Where Have All The Critics Gone?
The Singapore poetry scene has grown from strength to strength over the past decade. Thanks to the efforts of newer publisher Math Paper Press, stalwarts like Ethos Books and Landmark Books, the newly resurgent firstfruits publications, and others, it is far easier for a new writer to see their work in print today than in the 1990s or 2000s. Similarly, rather than spending peristaltic decades between publications digesting their collected work into a concentrated nugget of poetic excellence, poets now think nothing of pushing out a new volume every year or two, led by notably fecund culprits Cyril Wong (14 collections from 2000 to 2015) and Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé (12 collections from 2011 to 2017). So there is a lot of Sing Lit poetry out there.
However, a similar burgeoning cannot be observed for local criticism. Distant are the days where Life! would run a sprawling half-page review of a new local poetry collection, pausing from this largesse only to insert glossy color photo of bard and book. One would call themselves lucky these days to get a thumbnail of their cover inserted in the Straits Times — more likely a 3-liner capsule review in a column covering 5 books in one breath. No, I exaggerate wilfully for effect — arts correspondents Olivia Ho and Toh Wen Li still produce long reviews of local writing for our national broadsheet on a regular basis (when they can sneak it past their editors / paywall), but the output of published Singapore poetry has grown beyond the ability of our critics to digest it all. And what is a literary scene without critique? How can our writers grow without meaningful independent feedback?
The formidable Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS) is the only regular journal offering critical reviews of Sing Lit across multiple genres — its critical section has upheld its consistent standards under the duo of Stephanie Ye and Ng Wei Chian, but has not expanded in proportion with the growth of literary publishing. The lesser-known Singapore Review of Books, led by editor Lim Lee Ching with feature editor Jeremy Fernando and creative director Chen Yanyun, has surfaced slim yet thoughtful reviews across multiple genres since July 2012, but the editorial team casts their nets far wider than Singapore — of the 24 poetry reviews since their founding, only 8 could be notionally considered Sing Lit. Other websites such as The Eloquent Orifice, which uniquely required poets to publish their own exegeses alongside their poems, have come and gone, while yet other nascent attempts like The Field Guide never even made it past the first bar of grant approval. Indeed, the largest amount of Sing Lit poetry reviews outside of QLRS exists in a friendly Hong Kong-based neighbour, Cha: An Asian Journal, helmed by founding editors Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and Jeff Zroback, though it probably helps that Reviews Editor Eddie Tay is a Singaporean expatriate.
What could be constraining the growth of local criticism? Some will point to the well-known decline in the uptake of literature in schools, and others might cast fingers of disapprobation at our academic institutions. There are also obvious issues of capacity (limited) and budget (next to none) for the independent journals I have mentioned above. But the largest issue in my opinion is the fear factor of raising offence in the relatively small Singapore poetry scene. The scene is extremely well-networked due to the pervasiveness of social media combined with a state-funded week-long gathering every November. It is awkward (though not impossible) to write a negative review of a collection a fellow writer has slaved over for years (or months), and then smile delicately through a SWF panel with them or exchange acronymised Facebook pleasantries with them on respective birthdays. And what if their publisher takes offence to a honest review, which might have an equally honest effect on their book sales? One can count the number of local literary publishers on one hand — is that a bridge truly worth burning when so many critics are also practitioners? Might that senior poet whose scansion was nitpicked resurface one day as an anonymous grant panelist, or literary prize judge? Could they, heaven forbid, end up running a literary institution, the NAC itself, or (successfully) for Parliament?
But let’s look back at the not-so-distant past and examine some notable examples of Sing Lit criticism, where critics were happy to not clutch their pearls and/or instead throw them at swine. Published in QLRS in 2009, Nicholas Liu’s review of Gilbert Koh’s Two Baby Hands still sparkles with a certain gleeful bloodlust, as he eloquently expectorates Koh’s collection as “pre-chewed language” and “lumps of cud”. One cannot help but take a certain vicarious pleasure as Liu likens Koh’s craft in turn to “WMDs”, “the tools one might find in a Fisher Price My First Poem set”, and “a novelty edition of Monopoly”. I will even admit to cackling uncontrollably at “The intrepid reader is advised that those all-too-familiar arms will clutch you from the first page of this collection to the very last.”
