Succour for the Spirit – Issue 5
Sunday Reading with writer & academic
Boey Kim Cheng
Talking about Singapore Botanic Gardens, the late great jazz pianist Bill Evans, questioning place, the role of the poet in times of social & political crisis, & much more.
#SuccourfortheSpirit #SilentDialogueEvents
Photograph of Boey Kim Cheng by Wee Wah Fong
“Memory and place are inextricably linked. The place of memory and memory of place. It seems to be that we don’t really know or experience a place until we have left or lost it. Proust says the true paradises are the ones we have lost. There is something Edenic about the solitary hours I spent in different parts of the Gardens.”
In Conversation
with Boey Kim Cheng (BKC) & correspondences’ Emma Thomson (ET)
Nature, food or art?
Nature / Place
All-time favourite place
BKC—There are a few, but the Botanic Gardens in Singapore stays top of the list. I spent long hours, whole days there in my youth, sitting or sprawled on the soft luxuriant grass, reading Yeats, Edward Thomas and Pablo Neruda. Memory and place are inextricably linked. The place of memory and memory of place. It seems to be that we don’t really know or experience a place until we have left or lost it. Proust says the true paradises are the ones we have lost. There is something Edenic about the solitary hours I spent in different parts of the Gardens. One memory retains its vivid glow. One late afternoon, surrounded by the hundreds of varieties of palms in what was the quietest and most remote part of the Gardens, the Palm Valley, I was reading Neruda, a borrowed copy which carried a distinct smell and texture, and somehow, it must be the combination of scent of the grass, the languorous way the palm fronds dangled the light and stirred in the breeze, the cadences of Neruda’s lines, I felt transported and lifted to another place, yet grounded at the same time. It was a powerful experience, and must have added to my resolve to be a poet. The most powerful memories are stored in the body, and recently this one has surfaced, and nudged me into writing a suite of poems about the Gardens, one of them ending with this memory:
You remember reading Neruda’s
Residence On Earth under the sun-drunk
palms, and feel time slow in the lengthening
shadows, memory awakening in the deepening
tone of daylight. In your body you knew then
the poetry of earthy longing, the music born
of distance, of roots stirring with dreams
of home, of wandering branches alive
with the leaf-language of time and memory,
the history of leaving and homecoming
these travelled palms recite as the wind
and light pass through them.
The Gardens have changed tremendously since that time. It’s been developed into a park really, with groups of tourists shepherded through it. The Palm Valley is no longer the most distant part of it since they opened up another entrance at the far end. Things are utterly changed, to use Yeats’ words, but I can still remember experiencing the Gardens through the writers I loved – reading Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole” by the Swan Lake, and Edward Thomas’ “The Lane” as I walked up and down a quiet and overlooked path through towering tropical trees. It has been that way for me, how the memory of a place is often bound up with the memory of reading.
Favourite place near home
View over Berowra Valley from Barnetts lookout. © John Yurasek
BKC—At the end of the street in Berowra where we have made a home, there is a fire-trail that links up with the Great North Walk. It cuts through astonishing ranks of angophoras, scribbly, red and blue gums, paperbarks and native scrub that come spring sparks into subtle bursts of colours, to a sandstone escarpment, a ledge under giant gum overlooking Berowra Creek. You can see the midnight blue ribbon of the water below, joined to the Hawkesbury River behind the hills. To the west are the Blue Mountains, the sky over it a pristine breath-taking blue. I have watched some stupendous sunsets from this rock here, my place of retreat and meditation. Some glorious crimson hallelujahs over Tiepolo blue, some very quiet ones of the sun poised on the table-top of the mountains, each so different. Here I can let everything slide, and empty the mind, let the self disappear into all that space around me.
