital not an infinite laboratory called 'conditions'? And where is the edge of the electrified grid?" And then, from Boyer's 'Ma Vie en Bling: A Memoir': "is it possible to write about objects – the way things look and feel, the garments on bodies and in furniture in the gardens and in the rooms without somehow also provoking a desire to acquire more things, or even if one writes about making things is it possible to write about making things without also provoking desire for them?"

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
am able to bike from home to work (around 4–5km?), if necessary. It may take forever (I learned to bike during the first lockdown), but I'll get there.

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?
Comedy. I want to laugh.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
These days, I've become dependent on the word "yakap" (embrace), which, given this pandemic with no end in sight, you can only say and not do. I also like using "hugssss" (and many other variants that multiply different letters of the word, if only to suggest the hug's duration and emotion). I wouldn't mind a world without "webinar" and "outcomes-based".

12. Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three words: glitter, arc, distance.
How about the beginning of a limerick on a film with a feline lead…?

There once was a cat dressed in glitter
whose arc felt so distant and bitter

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
I'm the pen-and-paper type.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Early morning.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Edward Gorey (we could talk about cats), St. Vincent (whose Marry Me pulled me through tough times) and my partner Adam David, the only person I'm able to talk to these days without having to rally what's left of my social skills.

16. Cordite Poetry Review, in an article, mentions that "Cruz's enumerative poetics moves smoothly between many forms, from spatially-oriented poetry, prose poetry and micro-fiction, to letters, lists and invocations, to forms that take their cue from reference texts." What are your joys and challenges transcending what people expect poetry should be?
I've always been interested in turning to extra- or non-poetic forms to write poetry. I guess I'm responding to the allure of repurposing – there's an adventure to be had (for me, at least) in coaxing a poem out of, say, a bureaucratic form you're obliged to fill out. It's both a challenge and a pleasure to learn to stop writing a poem, which I'm finding I need to do more of (as opposed to knowing that a poem is done).

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
My name, birthdate and death date.

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