Of course, the poet in question was not as amused. Koh proceeded to publish a passive-aggressive dismissal of Liu as “some typical young smart-ass undergrad Lit student from NUS, attempting to comment on my works” in passing on his blog, and then committed the Internet faux pas of engaging in the comments thread with multiple mini-essays explaining his own work and why it was good. Koh continued to publish more defensive posts on the topic, including evidence of support from other poets, and a more positive review of his book in Cha by Moira Moody, alongside Koh Jee Leong’s Equal to the Earth. Everyone with an opinion leaped in, and it seemed like half of the publishing catalogue of Sing Lit was active in the comments threads at some point.
Let’s run off on a tangent and note that Jee Leong also responded to this debacle on his own blog in a meta-review of Moody’s review of his own book and Gilbert’s. His opinion on Liu’s review of Gilbert: “Liu enjoys wielding the knife a little too much, but his opinion is incisive and well-supported.” And he ends his review-review of Moody (spoiler: it’s a negative review of a non-review) with a telling, “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell when a reviewer does not say what she means.” Jee Leong has experienced two Liu reviews in QLRS, one in the same issue as Gilbert’s, one two years later. Both arrive at a more generous net conclusion (“Uncertain Mastery: Fine specimens jostle with flawed gems”; “Only Project: strong second collection returns ambition to our poetry”), albeit after shrugging off the requisite snarky slings and arrows (“For a start, one fears that Koh’s balance at the Bank of Keats may well be overdrawn. For another, it’s distressing to find oneself in the last place one expected of Koh — an abandoned Thumbootown, pop: zero”). Despite the odd rhetorical barb, it is not difficult to see why Jee Leong would consider these excellent reviews vis-a-vis Moody’s — Liu has no compunction about saying exactly what he means, in vivid detail, with well-chosen examples, topped off with exquisite style.
And wandering further off on a tangent, I’d like to draw your attention to this even earlier episode of the Acid Tongue — a now-defunct feature on QLRS which used to explicitly highlight {and thereby, promote} reviews that were not afraid of raising offense. In this case, Cyril Wong flagged up Kristina Tom’s review of Gilbert Koh’s Golden Point Award-winning poem on the Straits Times. Without further discussing the merits of review or review-review, this might interest the reader because (1) the merits of a GPA winner’s poems used to be dissected on the Straits Times (2) negatively (3) and further covered (briefly) on QLRS (4) in a section wholly dedicated to acerbic reviews — none of which is anywhere close to happening today!
But let’s return from my flight into mid-2000s Googling and consider the aftermath of the review. Notably, Gilbert Koh has not published a collection in the decade since. Equally notably: neither has Liu, who was a budding young poet at the time with a strong body of work published across several journals. One can only speculate at the reasons: a collective scarring from the vitriol, the untimely downfall of firstfruits publications shortly after this, or greener, more profitable pastures (both poets, coincidentally and contentiously, are lawyers). What’s to blame here? Liu’s incisive but bloodthirsty review? Koh’s inability to take criticism lying down? The kaypoh community? Or is there nothing to see here, move along, it’s only poetry?
