Poet of the Month: Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

Last month, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé won The Missing Slate’s inaugural Poetry World Cup, receiving 1295 votes in a tense final against Pakistan’s Mehvash Amin. Our Poet of the Month interview series continues with Desmond talking to the magazine’s Literary Editor Jacob Silkstone about the connection between working on the page and working in clay, the political power of poetry, and the importance of humour as ‘an empowering force’.

As an interdisciplinary artist, is there a strong connection between your work on the page and your work in clay? Chronologically, which came first? 

Illustration and writing in the early years. Graphic design when it became lucrative as paid work. Ceramics came later, but happened fast and furious because the earthiness of the practice unleashed a very different side of my creative self. I do think there’s a lot of shape-shifting when the different practices dialogue with each other. And that happens a lot. The different disciplines inform one another in ways that have become almost second nature to me.

I’m usually not even conscious of the moment when it happens. Sometimes, the moment is sudden and abrupt enough for me to recognise the transition, like when I have to forcibly get off the wheel to pull a pen out of my pocket to write an idea down on whatever paper I can find. Or when I halt my design work, when some motif in it becomes something I want to write into a character’s life in a manuscript I’m working on.

In an interview with The Urban Wire, you’ve asked ‘how may a line in a poem animate itself into sculptured form?’ Can that process work both ways? If a poem can become a pot, can a pot become a poem (or, has one of your pots ever been the catalyst for writing a poem, the way those lines from Manley Hopkins were the catalyst for sculpting a pot)?

Yes, the process definitely works both ways. In the last chapter of my new book, ‘I Didn’t Know Mani Was A Conceptualist’, there are allusions to clay and its workability. Here is one instalment from the sequence:

 A Sonorous Altruism

“If you can’t find my hairdryer,” the Second Dakini says, “there’s the Bradley in the restroom.” The Bradley can be meaningfully worked into the Third Dakini’s slab of brick clay, now tightly wrapped in plastic to help keep in the moisture. “Clay reconstitutes itself,” the Second Dakini seems insistent on making such gendered statements, as the Bradley tosses its lustre, and takes in rust like a new leavening. “Clay is an involuntary displacement too,” the First Dakini radiates like a crystalline rock. “Clay will give you five handles and rhetorical instruction like cup-and-saucer landforms.” But the Third Dakini has escaped through the coupled roof, into the incumbent on a slant, the cant of the naysayers just as conceptual, just as au courant a sound. On the far right, that temple in Thailand is gaining excellent karma, its million green bottles hanging on the wall, and if one should accidentally fall, the Indian Ocean would churn, heliodor again.

I guess we’re talking about ekphrastic work here, when one artform inspires the creation of another. I find a lot more intersection between visual arts and literature. Sculpting, at least for me, holds a very special place. It also requires a great deal of time, something that doesn’t always avail itself to me. I’m actually working on a very exciting ekphrastic project right now. I’m editing and managing the “Eye/Feel/Write” special program at this year’s Singapore Writers Festival. Commissioned by the National Arts Council, the program has invited ten writers — these include Robin Hemley, Joshua Ip, Isa Kamari, Alvin Pang, Tan Chee Lay, Jollin Tan, Edwin Thumboo, Ramanathan Vairavan, Yeow Kai Chai, and Ovidia Yu — to write ekphrastic responses to ten artworks exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum’s “Medium At Large” exhibition.

Several of the writers have given me such beautiful insights into their creative process, that I feel compelled to share them here. Yeow Kai Chai decided to work on Ho Tzu Nyen’s audio and visual installation, “The Cloud of Unknowing”, which represented Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Of his response poems, Yeow Kai Chai had this to say: “In these three inter-linked poems, I’d like to explore the fluidity and transience of one’s identity; how porous the wall between reality and art is, and the ease with which all of us flit between personas in our everyday lives. Characters disappear and re-emerge, and words echo and ricochet. We make things, and ourselves, up along the way. In my fanciful mind, ‘The Imposters Triptych’ is an update of those classical altarpieces: propped up as a foldable contraption, with each panel echoing one another, and forming a larger picture — but of what?”

