Poetry World Cup Final: Singapore-Pakistan

PREAMBLE

It’s time to decide who wins our first (and, quite possibly, last) Poetry World Cup. Over the last month, with the help of nearly 4,000 reader votes, we’ve whittled the original 32 poems down to a final two. Both semi-finals followed a broadly similar pattern, with the two poems close to parity until a surge of support in the final hours of voting put the result beyond doubt. Singapore (represented by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé) and Pakistan (represented by Mehvash Amin) were the two countries that made it through, and they’ll go head-to-head over the next 24 hours. You can vote in the poll or via the comments (both at the foot of this page), and the poem with the most votes will win the Poetry World Cup. Ready? Let’s go!

THE POEMS

gǎn qíng yòng shì :: impulsive and impetuous

“It was game season, and there was blood and lust in their eyes. It was no different from Rome in the old days. Gladiators, lions, slaves, the ringmaster, thrust in a ring together. No different. No different at all.” In the next hour, Geronimo practically talks to himself, gives himself a lesson in violence as spectacle. “What are the forces of tradition? How do they bear down on these peoples? We are in their debt really. We don’t get to see this kind of steadfastness in the city. Such an unwavering belief in what should be done, what needs to be done, and how it should all be done. All that urban chic, all the material wealth, the sheer waste. The blitzkrieg of the senses, that’s what our legacy will be understood as.” An anthropologist returning to the city is like a gazelle let back into the wild after years of captivity. This is an intentional inversion, Geronimo says. The zoo from which it escaped is as much a wild terrain as the vast open field, the wilderness that everyone seems to root for. The primal has its dangers too, as the noble savage has shown us. He shouldn’t use “savage”, but the word has reclaimed for itself a new right to be, a chic authenticity. “Violence presumes the spectacle,” Geronimo says, establishing his thesis. In the same hour, outside the window, a mother has picked up a toddler by its collar, and another woman is whipping its back and legs with a strip of leather. There is no rattan cane lying around, so she picks up the closest thing to it. The toddler has its arms on its mother’s hip and thigh. The toddler is hysterical and crying, kicking out like a wild animal. All this happens outside the window, across the street. It too is a recapitulation. It might as well have happened in another country and century.

Karachi

We must learn to quarter fear,
dice it, serve it on plates
in manageable portions.

Instead, it is etched like
a hologram against the sky,
starting out of the sockets

of buses burnt on the road,
where they root
like indestructible fungi.

The rat-a-tat of gunfire
shatters the silence into pieces
of a stone requiem.

Come now, instead of
allegorising fear,
dare we spell it out?

Dare we name the man
who left his house
never thinking: tonight it’s I,

till the bullets made him
spin and dance?  And dare we
name the woman

who will not know
the mess haemorrhaging
into the sewer as her husband?

A yellow moon comes up
and the smell of fish
from the phosphorescent sea

almost cancels out
the smell of fear
and singed hopes.

Almost. For nothing can atone
but the seamless reparation
of fairy tale endings.

FINAL RESULT: Singapore 1295-1270 Pakistan

Singapore win the 2014 Poetry World Cup!

MEET THE POETS

Singapore’s World Cup poet is Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé. The recipient of the PEN American Center Shorts Prize, Swale Life Poetry Prize and Cyclamens & Swords Poetry Prize, among other awards, he also has a theology masters (world religions) from Harvard and fine arts masters (creative writing) from Notre Dame. His work spans various genres —ethnography, journalism, poetry, and creative nonfiction: ‘I’ve come to realise,’ he says, ‘that… I was meant to work across artistic media. The hats are all funky to wear, and life is a grand party.’

Mehvash Amin is currently editor-in-chief of HELLO! Pakistan, and was editor of lifestyle magazine Libas International for 11 years. Her poetry has been published in an anthology, ‘Tangerine in the Sun’, and in a number of international magazines, including Vallum and Sugar Mule. ‘Karachi’, the poem chosen to represent Pakistan in the Poetry World Cup, was among The Missing Slate’s Pushcart nominees last year.

ROAD TO THE FINAL

Round One

Singapore began with a resounding win over China, with Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé’s prose poem finishing 48 votes ahead of Changming Yuan’s ‘Y: An Alphabetic Allusion’. Pakistan faced tough opposition in Ghana’s Kwame Dawes, regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation. In the highest-scoring game of the round, Mehvash Amin’s poem came through by 98 votes to 70.

Round Two

Singapore’s game with Cyprus was covered by the national press in both countries, and there was very little to separate the two poems until late in the voting. Singapore eventually won by 34 votes, recording the highest score of the round. Controversially, Pakistan received a walkover to the quarter-finals after Ireland’s Anatoly Kudryavitsky withdrew, stating that he felt his poem had no chance of winning.

Quarter-finals

Pakistan were pushed very close by Scotland’s Ryan Van Winkle, ultimately finishing 23 votes ahead in the  most tightly-contested of the quarter-finals. Singapore never looked in serious danger of going out during a relatively comfortable victory over Trinidad & Tobago, with Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé’s poem ending 70 votes in front of Vahni Capildeo’s.

Semi-finals

Based on previous vote totals, Singapore were expected to win fairly comfortably against Tunisia, but found themselves behind as voting passed the halfway point. After retaking the lead overnight, they never looked back and ended 54 votes ahead. Pakistan were up against Bryan Thao Worra’s poem ‘Dreamonstration’, representing Laos. In the highest-scoring game of the Poetry World Cup so far, Pakistan won by 402 votes to 265, booking their place in the final.

READ MORE…

Zafar Anjum interviews Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé for Kitaab.

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé showcased at Pirene’s Fountain.

Squircle Line Press, founded by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé.

‘Scholem in Forty Winged Hours’, an award-winning poem by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé.

Five prose poems by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé at Asymptote.

Vallum’s Poets from Pakistan issue, including work by Mehvash Amin.

The South Asian issue of Sugar Mule, including two Mehvash Amin poems.

Soniah Kamal interviews Mehvash Amin.

Mehvash Amin’s twitter page.

Blaine Merchand’s ‘Reading Pakistan’ essay, from Vallum.