A more recent example is Daryl Lim Wei Jie’s 2013 QLRS review on Mayo Martin’s debut collection, Occupational Hazards titled, “Trying Too Hard: Quirky cool not enough for debut collection to make itself heard. This one, too, includes the odd snarky brickbat (“As sterile, perhaps, as having sex with an inflatable doll”), but is gentler on the whole than a Liu review. Lim pairs his identification of weak areas with mention of strong, if not entirely redeeming, points, and ends with detailed suggestions for the poet’s improvement. This is what I’d argue is the dual job of the critic — to illume strengths and weaknesses so that each unique reader with their different value systems might be drawn to the former and exclude the latter, or vice versa; and to point to the poet’s improvement. (Noting the aftermath again: Martin has not followed up with a second collection, but interestingly enough, Lim and Martin now share a common publisher in Math Paper Press.)
At what point does a reviewer cross the line from academic analysis into personal attack? I’m not sure there is a clear line. If anything, there’s a grey zone where day fades into night, and where this line or zone exists differs depending on which geographical point on the globe of poetic taste you’re standing on. I’d venture that I’m willing to allow reviewers like Liu or Lim the benefit of the doubt as to their intentions because of the depth of their analysis, which could only have come from close reading and intimate engagement with the work, and to some extent, the quality of their wit. But that begs the question: Is Liu’s review of Gilbert Koh more justifiable because his bon mots sparkle more than Cyril Wong’s equally cutting, but rather less entertaining hit job on Heng Siok Tian’s Contouring (2004)? I don’t have a clear answer. But perhaps let’s move towards an example with a happier ending.
In 2008, poet and academic Dr Gwee Li Sui wrote a critique in QLRS of Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia, the bicultural volume edited by John Kinsella and Alvin Pang, subtitled by way of summary: “Singapore-Australia anthology let down by lack of dialogue between cultures”. The main thrust of Gwee’s criticism is that the volume “should really have been two separate volumes of verse.” He calls out what he perceives as a visible failure of both editors to create a dialogue between both countries and cultures in verse, instead curating two separate selections without comparable organising principles, and ultimately accusing the volume’s construct as a bilateral exchange on equal grounds as a false premise. Rather than taking to the QLRS forums, Pang and Kinsella were able to present their opposing points of view in an interview with Australian poet Adam Aitken published in Mascara Literary Review, where both interviewer and interviewees addressed and rebutted Gwee’s points — pointing out areas of commonality that Gwee did not mention, further explaining their intentions, discussing how many of the poems published were actually resisting notions of nationality that divided rather than collected — and further riffing off each other to more topics in an illuminating and expansive discussion, one that I would argue could not have happened without the provocation / invitation of Gwee’s critique. Gwee would later note (ironically, in the comments thread of the Liu-Koh debate) that all parties had learned something from the experience, and developed as writers and editors as a result. And this does seem like a model of how critical engagement could occur — critics given a right to an opinion, and poets a right to reply (or the dignity to stay silent…). (Some might note that poets with a lesser reputation than Kinsella and Pang might not have access to the same right to reply that they fashioned for themselves in Mascara, but I’d also say that poets with ability meriting their lesser reputation might not have fashioned a similarly credible response…)
One obvious issue in all of the previous examples (other than them all being cis males arguing with each other) is that all of them are reviews by poets on other poets. One casts an eye longingly towards our academic institutions, hoping for some local love. Academics like Prof Koh Tai Ann have in the past been free to deliver forthright criticism without accusations of character assassination of publishing rivals, which have been levelled at critics like Liu at various points. Where are the next generation of Sing Lit academic critics? One thinks of the growing community at NIE — Angelia Poon, Suzanne Choo, Richard Angus Whitehead et al, the lonely furrow ploughed by Philip Holden in NUS for years, Ismail Talib’s steadfast annual summaries for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and the contributions of the overseas lovers of Sing Lit — Agnes Lam, Shirley Lim, Eddie Tay, Gui Wei Hsin and many more. But is that enough to sustain Sing Lit? Or is academic discourse increasingly trammeled away into irrelevance behind paywalls and obscure journal titles, and the true criticism taking place on social media instead?