Joshua Ip was tasked with interpreting “BluRay_B” by Osang Gwon from South Korea. Joshua has also written about his experience. Here it is: “In direct response to the artist’s cheeky modern take on a classic form, I decided to employ the most traditional and dignified of Southeast-Asian literary forms, the liwuli. An 800-year-old poetic form derived from Southeast-Asian literary and rhetorical traditions, the epic beauty of the liwuli has only recently been rediscovered. I also constrained myself in thrice attempting the more difficult variation of the form, where a liwuli and its inversion, an iluwil, are juxtaposed to form a liwuliiluwil.”

I’m interested in exploring the rather anarchic humour that seems to be present in a lot of your writing. Even in the title of the poems we published recently, ‘…Wittgenstein’s whoopee cushion‘, there’s a fine balance between heaviness and lightness. I’m wondering whether humour can actually perform a very serious function: the necessary function of standing up to power… 

I’ve never been asked this question about my work, and I like how I’m needing to think through this properly even as I’m writing to you.

I have an awkward sense of myself in relation to humour. For one, I’m terribly uncomfortable with public humiliation, probably because my adolescence is marked — and scarred — by various occasions of traumatising embarrassments. I was very out of place, for years actually, and only started becoming a lot more comfortable with my self, whatever that means, in my mid-30s. That’s a really late acceptance, and a bit dismal and pathetic. To add, the way I sort of found a kind of cavern to house my personality was to crouch under the big, unwieldy cloak of postmodernism. To say one accepts oneself as a postmodernist is terribly ironic, which only underscores the point.

I remember discovering Wayne C. Booth’s ‘A Rhetoric of Irony’ in 2005 or 2006, all while the very notion of irony seemed ready to be jettisoned out of fashion’s window post-9/11. It was as if the new millennium was starting with the strange quandary of denying what seemed undeniable. Up till that point, I’d always viewed irony as one of the most sophisticated kinds of literary genius, the way Anne Hathaway’s Austen defends its use in the film Becoming Jane. But there’s that scene when Ian Richardson’s Lord Chief Judge character tries to demystify her understanding of its virtues. Of the dark nature of the ironic, a sort of bared-fangs-behind-wide-smile moment. That made me rethink irony completely.

Even as I’m writing this out, processing your question, I’m intentionally deciding against using the crutch of others’ words, and being as plainspeaking as possible about my relationship with humour and comedy. Channelling this kind of bare-bones narrative is the closest thing to confessionalist writing I’ll ever come to. I feel sort of lightheaded — not entirely because of the bottle of red on the table — like Hafiz, whose poem about laughing with God made me smile all those years ago. There was a softness yet levity to his lines. I’m usually so happy burying my emotion — difficult and evasive, most of the time — in metaphor because allusion and the crafting of it seems to help most in my confrontation with my own person and issues.

In your question, there’s the more important matter of the public function of humour. Yes, humour can be a very empowering force in bringing into relief what power might attempt to conceal or sweep under the carpet of nonchalance.

There’s a passage in ‘Rabelais and his world’ where Bakhtin writes that ‘Medieval laughter, when it triumphed over the fear inspired by the mystery of the world and by power, boldly unveiled the truth about both… This laughing truth… degraded power.’ I’ve never heard of an authoritarian regime with a sense of humour (or a sense of irony). Do you think humour is a necessary tool for a writer seeking to resist ‘the fear inspired by power’?

I don’t know if it’s a necessary tool but yes, it certainly is a serious one. Power has an insidious way of co-opting people into doing more readily what they might have thought twice about doing. The power that skirts and snakes around, within institutions, is even more invisible, more pervasive, and terrifyingly so. The image of the Panopticon, and the self-surveillance it engenders, is a classic one. Its stronghold lies in the way the strings remain unfelt by both puppet and puppeteer.

