Sunday, November 19, 2006
[The Straits Times, Lifestyle, Nov 19, 2006]
The $10, 000 Singapore Literature Prize has come just in time for poets Cyril Wong and Yong Shu Hoong - they are both moving from their full-time jobs to academia.
By sheer coincidence, the two poets who have tied for the Singapore Literature Prize (SLP) in English are quitting or have quit their full-time jobs. Following decisions made independently before they learnt they would split the $10,000 award, Yong Shu Hoong, 39, left his job as a vice-president at UOB last month, while Cyril Wong, 29, leaves his programme manager job at The Substation arts centre at the end of this year.
The winners of the prize, given by the National Book Development Council, were announced last night. During a chat with LifeStyle last week at Books Actually, a cosy bookstore in Telok Ayer Street, both said they were going to do stints in academia. Yong, who won for his third poetry collection, Frottage, joined the National University of Singapore as an associate with its Centre of the Arts at the beginning of this month. Meanwhile, Wong, who won for his fourth collection, titled Unmarked Treasure, will begin a master's degree in English literature next year at NUS, on a research scholarship. Both said they badly needed a change of scene.
'I stayed in the banking industry for six years only because of the money,' Yong said. 'My department was being restructured, so I took it as a good time to take a break and concentrate on writing.' The freelance journalist has also run subTEXT, a monthly poetry reading at the National Library, since May 2001. He was nominated for the SLP in 1995 for an unpublished manuscript, but did not win.
Academia is also a much-needed breather for Wong, who has been with The Substation since 2004. He is also founding editor of the online poetry journal, softblow.com. 'I'm tired of managing the arts every day because I see how it is kind of a losing battle. The arts are becoming more and more commercialised,' he said. 'There are some people who realise that they can't make money in arts, and so they swing to the other extreme and do it just for the money.'
While both poets agree that artists in Singapore actually have a lot of opportunities, whether it is platforms for their art or grants to fund their work, neither considers himself a product of the Government's push to promote the arts. Both had stumbled into poetry on their own.
Wong started out writing horror stories while studying at St Patrick's School, and was published in the school journal, Shamrock. He tried his hand at poetry only during national service. Wong, an NUS English graduate who received a Young Artist Award last year, said: 'In school, I had wanted to write screenplays, or novels like Stephen King. I wanted to write The Shining. 'But after a while, things caught up with me.' There was a period, he said, when he suffered from bouts of depression. 'NS came and made me feel so lousy about myself. So I ended up with all that literary energy turned inwards towards myself, to dig up issues about my insecurity, my psychological problems, and I couldn't stop writing.'
Meanwhile, Yong, an NUS computer science graduate who has an MBA from Texas A&M University, started writing only while doing his master's in 1993. He was inspired by a book of Jim Morrison poetry.'It was like some of the Biennale installation artworks, where you look and think that anyone could have done it. So I thought, why don't I give it a try?' he said with a laugh.
While winning a literary award might then seem like a coup for these late bloomers, they are worried it might lead some to see them as part of the establishment, or mainstream. Said Yong: 'It's good to win because of the recognition, which will make it easier to get grants. But on the other hand, I have not always agreed in the past when someone was picked over someone else.'
He was referring to the year when Boey Kim Cheng's critically acclaimed poetry collection, Days Of No Name, was passed over in favour of Roger Jenkins' From The Belly Of The Carp, which was considered more nationalistic. Boey has since taken up Australian citizenship.
Wong agreed: 'My friends are not so forgiving. When I got shortlisted, I immediately got SMSes saying, 'So when did you become mainstream?'
So they say the tie is a happy occurrence. Both were told of the results a week before the ceremony, and Wong was so excited that he e-mailed some friends and acquaintances, ruining the organiser's hopes of keeping the literary community in the dark until the awards were officially announced yesterday. Said Yong about the tie: 'It's a good compromise because you're winning it, and at the same time you are sharing it.'
Both also noted that the winning collections do not deal with overtly Singaporean themes. Frottage was inspired by Yong's visit to a Max Ernst exhibition in Australia, while Unmarked Treasure is a deeply personal collection about love, loss and loneliness. But does wanting to remain 'a best-kept secret', as Yong put it, mean that they considered themselves inaccessible to the general public?
The poets are the first to admit that outside their literary circle, it is not always clear who their fans are. 'The only impression I get of my audience is when I get strange e-mail messages, or when I read blog entries about my poetry,' said Wong, who thinks his Singaporean readers are mostly young adults.
Still, they stressed that their poetry was meant to appeal to different people on different levels.Yong said: 'I do feel that my poems are not difficult to get into, and I think that there are certain layers that people can peel to get into the poem's core.' He said some of his non-poetry-reading ex-colleagues have bought his books just to support him, only to return the next day to tell him that they actually did not find the poems difficult to understand. 'These are people in the financial world who have probably lost touch with poetry a long time ago,' he said. 'But, of course, if Cyril or other poets read my poems, then there are a lot more things they would be able to get, which even I myself am surprised to discover. Though, of course, when they point these out, I say I intentionally put them in.'
Both poets were also aware that, for better or for worse, there was going to be increased scrutiny, and obvious comparisons, between their works. Yong, who re-read Wong's collection after hearing of the tie, said: 'For Cyril as a confessional poet, he basically lays down all his feelings, spreads them out on the table. As for me, I tend to look at things in a sort of subtle, detached way.' Wong added: 'Shu Hoong takes a situation and lifts it, peers underneath, sees a bit, turns it around and offers new perspectives on the situation. 'I am not that subtle, or rather, my subtlety lies elsewhere: I will stab the thing, open it, take it all out and then I will play subtly with the insides.'
by Stephanie Yap
eothen blogged at 8:24 pm