Place you're dreaming of going
Bamiyan, View of the cliff niches & surrounding caves © United Nations
BKC—The places I wish I could go to are mostly places that have disappeared and or have been changed irrevocably to something unrecognisable from what they were before. Globalisation and mass tourism have killed off real travel and middle age has diminished a lot of the wanderlust of youth. Still, there are a few must-see-before-I-die places, and top of the short list would be Bamiyan. The gigantic standing Buddhas were blasted out of their cliff niches by the Taliban, but there are still Buddhist caves around it worth exploring. It will be enough to stand there and gaze at the empty niches and think that Xuanzang the Buddhist monk and Marco Polo came this way and stood in awe before the giants of the valley. It will be enough to stand on the spot where Bruce Chatwin stood back in the 60s where he came here on the hippie trail and read his characteristically chiselled sentence: “We will not stand on the Buddha’s head at Bamiyan, upright in his niche like a whale in a dry-dock.”
What are you reading?
Cover design, Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet © Faber & Faber
BKC—I am mostly re-reading books and writers that gave me such pleasure and were such a revelation when I first encountered them: Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, which I am seeing in a new light after reading Ian MacNiven’s biography and learning that Justine, the first book, was written long after Durrell had left Alexandria, which shows that you can only write about a place after you leave it; re-reading Durrell has also led me to dig up my copy of Cavafy, the Alexandrian poet who haunts the pages of Justine. There are also writers you never stop reading, books you go to every week to get recharged or restored – Heaney, Larkin, Du Fu, Wang Wei, Bruce Chatwin, Elizabeth Bishop. You go back to them as much to polish your craft as to draw sustenance, especially in a difficult time like this. It is like music, putting on a record that touches you in the deepest place, the way good writing brings you to this place where words stop and the silent music takes over.
ET—Some interesting reads or listening on: Cavafy, Heaney and Du Fu.
All-time favourite musician(s)?
BKC—Bill Evans, the jazz pianist. There are days when I am content to just put on my Bill Evans records and forget about writing and everything else. It’s incredibly rich and deep, light and graceful, the delicate touches, the lustrous resonance of his chords. It’s like Ravel, Debussy and Bud Powell and Miles Davis coming together, to create this uniquely beautiful voice and tone. Just listen to him play “My Foolish Heart” and “Peace Piece” and you would think nothing in poetry or any kind of writing can come anywhere near it.
Tell us about one of your creations
Cover art and design by Yong Wen Yeu © Yong Wen Yeu
BKC—The title of the work I want to talk about is 'Gull Between Heaven and Earth', published in 2017. It is a historical novel based on the life of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu.
Why did you choose this particular work?
BKC—Because it was the hardest book to write, and because I had the privilege of travelling with a great poet for close to a decade, immersing myself in his poems and his life. It is my first and probably only work of narrative prose, so I really had to push myself. It was a long journey, involving a lot of research and fieldwork, translating them together with the poems into narrative, but in the end, as the cliché goes, it was the journey that was the most gratifying, the writing allowing me to experience his poetry at the deepest level, and reconnecting me with the Chinese literary tradition I was first exposed to before I switched to Anglo-American exemplars. His poetry was a quest for home, a search for peace among the tumult caused by the An Lushan Rebellion. I saw him as an uncompromising exemplar, a poet who endured many personal and familial adversities but who resisted self-pity, bearing witness instead to the tremendous afflictions of his people and the plight of his country. His questioning poems of his own place, of the relevance of the poet in times of social and political crisis, and his description of himself as “a guest over ten thousand miles and autumnal sorrows” and as a “lone gull between heaven and earth” all spoke strongly to my own sense of displacement and not-being-at-home.
What was the starting point?
BKC—It began with feelings of homesickness in my first years as a migrant here. I started re-reading the Tang poets that I first read when I was in a Chinese-medium primary school in Singapore. It was comforting, reading the juejus or quatrains; it brought back a buried part of my childhood, but at a deeper level, it revealed a new direction I could take as a migrant, a sort of reclamation of literary roots, and of reconciling the different parts of my identity as a writer. Reading beyond Du Fu’s most anthologised poems, I began to appreciate the incredible depth and power of his work.
