Hard To Get: My talk at TEDxBencoolenStYouth!
Yesterday, I had the privilege of being invited to speak at TEDx Bencoolen Street Youth, Singapore’s only youth-initiated TEDx event held at SMU. I was also battling an awful cold - huge thanks to the organisers and everyone else for bearing with me!
I decided to tackle a question I’ve been asked again and again since embarking on this crazy journey as a writer (and specifically, poet): why pick an art form that’s so baffling to so many? I ended up speaking pretty much off-the-cuff — and you’ll get to see all of that in the official video that will be uploaded soon. In the meantime, here’s what I came up with; an attempt to puzzle out my thoughts ahead of the next author Q&A!
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‘HARD TO GET: Why write poems when no-one understands them?’
At lunch recently a friend told me, with a sort of apology in his voice, “I don’t read much poetry. I always feel like there’s something I don’t get.”
Even if you know me well, you’ll find it hard to guess who I’m referring to. The sentiment is just so widely shared. I’ve heard versions of this said by classmates, teachers, colleagues, loved ones – many of whom were once students of literature, or the sort to spend a precious weekend at a creative writing workshop. Some confess it with fear and trembling, as if to say there’s something about me they can’t quite figure out. Others don’t see anything to hide. Sure, they might read books or go to the theatre. But poetry? Not their cup of tea.
Suffice to say, if you looked at the programme today and groaned at the thought of listening to a poet try to explain the inexplicable, you are hardly alone. Yet despite the fact that poetry remains so baffling to so many, some of us stubbornly refuse to stop writing it. The question is, why?
I should say here that yes, some poets are not trying to get you to understand them. They may write primarily for themselves, sometimes to process what they’ve been through, sometimes as a memorial or keepsake, like a journal. But any poet who shares their poems publicly, whether by putting them on Instagram or in a book, is in some way seeking a readership, a connection with an audience. No writer, except the most famous or narcissistic, expects to be read by everyone. Still, the journey to professional publication is often so long and painful that it would be hard to imagine anyone doing it unless they genuinely hope someone will pick their book off the shelf.
How is that ever going to happen, you may ask, if they insist on writing in a genre that nobody understands? I don’t think this question can be answered fully in fifteen minutes but I’ve been told that poets are often foolishly hopeful, so I’ll give it my best.
Let me start by asking: what do we mean when we say we don’t get poetry?
One of my favourite things about public transport in this country is the Arts in Transit initiative, where we have all sorts of art installations – paintings, sculptures, murals – in our MRT stations. I live on the Circle Line and at every stop, as you make your way up from the platform, you come face-to-face with the work of a Singaporean artist: some incredibly realistic, others more abstract. Not once have I heard a fellow passenger say, as the escalator takes them past a local masterpiece, “I don’t get it”. Or, “I don’t think that’s for me.”
With poetry, unlike other forms of art like dance, jazz, or photography, there seems to be an expectation that because the medium of the poet is language (as opposed to movement, rhythm, or colour), then we ought to be able to “get” what is “going on”. After all, that is the case with other forms of writing: we may not immediately decode the meaning of a story, but we don’t expect to crack our heads to understand who the characters are and what they’re doing. We expect the text to tell us. As readers used to the structure and logic of how words stack up in sentences and paragraphs, it’s no wonder a poem can feel like a puzzle.
The thing is, poets have a different way of making meaning from the same raw material of language, as compared to storytellers or novelists. Broadly speaking, this consists of three steps. First, instead of a plot full of twists and turns, poets often start with a single well-chosen moment or image which may be as small as a blade of grass, or as large and terrible as a battlefield. Then, poets will try to use all the properties of language, including even the shapes and sounds of words, to evoke this image as economically as possible. When I was younger, this was one of the main reasons that compelled me to be a poet, rather than any other kind of writer: poems were short, and I was impatient. But the third step is what many readers often overlook. In addition to using language to evoke what is there in the scene they are describing, poets will at the same time try to invoke what isn’t there.
Let’s take a look at a little poem by Nathaniel Chew called ‘radical days’. It isn’t long, so I’ll read it for us –
Me reading Nathaniel’s poem - read the original on QLRS here!
Nathaniel builds his poem around the familiar image of the home garden, bringing us right back to the pandemic when, stuck at home, many of us decided to grow vegetables on our balconies. He deploys comforting rhymes, all single-syllable words – cup, up; sprouts, out; held, dwelled – to evoke the simple, regular habits of watering and tending. But in sketching out this reassuring picture, he also imagines what isn’t there: the image of tiny leaves “turning up their palms” makes him think of loved ones far away, “all the hands I have not held in months”. And in the same way that a gardener hopes for his efforts to bear fruit, the poet sees the lockdown as one long period of germination, for hopes that will one day come to pass. If the poet seems to be telling us about his plants, what the poem reveals are his plans.
The more observant among you will have noticed that this poem takes the traditional form of a sonnet with fourteen lines of ten syllables each, plus a distinctive rhyme-scheme. Appreciating this adds another layer to the poem: sonnets have something called a ‘turn’, often found after the first eight lines, where the poet experiences a change or realisation, and the otherwise downcast verse starts to head in a new direction. Even if you weren’t aware of this, though, the “but” in line nine, coupled with the irony of “sharing drinks with plants”, rather than people, already tells you that the poem is shifting into a more hopeful gear.