SingPoWriMo itself has popularised the #plscrit hashtag, and if anything, the fast-loop feedback cycle that a poet can receive from posting their work on the eponymous Facebook group points to new possibilities for growth — a veritable petri dish (or some might say leaf litter) of literary experimentation. But as SingPoWriMo itself matures as a community, creates more of its own rules, solidifies in-groups and becomes comfortable with mostly the same few styles or themes, will its original wild energies ossify into the polite mooing of a herd? How credible anyway are the 30 second “crits” of a junior moderator, and many in number as they may be, can they be any true replacement for a full critique published by an independent reviewer? I think not.
On the note of practising and preaching: for the most part, I avoid submitting reviews to QLRS or other sources (the sole exception being a review in the “Writing Singapore” issue of Cha: An Asian Journal that I guest curated, and that for a prose piece). I still publish actively myself, and am leery of being perceived of taking down competitors or jockeying for pole position for awards and prizes. More pertinently, my perceived role (which is significantly larger than my actual role) in movements that develop and archive Sing Lit such as SingPoWriMo and poetry.sg, and Sing Lit Station as a whole, is such that my words could be conflated with that of the organisation, which I would prefer to avoid. Each time Toh Hsien Min, the chief editor of QLRS, ventures into the reviews section to engage with a Singapore literary book, the impact of the review is greater than that by any other reviewer, and I’d argue that the public response to it impacts the reputation of the journal more than that by any other reviewer. (It’s also worth noting that Toh’s reviews of Sing Lit have been restricted to prose since 2002 — one would construe that he shares similar concerns as an active poet.)
Taking these factors into account, I keep my (multifarious and unedited) opinions on Singapore poetry to my personal Facebook account.
What can be done? Poetry.sg was created in 2015 as an attempt to grow the amount of Sing Lit critical material, bolstering the biographical and bibliographical function of a poetry archive with a critical essay written on the entire body of each poet’s work. Yet the editors have also been faced with challenges — multiple poets have threatened, and in certain cases, actually gone through with removing themselves from the archive because they were not happy with their critical essay. Nonetheless, the archive continues to seek new critics willing to contribute to the body of critical material — that is one place to start if you’re interested in the field. The Arts House ran a young critics mentorship programme in 2016, aiming “to develop and nurture the next generation of reviewers and critics”, with at least one actively publishing new critic coming out of the programme. Though the programme has been discontinued, poets Cheryl Julia Lee and Samuel Lim are attempting to resurrect it, with the potential support of Sing Lit Station. Koh Jee Leong runs SP Blog (formerly Singapore Poetry), which commissions paid reviews of Sing Lit by non-Singaporeans (and vice versa), a brilliant effort to grow dialogue beyond the arbitrary lines of national borders. QLRS remains always open (email here) to new contributors. And I still wait for the day when someone figures out how to do a proper critique or review of spoken word, to properly recognise and discuss the nearly two decades of evolution and development in that scene in Singapore.
But shambling towards a conclusion: one of the most quoted works on criticism in past years is the discourse of Anton Ego from noted literary treatise Ratatouille (2007).
“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.”
While in my time I have joyfully quoted this paragraph in many a school talk, I now disagree with large parts of it. 13 years after Ratatouille, we see few Sing Lit critics with any “position” at all, and a preponderance of Sing Lit poetry arriving on the scene uncriticised and undiscussed beyond the feckless applause of Facebook acquaintances. I would put forward that a well-written critique is more rare and meaningful than the average Sing Lit collection today — and every time a critic speaks forth in public, especially in the fraught Singapore scene, they are taking a brave risk — through engaging with, contesting with, developing through trial by fire, and only thus truly discovering, the new.
Singapore’s literary scene can only come of age if we are able to express well-researched opinions on the books we publish without fear or favour. Give critics the benefit of the doubt. Disagree with them, sure. But don’t just cast aspersions on them in private messenger groups. Write your own take. Defend your opinion. Listen to others. Show us that Sing Lit is worth more than the paper it’s printed on — Sing Lit is worth talking about.