By Yeow Kai Chai

What's next for Singaporean Anglophone poetry? Judging by recent efforts in bridging the divide between linguistic groups in the literary scene, translation (and its cousins, transliteration and transcreation) have been helpful in enriching the poetic landscape.

One thinks of Joshua Ip's irreverent translations to the tanglish (Math Paper Press, 2021), which involves "dodgily translated" versions of poems from the Tang and Song dynasties; Daryl Lim Wei Jie's minimalist abstractions of Bai Juyi's lines (Anything But Human, 2021); and Clara Chow's Lousy Love Poems (Hermit Press/Math Paper Press, 2021), comprising poems written in Chinese and translated into English by the poet herself.

Shawn Hoo, similarly, mines liminal fields between languages. He's already made heads turn with Of the Florids (Diode Editions, 2022), an exquisite realisation of a chapbook which queries and unravels taxonomies of languages – be them about power, history, and ecology. Awarded the 2021 Diode Editions Chapbook Prize, it includes a curio of a poem 'Deferred Sayings for the Next Century.' A playful riff on the Hokkien saying "Carrying the sand to fill the sea – a fool's work," it borrows the dialectal syntax (and its gnomic punchline) to spin some campy, laugh-out-loud proclamations.

After graduating from Yale-NUS College majoring in literature in 2020, Hoo was a Global Writing and Speaking Fellow at NYU Shanghai from 2021 to 2022. Currently Assistant Editor at Asymptote, where he curates the Translation Tuesdays showcase, he has done translations for other platforms too, such as excerpts of a Lao She novel for the Journal of Practice, Research and Tangential Activities (PR&TA); and of a Wong Koi Tet story for Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation.

His poems are anthologised in the forthcoming New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Boy, 2022) and can be found in Diode Poetry Journal, New Delta Review, Queer Southeast Asia, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere.

1. What are you reading right now?
I am newly obsessed with Marianne Moore, so I'm working through her New Collected Poems edited by Heather Cass White. Jeremy Tiang's translation of Rouge Street by Shuang Xuetao, a collection of three novellas (or long short stories) which are breathtaking in their shifting perspectives and dilated senses of time, has been great. Finally, Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing, as I find myself increasingly interested in the linguistic and poetic situation Glissant describes.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
The narrator of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy. Never saying much, yet always fishing from her interlocutors outrageously clear monologues, the most dazzling sentences.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
Who's out there having conceptions about me?

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
I'm not sure I "identify" with writers, especially living writers, as if I were out to steal their identities. So here are two dead writers: Arthur Yap – naturally, since a line from his poem 'tropical paradise' makes up one of three epigraphs to Of the Florids. Gertrude Stein – every sentence, every line of hers yields so much pleasure. They are more poetic muses than persons of identification, really.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I spent four years not really writing poems, so writer's block believes in me. Poetry embraces its own timeline for gestation and that includes the time of not writing, it includes the dreaded time of experiencing the anxiety that I might never write a poem again. In these times, I find that reading a book, watching a film, browsing in the library, looking at art, taking a walk – in short, listening to the language of others – works (though rarely immediately). Encountering  language that excites me often induces in me a need to write. And then, ah, I have to find the time to write.

6.  What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
The commitment to becoming singular on the page. An untimely, syncopated mind. Teacherly writers. Those who write in alien tongues. Fearlessness.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
Too much certainty.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." – Franz Kafka. It reminds me that reading can be violent, seismic, cathartic.

Also: when discussing a poet's relationship to their audience, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil once advised not to worry about who one's audience is: instead, summon your audience. (Larry does not recall having said this, but when I recalled this advice, he says he agrees with the sentiment!)

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
think if it wasn't poetry for me, it could have been music.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
None of the above. Instead, I would pick any film by Tsai Ming-liang and drift off in his unhurried style. (I have a fondness for slow cinema, and joke that the dream cinema I would run is one which plays two long long films a day and, outside, I'd curate a space for people to mingle in between their sleepiness or boredom. Napping in theatres is, of course, encouraged!)  

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Current favourite word: awnings. It's close enough to yawning and, in my mind, awning is what a building does when its roof yawns to give cover to a neighbour.

Least favourite word: any word that is too wide in circulation is my least favourite word at that moment.  

12. Please compose a rhyming couplet with the following words: unicorn, cycad, extant.
I fell in love with a cycad-tarian unicorn when
extant plantae were extincting, regrettably, when.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
Some sort of dictionary or thesaurus (mostly online), access to another book or a bookshelf (preferably physical), and a blank page (either paper or screen, preferably screen).

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Late at night, when you are able to imagine everyone else asleep, is the best time to hear yourself and therefore the best time for writing.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
The time is short for dawdling or grand systems during a last supper, so I would invite the aphorists among writers to quip cheerfully at the table: Roland Barthes (fragmentary, eminently quotable), W. S. Merwin (his small poems), and Lydia Davis (her short short stories). We might scribble a few minor things before dessert!

16. In a July 2022 interview with Yale-NUS, you spoke about your time in NYU Shanghai, sharing your observation that multilingualism and translation could be the norm for the future, with "deep implications" for the way we "write, read, talk, teach and live."  What are some of these implications, and will this insight influence your full poetry collection?
I am interested in what happens when we take difference as the starting point to how we use language instead of standardisation – which is how we conventionally approach language study or literary traditions. In Shanghai, I found myself in environments where multiple Englishes and multiple Chineses kept coming into contact, which made me speak and listen in ways that were new, exciting, improvisatory. There was a playful way in which my friends and I would speak in between these multiple registers of different languages. I've been thinking about how that can change the way we teach and write, two modes that – unlike speaking and listening – are incredibly resistant to such an insight.

In writing terms, I am interested in a poetics of the impure, idiosyncratic, unsystemetisable, excessive, opaque, and noisy. The writers who excite me now are the translingual poets, writers in creole languages, exophonic writers and translator-poets: Yoko Tawada, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, Hamid Roslan, Don Mee Choi, Eugene Ostashevsky, Sawako Nakayasu, and more. I think some of this spirit is already in Of the Florids, where different languages rub up against each other because different systems of representing the natural world rub up against one another. I picked up some basic Cantonese in a language school in Shanghai, and have been trying to introduce more Hokkien into my life. I suspect that the more time I spend with these writers, books, and languages, the more it will feed into what I write. It's marinating.

Perhaps as a provocation to your question about the "full poetry collection" – I do consider Of the Florids as full, even if it is technically a chapbook by page count. Full in the sense that it does not need to find its raison d'être in a longer book. So what I write next, I hope will take the shape and length it needs. I would certainly love to see more poetry collections from Singapore take on the chapbook – its brevity, concentration, portability – as an aesthetic form in itself.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
Stay awhile.

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