Gwee Li Sui is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He was awarded his doctorate by Queen Mary, University of London, for his work on the influence of Sir Isaac Newton on eighteenth century poetry. His current research interests involve seventeenth- and eighteenth-century knowledge, British and German Romanticism, and modern Singaporean literature. He has previously written on the Reformation, the English Bible, and modern Protestant theology. He is also a poet and visual artist, and has published a graphic novel Myth of the Stone (1993) and a collection of poems Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? (1998).

Did the small island of Singapore experience a renaissance of English-language poetry in the late 1990's? If you followed local media reports or encountered survey pieces by clued-in academics, you would certainly think that it did. The country's chattier poets themselves admit to some collective coincidence as swiftly as they qualify their exact understanding of its significance.¹ To be sure, a linguistic flowering – the phase where a growing society discovers the literary potential of its own lingua franca – should occur as a matter of time. English may have been the language of Singapore's colonisers from 1819 to 1959, a 140-year rule interrupted only by forty-two months of Japanese occupation, but it is now on a par with Malay, Chinese, and Tamil as one of the nation's official languages. The medium has, after all, historically pulled together the thoughts and concerns of the various ethnic communities; its use further helps to implement a systematic governmental pursuit of success in the realms of commerce, technology, and international relations. Most factors considered, the choice of speaking English has come naturally to this modern Asian city-state, itself the product of a loss of choice, Singapore's forceful expulsion from the Federation of Malaysia in 1965. When its three-and-a-half million people celebrate the fortieth year of absolute independence on August 9 2005, they will also be observing the achievement of Singapore's political existence outside the spheres of influence of both Britain and Malaysia.

At forty, Singapore may no longer be young in absolute terms, but it continues almost obsessively to refer to itself as such. This is an oddity that even a nurturing older generation of writers seems to forget: thus, the vastly influential Lee Tzu Pheng praised the poetry of a “very young Singapore” in 1997 and, as late as 2002, the veteran poet-critic Kirpal Singh still hailed emerging writers as “the poetic voices of the young island Republic.”² The myth of infancy whitewashes what has been, in real time, a slow and patchy literary development in keeping with the general deferral of cultural matters to the country's perennially urgent economic concerns. My article aims to account for this sudden exception in the current trend and will do so by reattaching its occurrence to a history of general poetic manoeuvres in Singapore . The attempt is not to uncritically bypass discussions of the nation's initial abstract similarities to other Commonwealth members whose bodies of English speakers would have by now their Okot p'Bitek, Derek Walcott, or David Dabydeen. However, the situation of these writers from Africa and the Caribbean is quite different from that of Singaporean ones trying to articulate their sense of national identity inventively and meaningfully through the English language in a postcolonial Southeast Asian context.³ The Philippines, with its longstanding American influence, is one regional exception but, even here, differing cultural trajectories and socio-political contingencies have to be raised for accuracy's sake. Besides, Singapore does have a colossal poet dating from more traumatic times; although present readers do not actively study him, this does not mean that the name Edwin Thumboo is therefore unfamiliar.

A People's Poetry

All efforts to situate Singaporean poetry must begin with this figure whose towering stature makes his precursors and contemporaries seem like mere satellites. Edwin Thumboo's Rib of Earth (1956) may not be the first local volume of English verse on record but it is a central text that is regularly referred to from that period. Likewise, the accolade of first post-independence collection can hardly be said to go to Gods Can Die, published in 1977, yet this book persists as a favourite academic source for explicating issues of nation-building. A number of writers in the 1950's and early 1960's struggled to free the region's creative alternatives from the constraints of an overbearing imperial language. Their joint adventure in verse, called Engmalchin, nonetheless proved disastrous: the “new” poetry had borrowed indiscriminately from Malay and Chinese and still turned at length to English for a stylistic backbone. Instead of forging some unwieldy Malayan idiom, Thumboo simply cheated the schizophrenic mind by changing the signifiers of its entangled thoughts. A poem like “The Way Ahead” therefore patently sees double, an inner self and its outward subjection not so much to empire now as to nation:

A City is for people, for living,
For walking between shadows of tall buildings
That leave some room, for living.
And though we rush to work, appointments,
To many other ends, there must be time to pause,
Loosen the grip of each working day,
To make amends, to hear the inner self
And keep our spirits solvent.
A City should be the reception we give ourselves,
What we prepare for our posterity.