A lover of Foucault, I’m aware of the added dimension of how power has shaped whole epistemes of knowledge — and its civilising methods and functions. It’s the history of how power exacts its influence on what becomes epistemology. While it’s seductive to be judgmental of its process, it’s also fine to witness its legacy, its cold work through the passage of time. The arbitrariness of what kinds of values or knowledge become dominant discourse is what intrigues me.

I think where humour comes in is when it’s adopted as a way of coping. A coping mechanism. A language that allows a vocalising of what’s become obvious and apparent sans danger to the man or woman of letters. It is also an intensely humane practice in the way it also invites an open or reciprocal response — one that can be serious or funny or ironic, with its relevance to political reality up for grabs and interpretation. Humour has often been most effective in the most repressive and oppressive of regimes. It allows people their catharsis, in the face of hopelessness. This double function is very elegant, very charming. Coupled with the work of the symbolic and the metaphorical, the function becomes many-handed and a very beautiful trope in the making of literature.

The triumph over fear may be momentary and illusory but it’s an escape nonetheless. If the laughing truth does succeed in degrading power, and equalising relations, all power to the rhetorical device. How far the message goes towards real and good change is a whole other matter altogether. That said, I’m about as anarchic as a rabbit in a magician’s hat. I know that doesn’t say very much about or for me. But the world has been brutal and cruel enough. And then some. At least for me.

I think one follow-up to that would be to ask ‘how far does poetry go towards real and good change?’ Anthony Burgess once wrote, reviewing a novel (‘A Maggot’) by John Fowles, that all literature should serve ‘the forces of subversion.’ Having discussed the public function of humour, what about the public function of poetry? 

I get nervous and tentative being caught up in politics, especially when it falls on my lap without my choice in the matter. I like things to be absolutely consensual, like good sex. I shared this sentiment with someone once, and he gave me such wise words of advice. He said that the problem is often how politics comes knocking on your front porch anyway. He was trying to tell me how we must learn to deal with politics because it’ll come when we’re almost always not looking. Not to run from it, that was his point. He was a learned man, so I’ve taken his wisdom to heart.

I fully understand Orwell’s statement that even an apolitical attitude is a political one. There’s no escaping an utterance possessing some kind of political stance, even beyond intentionality. This inevitability also helps one muster some measure of courage. I think language can be naturally “subversive” in how it evolves, how it’s constantly negotiating its own use, its own acceptability, its own form and vocabulary and grammar and syntax. Its being is not static, and morphs as if struggling against an established structure, or a kind of lazy contentment with that structure. Language is wonderfully organic. The perceived order is actually only a respite from a larger architecture of unpredictable change, transformations that go beyond even the language community’s awareness or intention.

Because I like poetry best when its meaning is at its most fluid — in my dreams, it goes beyond even Derridean ideas of eternal slippage (an infolding-pluralising cornucopia of meaning as opposed to meaninglessness) — I think poetry is possibly terribly equipped to become an effective instrument of politicking. How can one propagandise something with a language that pushes against the literalist imagination? Of course, there are poetic manifestoes which are wonderful to read. Even those, however, seem to attend more to the beauty of their expression than said matters of contention.

We’re really asking Dana Gioia’s question of whether poetry can matter, aren’t we? Now that the art of poetry only belongs to a subculture, a pale presence within America’s artistic and intellectual life. Then there’s Auden, who boldly claimed that poetry makes nothing happen. The exact lines are: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives… / A way of happening, a mouth.” Actually, I think the work of poetry lies in exactly that — the precise phenomenon that is “a way of happening”, the utterance — for sometimes, the voice is enough, in and of itself. No need to calculate its mileage, or how far our words can take us, to purchase themselves something beyond their own presence and being. It should be enough to exist, not to exist towards some specific ideal or goal or objective or destiny or end.