He was writing about homelessness long before Shakespeare did in King Lear, in his poem “My Cottage Unroofed by the Autumn Gale,” among many others that deal with exile and displacement. The compassion is genuine and marks him apart from other classical Chinese poets. There are poems that provide eyewitness accounts of the sorrows of the ordinary folk; in perhaps the first anti-war poem in Chinese literature, “The Song of the War-Wagons,” he watches on as a convoy of soldiers marches to the frontier, with wives and mothers weeping in the wake. Then there are poems that give heart-wrenching details of widespread famine, of physical hardships he and his countrymen had to endure during the long Rebellion years. In a poem recording his journey to see his family he paints a moving portrait of his wife and children, starving and dressed in rags, and discovers that his youngest son has died of hunger. Du Fu, I would argue, is the first truly autobiographical poet in Chinese poetry, perhaps world poetry. No other poet from the classical period has rendered such a vivid and detailed account of his life and times.
I wanted to pay homage to this great poet, and the first impetus for the novel came when I discovered that there was no full-length account of his life, no full-length biography, not even in Chinese, aside from the centuries of scholarly treatises on the poems, but no biographies of the scale Shakespeare has inspired. I wanted to show, especially to Western readers, how great a man and poet he was, and draw attention to his lesser known poems.
What were you striving to explore?
BKC—It was an act of translation on many levels – translating the Chinese poems into English, translating the poetry into narrative prose, translating all the research and fieldwork into an authentic sense of place and time. I wanted to do justice to his work and life, so it took a long time to get the voice right, or what I think his voice is. I used the four key places in his life as staging posts for the narrative and made two trips to China to experience these places, and track his journeys from Changan to Tonggu, then over the central range to Chengdu, and finally down the Yangtse River to Kuizhou. For me he was a sort of diasporic precedent, a refugee poet on a relentless quest for home and peace. It took a while for me to inhabit his character, but discovering that many of the concerns and conflicts in his work were also mine helped a great deal to close the distance – the place of poetry, the tussle between the longing to withdraw from worldly ambition and strife and the Confucian duty to family and emperor, the sense of failure, the importance of friendship etc.
There were moments of inspired invention, which for me were the highlights of the writing. There were gaps and silences in and between poems and so I took the liberty of improvisation and invention. I envisaged a not implausible meeting before the poet and Li Bai’s sister; I summoned his mother to the stage, as a distant memory – she is absent in his work, understandably, as she died soon after his birth. It felt right, not something entirely fabricated; these fictional episodes and scenes were made possible by research, but not bound or dictated by it.
What are you working on now that we can learn more about?
BKC—I am working on a collection of poetry, which will be my first in eight or nine years. A group of prose poems forms the core of the collection. For the Silent Dialogue publication, I will be reworking a prose poem into a lyrical essay for consideration.
What else can supporters do?
Pre purchase our book for Silent Dialogue with Boey's words. Featuring Boey Kim Cheng's piece and ten other original pieces of writing by some of the country's finest writers alongside beautiful imagery from our participating visual artists, it is going to be special.
Keep your eye out for Boey Kim Cheng's next book of poetry. Meanwhile, purchase your copy of 'Gull Between Heaven and Earth' published by Epigram Books here. Also by the author are the following wonderful books we heartily recommend:
MEMOIR: Between Stations
POETRY: Clear Brightness, After the Fire, Days of No Name, Another Place Somewhere-Bound.
Share our news via email & social media via i: silent_dialogue & f: silentdialogueevents. It introduces us to new supporters!
Biography
Contributing essayist Kim Cheng Boey emigrated from Singapore in 1997 to Australia. His research and work exploring themes of travel, migration and displacement have resulted in monographs on Asian and Irish émigré writers along with five award-wining collections of poetry and a book of personal essays entitled Between Stations. Living the life of an émigré writer from Singapore and as a migrant writer in Australia, he has examined the relationships between place, memory and identity. This engagement has brought about literary community work with Asian Australian writers, and resulted in his co-editing of a ground-breaking anthology of Asian Australian poetry entitled Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (2013, Puncher & Wattmann), the first anthology in Australia with a focus on Australian writers of Asian descent.
Image credit (banner): Palm Valley, Singapore Botanic Gardens, Singapore © Buster & Bubby Pro