The City is what we make of it,
You and I. We are the City.
For better or for worse.⁴

These lines conclude an account of Thumboo's brainstorming with a university don, a civil servant, and a town planner on the issue of Singapore's next move. They do not ultimately describe one of four professional viewpoints: the poet here acts as a universal solvent, the voice through which academia, bureaucracy, and architecture can discover their civilizing core. The diffusion of poetic truth – by positing it as both the conscience and a practical resource of a socio-political dream – illustrates yet another strategy in the scheme to transcend a deadlock of circumstances. What Thumboo exploits now is an understanding that the nation-builder and the artist are essentially co-workers in similar realms of imaginative enunciation. A polity without much history or tradition must, after all, look to the future in an act that already involves much artistic imagination. While various parties advance their versions of what this future might look like, the concerned creative mind relies on language in imagining an identity of collective existence. Indeed, rather than representing a subordination of poetry to politics, Thumboo's writing demonstrates the value of a poetic sensibility to political life; as writers like p'Bitek know too, poetry has a political utility as a provisional language which conveys emotions and nuances unavailable in everyday speech. Poetry functions by mediating between the existing symbolic reality and a new perception awaiting words and does so to lead the former into otherwise excluded sensibilities.⁵

Thumboo's endeavour could have easily opened up a whole spectrum of literary possibilities ranging from the exposition of new feelings and powers to an infusion of culture-specific proclivities. It was, without doubt, persuasive and highly liberating insofar as the clarity of what was being forged together – a social reality where “country” was, at some level, “poetry” – endured. The recognition of this tacit agreement is fundamental if one wishes to understand the assumptions surrounding thinking about social planning in Singapore . To be sure, the end of Thumbooian constructivism would not have been half as puzzling as its actual historical brevity; the process had crucially admitted the unfeasibility of rendering back everything that once emanated from Caesar. What a Singaporean ought to do was also in the opposite direction, to absorb more fully all the elements that had become too embedded and make these indivisible from his or her cultivated identity. In this course of development, a nation's well-being should logically reach a point where, as proof of its own coming-of-age, its status in postcoloniality must have lingered simply as the thing to be struck off at length. Now, a recurring question in the few helpful studies of Singaporean literature has not been such a conclusion per se but rather its very odd early arrival and quick obsolescence. From the start to the symbolic end of what has been hailed a second generation of poets, from Kirpal Singh to Lee Tzu Pheng, a writer's typical range can be noted as already that turn from extending Thumboo to rejecting his ground without reservation.

Two key assumptions further took root here: what the critic Rajeev Patke calls the “romantic” notions that the self can be completed in poetic isolation and that this distance from social drives has, in fact, an enriching value.⁶ Independent of the traits that may preserve their allure today, their historical foundation could hardly be said to relate to an inner cultural confidence. A dazzling poet like Arthur Yap seems the island's constant exception in exploring instead a kind of American modernism; yet, his linguistic play and clean ironic involvement are still as vital to our suspicion here. It is perhaps Lee Tzu Pheng's "My Country and My People,” from her inaugural Prospect of a Drowning (1980), that documents best that curious underside of home-grown writing after Thumboo. This piece boldly questions being made "a patriot / of the will” and confesses:

My country and my people
I never understood.
I grew up in China's mighty shadow,
with my gentle brown-skinned neighbours;
but I keep diaries in English.
I sought to grow
in humanity's rich soil,
and started digging on the banks, then saw
life carrying my friends downstream.

Yet, careful tending of the human heart
may make a hundred flowers bloom;
and perhaps, fence-sitting neighbour,
I claim citizenship in your recognition
of your kind.
My people, and my country
are you, and you my home.⁷

The poem may outwardly end like Thumboo's “The Way Ahead” but an entire inner speaking mind has shifted course. Its raw intimacy should not obscure the fact that Lee's main quarrel is indeed public and didactic, aimed at Singapore's fiercely rapid and disaffecting rate of modernisation. The private poetic quarrel – even in a mere claim of writing personally – is surely with Thumboo himself.