Despite that tentativeness when it comes to ‘being caught up in politics’, there’s a certain sense of subversion implicit in the form of your work: for example, the prose poem that won our Poetry World Cup stood out partly because it was so different from the other poems — it looked so different on the page. Do you ever begin writing a poem with any deliberate sense of being subversive?

Perhaps my subversion as a poet lies in the questions I level at trendy or accepted or celebrated poetries. I actually don’t think I do enough of that inquiry. Every time I think I’m pushing against the limits of language, I realise it’s not very new after all. I love adopting experimentation, and work in hybridity and transformation. Like the World Cup poem, ‘I Didn’t Know Mani Was A Conceptualist’ (published by the awesome Math Paper Press), comprises four chapters of similar forms. One of the aesthetic questions I was investigating was the fine line between the prose poem and microfiction. The lyric quality elevates and drops when one moves through the different sequences. I like the way Robert Pinsky puts it in his essay ‘The Pursuit of Form’ — that “the poetic line is a means of performing energy and balance in writing”.

I conceptualised the four chapters as suites of poetic narratives, so there is a lovely coherence when they’re read in sequence. That said, each piece can stand on its own, like a koan or fable or parable. Just like how one may enter a poem at a random image or line or sound or metaphor, I like the idea of readers being able to enter the book at any point, and still come away with something.

I have another poetry collection to be launched at the Singapore Writers Festival in November. It’s titled ‘Sanctus Sanctus Dirgha Sanctus’, and it comprises sestinas stripped down into monostiches. I’ve always admired the sestina for its structural complexity. It’s an extremely difficult form. Cate Marvin first introduced me to the sestina, and I fell in love with it completely. It’s a ridiculous challenge to cycle the word permutations, and keep the poem from derailing altogether. Or becoming totally contrived and efforted. I felt that dismantling the 39 lines into their constituent units allowed the page to breathe, something that just doesn’t happen in a whole sestina. It allows the ineffable to enter, to creep into the space of the poem, and thereby achieve a different kind of reading. This book will be published by Red Wheelbarrow Books, which also put out my other poetry book, ‘The Arbitrary Sign’.

Talking of ‘The Arbitrary Sign’, can you sympathise with a kind of Dadaist quest for arbitrariness/meaninglessness? Does poetry suffer when it’s tied too heavily to theory?

In the Mani collection, there’s a chapter titled “When Dada Rewrote Koans”. It’s the first chapter. It opens the book. At the centre of this suite stands Da-Ren, which translates from Chinese as “Great Man”. A significant motif in traditional Chinese thought, Da-Ren is first found as a term in the Yijing under the first “Heaven” or qian hexagram. It is later found once in the Analects, characterised as a sage in the Mencius and as a state ruler in the Zhuangzi. Chinese poet Ruan Ji’s protagonist in Daren Xiansheng Zhuan is hardly ascetic. He lives a wandering existence as a counter-narrative to the harsher realities within society.

And theory? I absolutely love it. I love isms. They can sometimes seem so artificial and false, mere constructions to create familial resemblances for what are essentially other constructs. Yet, I love them. Does poetry suffer when it’s tied too heavily to theory? What may be lost is an easy read, the poem’s accessibility. That may or may not be a real loss.

In the Mani book, the individual chapters seemed to write themselves out. They had an internal logic of their own, despite their theoretical underpinning or apparatus. In fact, I felt the theory helped push the aesthetic into what it finally settled into. Because I love compression and tropic density, dipping into the work can seem like wading through a mud swamp or slowly sinking in quicksand.

Again, I take a leaf from Pinsky, who does not shy away from difficult and complex writing. When asked whether there’s still room in poetry for discursive poems, Pinsky had this to say: “The verb ‘to essay,’ to try, to vocalize one’s way along a sort of heuristic journey into things . . . I like the essayistic element, an element that finds the scope of lyric poetry limitless, completely wide, as embracing (and as vulnerable) as the human voice. There is room in poetry for absolutely everything, I think.”