What I’ve just done is to break down for us how to approach a poem, which as you can see, is very different from approaching a play or a thriller. Much like appreciating a painting, the poem requires you step back and ask: What is the image that leaps out at me here? How is the image being sketched or suggested with a few strokes of the pen? And most importantly, what is the poet also sketching or suggesting that you can’t see?
Reading a poem in this way is effectively a dance for two. It requires you, the reader, to imagine – along with the poet – the sort of unseen emotional response elicited by what seems to the rest of the world like nothing more remarkable than a potted plant. This is only possible if you can put yourself in the poet’s shoes. Under pandemic conditions, or any sort of separation, who are those you feel most distant from, and how do everyday actions suddenly remind you of them? Luckily, in a poem like ‘radical days’, all the effects I described earlier (from its imagery and rhyme, to how the poet uses the sonnet form) are already subtly nudging you toward this act of empathy. A skilful poet is one who uses language to create the right conditions for you to dream with them. Your job is to read, listen, and imagine.
The magic of poetry lies in the fact that this imaginative process takes place even if you aren’t trained to spot the telltale signs of the poet at work. You don’t need to be on the lookout for rhyming words as you read a poem, and you certainly don’t have to count the syllables in each line. The best poems work on you invisibly, and are able to catch you unawares through a combination of what the words are saying, and the effects created by how they look, sound, and feel. Think about how thousands of visitors arrive in Paris every day to stare in awe at the Mona Lisa, without having to trace every pigment or brushstroke. Similarly, it often isn’t any one word or line but the totality of the poem that moves us.
Now here’s the thing. If you’re someone who finds poetry ‘hard to get’, you might be tempted to ask at this point: What happens when the magic doesn’t work? Am I a bad reader? Or have I just encountered a bad poem? How can a poet tell, for that matter, whether this very specific combination of words and ideas will work on me?
I’ll let you in on a secret – it’s impossible to know. As poets, we’re always trying our best to imagine our readers: What makes them laugh or cry, what ideas they’re interested in, or what clues might help them arrive at what we’re trying to say. The better we can grasp our readers’ perspectives, the more finely we can tune our poems to meet them where they are. But this only takes us so far. No matter if the person on the other side of the page is a close friend or a stranger, no poet, I think, can perfectly know their readers. So even the most skilful poets will tell you that when a poem hits home, it can be more by coincidence than design.
Why write poetry then, given these slim odds?
I want to leave you with three thoughts; three attempts to answer this question.
First, poems are a way of reminding ourselves of difference, that we all come to the page with contrasting backgrounds, perspectives, and assumptions. It’s worth saying that this also applies to spoken word and performance poetry, or any context in which you might hear, rather than read, a poem. Poems showcase the myriad ways we have learned to stretch language in the service of meaning, to use the full range of accents, volumes, dialects, rhymes and metaphors to help our audience see what we have in mind – as we alone are capable of seeing it. This is also the reason why the good poem is the enemy of the cliché. When I write a poem, I am highlighting the distinctiveness of where I stand, and paying attention to the space between where I am and where you are. You may be just a stone’s throw away, but the world could look and sound entirely different from your vantage-point.
My second point is related to the first. We read and write poems because every poem is an exercise in empathy, and when we do it we stretch a muscle that keeps us human. As we have seen, the reader must try their best to imagine what the writer sees and feels, and the writer must reciprocate by trying to imagine how their readers’ imaginations work. These imaginative gymnastics are not required when you read a Reddit thread or a Wikipedia article, but that’s the point. With poetry, we set aside for a moment our impatience and desire for information that’s easy to consume. Instead, we tune our senses to the way someone else’s mind works, which so often reflects how the world appears to them. In the process, we make way for quirks and misunderstandings, like how we bear with the eccentricities of those we love. We become patient with ourselves and each other, even when we don’t ‘get it’ all the time.
Both of these reasons, reminding each other of difference and exercising our empathy, seem all the more necessary in a world that’s often fraught and unkind. But the final and most important reason why we still write poems is a more timeless one.
The fact is, poems remain the best way of getting some things across. As a young writer, I used to think that anything could be said in a poem, you just need to be a good enough poet. Now I’m not so sure. I’ve learned that the poem’s unique machinery, the way it combines vivid images with emotional impact, the way it tells you something true about what is there and what isn’t, shouldn’t be squandered on the first thing that comes to mind. Most contexts call for other sorts of writing: if you want to lodge a complaint, write a forum letter; if you want to pick a fight, make a diss track. But sometimes, something comes along that tugs at your heart and won’t go away. It can happen on the most common of days. Nobody else notices, but something happens that moves you – to tears, to joy, to rage, to longing – and you just have to find a way for it to move someone else too. How better than with a form of writing that requires you to place your flicker of feeling into a reader’s unseen and uncertain hands? These moments are worth waiting for, and they’re worth putting in a poem.
The next time you see a poem you don’t get, that’s okay. Just know that if you’re reading it, here was a moment that moved someone else – a most powerful reaction to what could have been a most ordinary thing – and that is something we can all understand.