The Artistic Withdrawal

What then “went wrong” in this brief transition from Thumboo to the poets born in the 1940s, most being twenty-somethings in the year of Singapore's independence? The economic acumen that has since distinguished batches of the country's leaders first proved itself in plans to overcome the limitations of a 580-square- kilometre land mass and a lack of both natural and human resources.⁸A firm commitment to building an export-driven free-market system and educating its workforce soon reaped phenomenal results: from 1965 to 1999, real GDP rose an average of 8.6% per annum while real per capita GDP expanded eightfold.⁹ That generation scandalised in “My Country and My People” was, in fact, the earliest to have known a remarkable social transformation which drew its momentum from a fast-evolving economic landscape. The ensuing radio ban on Lee's poem through the 1970s was consistent with a fear of being derailed from this road to more good things; it nonetheless shook up an otherwise healthy support thus far for home-grown creative voices through public readings. The significance of this forked path and the choices it entailed cannot be undervalued despite the poem's later appearance in print and its systematic downplaying even by Lee herself.¹⁰ The authorial response here – more so than the authorities' – is telling: indeed, while a hasty official perception of threat would be most unfortunate, the twist in Lee's argument and her supporters' has been saying something else. For most parts, observers are still being asked to see the government's overreaction on the basis of the harmless interests of verse but this could not have preceded the quarrel it was contextually the product of.

We observe rather that the fracture between the written content and the writer's withdrawal must make two quietly extraordinary statements. Firstly, by choosing to anchor spoken meaning in subjectivity, poets like Lee had demonstrated their right to comment on their own grounding realities independent of the truth and cost of what they might share. The move essentially thwarted any political attempt to argue with the writer's art without also exposing a practical valuation of the space for self-expression and with it the fact of unenlightened heavy-handedness. Secondly, by consigning her most valuable thoughts to her private work, Lee had effectively sited her own socialised being within an extracted realm whose inhabiting reinvented it as an ironic permissible space for defiance. The creative conscience, henceforth speaking for and to itself, was already severed from an externality it might revile but must almost always feel alienated from. These two underlying statements are central to our recognition now that, while any writing of poetry testifies to the mind's freedom and hence cannot be restrained, its enterprise in Singapore had merely secured its liberties by drawing clear territorial lines. The move, as a reaction to a happier early blurring of vision, further revealed differences not so much between two generations of writers as between an artistic and a government-directed national vision. What followed from here changed everything: in the words of another “personal” poem by Lee, which might as well describe her disenchantment with a public narrative where “Once upon a time” was “always immanent,” “the fictioning ends today."¹¹

We speak therefore of how poetry had only reassumed its pure space of freedom in the general failure of a stable sense of self and home to arrive distinct from infrastructural and economic concerns. We also assert that the catalytic conflict was indeed the key to its own mediation: what the politicising of art in a ban provoked was precisely an artistic response that would be as good as an agreement to the larger redrawing of boundaries. With this new relationship, poetry would be as free to pursue its own concerns as the state would be to fashion a whole national culture that could ignore its relevance through a top-down commandeering of language.¹² The absolute social defeat poetry had suffered was converted internally into absolute self-sufficiency, a truth we must now re-expose through a different confessing voice, that of Boey Kim Cheng. This one-time protégé of Lee established with Somewhere-Bound (1989) a fiercely intense pursuit of writing and reading that would lead him at length to choose an Australian citizenship in 2003. His early “Cloud of Unknowing,” in fact, shows an impotent wish to be revenged on the realigned world of social usefulness:

The clue to a lot of Boey's contemplations is his neurosis, depicted here as being “on the verge / Of something state.” In his characterisation of “useful people,” we imagine Thumboo's nation-makers – folks like his academic, civil servant, and city planner – but are struck by the further complicity of the poets Thumboo and Lee as citizens. The former's role is straightforward while the latter can now be construed as a beacon for others cast out by an imagination at odds with or untouched by the official social vision. The decisive question emerges: where then can a late-arriving poet go if he or she simply has no wish to stand outside inside and still yearns for a communal space to posit or propose a personal identity? Boey's poems are launched almost fixatedly to tear rootlessness out of uselessness; they throw themselves nervously into an assortment of locales around the world where, in some makeshift humanity, he sees himself more at home than in either Singapore or poetry. His devotion to place even recalls Thumboo's but is without their common origin, its strange exclusion foiling his own attempt to pass through a love of many peoples, cultures, and spiritual traditions into the universal. This is the price of exilic internalised poetry: its kind of poet's ungrounded and deformed sense of “country” must become the impediment to the full execution of his or her intense exploratory vision. A leap from Lee to Boey – a child of the annus mirabilis 1965 – appears impulsive, but there has been no major poet born in the 1950s and few youthful voices that could convey the inner life of the 1980s.¹⁴ The silence itself spoke damningly through the first to break it, Boey.

Double Endings

It should now be obvious that, especially in Singaporean poetry, youthfulness is an overdetermined word that cannot be read simplistically. It may be used to describe a new writer's potential or the astounding maturity of a young one, or to suggest both meanings together to contain an impactful but chiefly unfamiliar vision. Even here, one already notices the slippage at work: a promising poet for one or more of these reasons is still not constitutively the same person as a poet of young Singapore, the phrase more often employed. In this description is a further doubling where, on the one hand, a slow but careful ripening of national culture is being invoked while, on the other, the new trend is being detached from what came before, the poetry of old Singapore. The notion of a young nation's literature, in this sense, cuts both ways correctly: it speaks to the wider social world of a cultural vibrancy that is the excess of the good life, the offering of a national vision that keeps unwaveringly to a strong economic focus. Young Singapore is a selling point, the image through which the country celebrates its own willingness and periodic ability to reinvent itself and whose audience here are both global and local, its foreign investors and its worker-citizens. To a small band of writers and readers however, the term serves more to remind them of the near cultural stagnation that has already damned some of the island's best poets to isolation, neglect, or self-hatred. A statement of renewal hence discloses chronic national failures and announces a radical solution; it is a reloading of the poetic origin all over again as a means to reverse a defeat by erasing it.

May we not marvel, after all, at the layers of frustration that can exist in an otherwise simple relationship between a poet and his or her own readers? The most immediate has been this: until more recent years when small independent publishers began issuing separate titles, the only way someone new could get his clutch of poems published was to win in an annual literary competition funded by the state printer. This arrangement spanning the 1990s largely benefited recurring award-holders like Boey and Paul Tan, a true master of little moments; it tended for a greater part to attract ingratiating entries and dispirit possibly good efforts averse to being judged, not least by the usual reputable names.¹⁵ Indeed, an offer of visibility via endorsement – which put the cart before the horse – might want the best verse to be read but its resulting reality was far less able to produce the sort of reception befitting a people's laureate. Since highly crafted writing would often be less accessible, an over-management of authorial space meant that no poem rubberstamped for consumption could ever be popular even as the scarcity of its kind conversely implied a lack of talent. On a different note, there is what Singh, as literary activist, criticises as lingering “kowtowism,” a tendency among Singaporean readers to follow Anglo-American literature avidly while pooh-poohing their own.¹⁶ Its wider Catch-22 goes like this: expert acclaim and publication can still not guarantee a work's availability because many bookshops too see no value in stocking well the category they find difficult to sell. A marketplace of missing local titles commits to reality what readers assume on the basis of commercial wisdom and so preserves Western literary supremacy at the expense of the survival of local writing.

Such subsequent self-loathing readership extends a deep-seated social circumvention which more commonly takes the shape of a rubbishing of any literature altogether. Decades of a national instruction in English centred mostly on functional literacy have made this a defining trait of Singaporean society from its workplaces and industries to its schools and homes. For example, the push towards excellence happily compels academic institutions here to favour subjects offering greater control over student performances and so steer their general curricula away from literature towards mathematics and the sciences. The few on the road less travelled may not read more poetry and, even if they do, the choice almost always involves Western texts, strangely deemed more germane than local ones.¹⁷ To be fair, the state has already started to turn its attention to the social repercussions of values underpinning the drive towards wealth and standing that can damage healthier efforts to nurture a daring, forgiving, and leisurely society. The lesson emerges more heartbreakingly for Alvin Pang who sees in a brilliant Oxford student's suicide the symptom of a nation's self-destructiveness:

“High-Flyer: An Epitaph,” from Pang's first collection Testing the Silence (1997), is soaked in irony from the instance of its title. Its young overachiever would have easily numbered among the nation's assets, Boey's “useful people,” and so Boey's earlier wish that these would disappear attains an eerily perverse fulfilment here. The Singaporean Icarus is destroyed by nothing less than his own source of strength, the internalised social expectations he gives himself to with no refuge or second resolve. He actually plays the eventual tragic counterpart to the ever-waiting poet: both are, in essence, lonesome creatures who embody reflecting paradoxes, one in an excess of useless significance and the other in sterile utility. Even Pang's mere reverential silence is loaded: it seeks to bridge his feelings and death's reality but, as also the mute space through which poetry talks of society, bears further witness to a national offence that cannot be named. Yet, the writer himself displays a refreshing determination to storm out of art's doomed confines and recognises exactly what Thumboo saw three decades before, the timeliness of poetry's gift to a stricken world. The artistic mode kept to sustaining inner exile in Boey now seems to want a decisive return in striving to reclaim poetry's citizenship through another social history, one it alone is able to tell. The poet, as a rememberer and personally a survivor of some collective failure, is the keeper of absent and departed truths; as this, he or she realises an outer redemption, the arrival of art's serendipitous success in an old place of containment.

Poets and Friends

Is it not curious that poetry's new calling – to chronicle what would otherwise be given up in vain – is admitted too by a different sort of writer, one who soon emerged with much sound and fury in One Fierce Hour (1998)? The enfant terrible Alfian bin Sa'at seemed to learn at first the uselessness of infamy in a culture unmoved by a linguistic exploration of mere emotions. His cantankerous “Singapore You Are Not My Country,” a sprawling melodramatic update of Lee's theme of alienation in “My Country and My People,” failed to provoke state censorship and prove its internal claim of institutional intolerance. An initial puzzlement – leading to his belief that he was a “small fry” with a poor print run but some unseen “establishment support” – gradually gave way to an admission of poetry's own limitations.¹⁹ In “Preface for Cyril Wong” (2001), he tells a poet of less ambitious dealings:

What Sa'at discovers here is not just a defeat but already its overturning: the realisation is that poetry in Singapore does not need radical statements to be revolutionary at all. The upheaval exists in one's writing persona, that “hulking effigy” that buffers a real interiority from harm; this alone both maintains a public face of available inwardness and fulfils the duty of life to one's deeper self.

In a formulation that must distinguish newer intimate writers from Boey, we note that social vulnerability and an attention to inner health are neatly separated today. The artistic interior no longer leaves itself at the nation's mercy to be diminished as a space of powerlessness; what every recent poet acknowledges is a comfortable secret resource and something more that compulsively presses him or her back into the world. The latter – a thinking or confessing persona in Pang or Wong and an ideological mask in Sa'at – is all a writer ever reveals to the readers; it upholds not so much a selfish lie to live through as a figure of difference raised up for oneself first and then an immediate community. This is deliberately a fiction cast among more familiar social fictions, whose artificiality is exposed ironically by the frequency of Singapore's self-refashioning. The poet's own stabilising duplicity is what Wong celebrates by mocking the more naïve claim “If you are _________, you must speak ________.”²¹ In “The Poem,” he narrates as playfully this manner of being in mundane terms:

A tortuous history so outlined must thus show up the whole recent resurgence as having hardly exploded as a confluence of youthful, starry-eyed, or even egoistical endeavours. Indeed, if the moment was not exactly coincidental, neither did it constitute a definitive renaissance; we are, after all, still concerned with the ongoing battle of art to secure the site of its own future within a socio-political world. It does help to pursue further: a plethora of styles – from the elegant, reflective, and confessional to the brusque, irreverent, and political – is firstly fundamental to and not just characteristic of the new trend. What a community of poets as an idea offers is precisely a microcosmic alternative Singapore, a lived proclamation of a space of freely imaginative citizens, natural heirs to Thumboo's Singapore rooted through poetry. The writers' camaraderie is displayed in their various traces of mutual influence, invocation, encouragement, and critique as well as their frequent adaptation of another's style and extension of one another's ideas. Sa'at's own response to Wong exemplifies this level of professional friendship, which remains unstudied by critics but has been present since the first two to arrive in its context, Pang and the darkly buoyant Aaron Lee. The truth demands that we also contend with the following both individually and in relation to their circle: Felix Cheong, Grace Chia, Gwee Li Sui, Koh Beng Liang, Daren Shiau, Eddie Tay, Toh Hsien Min, Yeow Kai Chai, Yong Shu Hoong, and more. To their diverse work on anthologies and both print and online projects and proactive efforts to foster public interest through readings, talks, book reviews, essays, school visits, writing competitions, and collaborations with visual media, we must add the regular support of veteran poets like Leong Liew Geok, Angeline Yap, Heng Siok Tian, and Paul Tan.²³

Secondly, if there has been a buzz around poetry, one must keep one's enthusiasm in check and admit not so much more talent as simply more alternatives for getting heard today. Indeed, a likelier scenario of growth should involve efforts to support readers ; this has begun with new and newly enlightened publishers, specifically three major players, and extends to community-based groups like Australian Chris Mooney Singh's Word Forward, which popularises writing and performance in verse.²⁴ Significant too has been that social force Patke calls “sympathetic media,” a barely adequate term for what the very idea of a renaissance first served as a gainful news-making device.²⁵ The exact date of its suggestion was October 3 1998 when a feature article by a respected journalist with The Straits Times, the island's leading English newspaper, hailed the demise of local prose and the new reign of poetry.²⁶ Before Ong Sor Fern's grand coverage, at least two important collections went unnoticed even by the same broadsheet; after it, not only were Pang's and Aaron Lee's year-old works given their reviews but, for a time, every self-proclaimed poet – with at least one being unpublished – got his or her day in the press. The status of media is a key motif in recent volumes but its power can be over-estimated; this has been clear since The Straits Times ended its flirtation with literary culture in mid-2003 and turned its attention towards popular entertainment, and in particular film, to dovetail with current state interest in the film industry. The curtailment of local journalistic space for serious literature has not diminished the push of poetry; significantly, its writers have since gravitated towards other avenues, be these social, textual, or online, to transmit their passion to a larger public.

Renaissance Now

There is one further twist to consider: as though the public and properly private realms are doomed to acknowledge each other, the imagination of a Singaporean renaissance has also come doubled almost concurrently. In his National Day Rally Speech of 1999, the then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong promised a whole new vision for reviving the arts which was unveiled exactly seven months after the republic turned thirty-four.²⁷ The landmark Renaissance City Report (2000), officially presented by the Minister for Information and the Arts in parliament, came with a nod to a prior overview said to have helped lay “the foundation for the burst of cultural activities … witnessed in the 1990's.”²⁸ The report itself further mentions this 1989 document as having introduced much “hardware” for local creative efforts and agrees with its analysts that the next step should be to produce the “software” or “heartware.” The two fresh majestic aims are as follows: the first is to transform Singapore into “a global arts city,” an urban hub like London and New York “to live, work and play in.” The second is revealingly to secure “cultural ballast” for the work of nation-building; a crudely coined “Singapore Heartbeat” needs to be strengthened in order to reinforce a sense of national identity and belonging. This strange lateness in a concern with culture is nonetheless posited as all too natural: only with the "‘ Made in Singapore' label” recognised for “technologically advanced, aesthetically designed and creatively packaged products and services” can creativity proceed to maintain the nation's place internationally . Here at last is where “the creation and sharing of Singapore stories” – named as the work of film, theatre, dance, music, literature, and the visual arts – come in.²⁹

If a pragmatic language filled with entrepreneurial values and mechanical metaphors seems hardly significant here, a clearer understanding can be achieved by going on to the report's manifesto-like Chapter Five. At the height of its optimism, the language suddenly turns rhapsodic: we are reminded that the term “renaissance” should invoke not so much old European conditions as a “spirit of creativity, innovation, multi-disciplinary learning, socio-economic and cultural vibrancy.” Its imminent “Renaissance Singaporean” is primarily an individual who has “an open, analytical and creative mind that is capable of acquiring, sharing, applying and creating new knowledge.” This new citizen also affirms life, loves society, hates idleness, thirsts after results, values the means and the ends equally, balances personal rights and responsibilities, and is inherently artistic: he or she is “not a mere actor in a vast nameless play, but a co-writer of the Singapore Story.” What is truly fascinating is how all these liberal-sounding assertions are set almost schizophrenically against a more familiar rhetorical backdrop where sheer economic necessity still reigns supreme. Thus, w e read elsewhere that the bottom line is really to ensure long-term economic growth: Singapore has to make itself “conducive to innovations, new discoveries and the creation of new knowledge,” which means that it needs workers of the kind that are drawn to vibrant cities.³⁰ This predictable focus compels us to suspect the curious benchmarking against London and New York as potentially the stuff of yet another less than enlightened social narrativising. A tell-tale deference to foreign, and once more Western, identities reveals what is still misunderstood about serious nation-building; the point is not to add to a list of indices as once Gibraltar and now also Switzerland, Silicon Valley, Boston, and, with the latest plan to build casinos, Las Vegas of the East.

So is Singapore facing yet another historic forked path or is this the same one all over again, as if a previous choice has come full circle in its wild experimentation with possibilities of being? An affirmation either way can be heartening: policymakers today are at least more keenly aware that culture will not permit itself to be dismissed without a price exacted on the aspect it is brought under. The decisions being made at the moment will therefore be wholly critical; an observer ought to be more patient here and not celebrate, as some already have, a progressive top-level ideological conversion.³¹ Because, on a basic level, the vision engenders no real need for essential values to change, our unease should deepen further; so far, more indicators affirm rather than contradict how this is still about economically determining the fate of creative endeavours, which we have seen to plague the long and awkward history of poetry in Singapore . The most recent major effort in the wake of the Renaissance City Report has been a lengthy US$1.1-million Singapore Season held in London a few months back to showcase the island's talents in both visual and performance arts, along with its culinary traditions. The mistake of a few foreign presses was to patronisingly characterize the festival as a sterile autocratic state's laughable attempt to make culture.³² This was, in fact, more about economic cunning than political worry; the vital question was whether the orchestration could leapfrog the slower growth of “Renaissance Singaporeans” and get first to the Holy Grail of confidence among foreign investors. The related issue then was whether such a move could contribute to a domestic interest in art-driven culture or was, from the start, meant to lead creative energies to money-spinning genres only.

To answer these queries, the treatment of local poetry will prove pivotal: ironic in the sense of how we precisely need its uselessness here, the non-lucrative work of verse will serve as the most reliable touchstone. Poetry, after all, assumes before its enjoyment a basic patience with language – one that discerns a possibility of beauty in private modes of thinking – and a measure of sensitivity to its use. State subsidies for publishing and events such as Wordfeast, a festival of international poetry launched in 2004, may thus be helpful but what is more constructive would always be, for example, revised educational policies that promote the study of literature. The authenticity of a commitment to artistic culture should be defined in such terms, by whether a whole people can move beyond pragmatic and binding notions of worth and choose a broader socio-cultural, as opposed to a politico-economic, body of values. The consequences of their choices are yet again far-reaching: a different concern raised in the same prime-ministerial speech of 1999 and tied too to economic fortunes has been the worrying trend among young Singaporeans to use a cliquish pidgin called Singlish instead of profitable proper English.³³ Official finger-pointing may identify poor influences in families, schools, and the media but an institutional failure to inspire a wider appreciation of English must also assume some blame. Language is not a mere skill to be learnt, a fact quick fixes like a Speak Good English Movement continue to miss; as Thumboo observed before, it needs to be owned in a way that should find the engagement with literary thoughts and explorations central and not tangential.³⁴ Will the gloriously stupid pursuit of common literariness ever be deemed worthwhile in Singapore especially if it demands much schematic back-pedalling, even if it may prove advantageous at length only by accident?

Endnotes

1 For a very recent example, see Alvin Pang, “Poetry in Singapore,” Poetry News (Spring 2004).

2 Felicia Chan, Silence May Speak: The Poetry of Lee Tzu Pheng (Singapore: Times Editions, 1999), 56; back cover of Cyril Wong, Below: Absence (Singapore: Firstfruits Publication, 2002).

3 For a discussion of how these cultures differently approach the issue of writing in English, see Ismail S. Talib, The Language of Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 90-103.

4 Edwin Thumboo, Gods Can Die (Singapore: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977), 58-59.

5 For Thumboo's own insight, see Peter Nazareth and Gwee Li Sui, “Interweaving Edwin Thumboo,” Ariels: Departures and Returns: Essays for Edwin Thumboo, eds. Tong Chee Kong, et al. (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 2001), 159-83.

6 Rajeev Patke, “Poetry in English from Singapore,” World Literature Today 74:2 (2000): 293-99, 296.

7 Lee Tzu Pheng, Prospect of a Drowning (Singapore: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980), 51-52.

8 Land reclamation in Singapore began as early as 1962 and has contributed to its growing land mass, most recently estimated at 692.7 square kilometres. See “Triangulating the Borderless World: Geographies of Power in the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle.” Matthew Sparke, et al., Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 29 (2004): 485–98.

9 See “Overview of the Singapore Economy,” Monetary Authority of Singapore, 10 Apr. 2005.

10 Chan 53-55.

11 Lee Tzu Pheng, The Brink of an Amen (Singapore: Times Editions, 1991), 13-14.

12 All literary genres in Singapore can be read in terms of some unspoken pact with the ruling powers. Thus, in the well-known “Catherine Lim Affair” of 1994, a novelist was rebuked at once when she “crossed the line” and re-interpreted in a newspaper column the leadership then of Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. The public censure by Goh himself was justified in these words: “When my authority is being ... undermined by wrong observations, I have to correct them, or the view will prevail that I am indeed not in charge of Singapore .” Vijay Joshi, “Singapore Leader Asserts Power, Warns Critics to Respect Him,” The Associated Press Political Service (4 Dec. 1994); see also Ajoy Sen, "Singapore PM's Comments Raise Questions on Style,” Reuters News (15 Dec. 1994).

13 Boey Kim Cheng, Another Place (Singapore: Times Editions, 1992), 64-65.

14 I owe this insight to Leong Liew Geok, who made the casual observation many years ago. Angeline Yap, born in 1959, is the only poet from that decade while the most important young writer of verse in the 1980s was Simon Tay, born in 1961.

15 The Singapore Literature Prize lost its of funding in 1999 but was re-launched within months as the Dymocks Literature Prize; this too ended when the sponsoring Australian bookshop folded its operations here in 2000. The competition has only been revived last year in a less ambitious biennial format that considers works in all four national languages.

16 Tan Hwee Hwee, “Between the Covers,” Business Times Singapore (24 Aug. 2001); Kirpal Singh, Introduction, Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature, vol. 2, ed. Kirpal Singh . (Singapore: Ethos Books, 1999), 9-17, 9-10.

17 It may be pointed out that the Angus Ross prize in English literature, awarded each year to the best A-level script outside Britain, has been won by a Singaporean since its launch in 1987, except in 1999. This cannot establish, however, the fact of a national or a personal commitment; for example, the local front-page news on the most recent recipient proudly records her admission to have read very little. "Literature Winner Read Only Three Novels in Two Years,” The Straits Times (25 Mar. 2005).

18 Alvin Pang, Testing the Silence (Singapore: Ethos Books, 1997), 26.

19 Alfian bin Sa'at, One Fierce Hour (Singapore: Landmark Books, 1998), 37-41; Audrey Lim, "Deny Thy Country, Young Man: An Interview with Alfian Sa'at,” A4oria 4 (1999).

20 Cyril Wong, The End of His Orbit (Singapore: Firstfruits Publication, 2001), 11-15.

21 Wong, If… Else (Forthcoming).

22 Wong, The End of His Orbit, 62.

23 Two significant anthologies have been No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000) and Love Gathers All: The Philippines-Singapore Anthology of Love Poetry (2002). Cheong recently completes a bizarre but noteworthy project that has poets introduce themselves intimately in Idea to Ideal: 12 Singapore Poets on the Writing of Their Poems (2004). The two most interesting online literary websites to date have been Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Softblow.

24 The three key publishers of verse have been Landmark Books, Ethos Books, and Firstfruits Publication.

25 Patke 293.

26 Ong Sor Fern, “Young Poets' Society – There's Rhyme and Reason,” The Straits Times (3 Oct. 1998). Ong cites a number of poets to arrive at these reasons for a poetic movement: the outlook of an MTV generation, a desire to celebrate a local canon, break linguistic rules, and codify defiance, and an interest in nation-building. Contrast this with her later response: Ong Sor Fern, “Waging a Losing Battle,” The Straits Times (28 Mar. 2001).

27 Goh Chong Tong, Prime Minister's National Day Rally Speech 1999 (Singapore: Ministry of Information and the Arts, 1999), 46-49.

28 Lee Yock Suan, “On the Completion of the Renaissance City Report,” Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, 10 Apr. 2005. The office changed from Ministry of Information and the Arts to the current longer name in 2004.

29 Renaissance City Report: Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore (Singapore: Ministry of Information and the Arts, 2000), 13, 4, 40.

30 Renaissance City Report 38-39, 5.

31 Warren Fernandez, “All the World's a Stage for Singapore's New Push,” The Straits Times (19 Feb. 2005); compare with Salil Tripathi, “Mandarin Duck,” New Statesman (4 Nov. 2002): 38-39.

32 For example, see Peter Culshaw, "You Will Now Be Creative!” The Daily Telegraph (26 Feb. 2005). Culshaw's impression of Singapore relies too much on the outdated views of poet D.J. Enright, who taught on the island in the 1960s, and a controversial report by science-fiction writer William Gibson, based on his short visit in the early 1990s. Gibson, "Disneyland With the Death Penalty,” Wired 1:4 (1993): 51-55.

33 Goh, National Day Rally Speech 1999, 38-43.

34 See the Speak Good English Movement website.