#nocrit
/ Poetry Note by Benzie Dio
One of the cornerstones of SingPoWriMo, stemming from its core purpose to gather as many writers as a social media platform could conceivably host to come together for a month and write with/for/at/against each other, is that such a gathering would offer otherwise unacknowledged writers, writers who are unknown, writers who have yet to have their presence felt in the poet-o-sphere (if there was such a thing), writers who have not published, writers who would like to show their work to someone else but have no easily viable recourse, writers who want someone to chime in to say ‘good job, carry on’, an opportunity to be heard.
Well, this issue is dedicated to you, that writer. Eschewing familiar names who have appeared in previous editions, I looked for fresh voices in the group. It may have been that the poem curated was the only one they wrote the entire month, or it may be that they have been represented elsewhere, but found SingPoWriMo a new avenue to make their mark. Your poems are no less remarkable.
For many voices, a poem starts from a personal, tangible location. The visceral quality of Benedicta Foo's “Moorgate” evokes the mundane and connects it with the personal in its imagery of development and construction, far from home. Sometimes, the journey through the landscape is just as important, as in the instance of Wayne Shin’s “Greece is Wide, Cebes,” where the inner journey supercedes the literal. For Migs Bravo Dutt, the journey itself is the metaphor, in “Revising the Laws of Distance”.
Some poems appeal precisely because of their intimacy, drawing in the reader in immediately, permitting us a glimpse into what moves them. Ng Wei Kai’s “Bright Star”, Damon Leong’s “It is Meant to Part / Like That”, and also the more prosaic “Breakfast is an Act of Rebellion”, all snapshots of moments in time.
In contrast, some voices are public, utterances that relate and speak to something larger, something present, in the realm of the political or religious or ideological (in the loosest sense). Alexandra Yapp urges us to Come Forward and Abu Ubaidah equates X-Men imagery to faith in “I was not Always Human”, whereas Gemma Pereira’s poem “The End of the World” performs its own declaration, after which comes Nathaniel Chew’s “After Eschatology”, where “the universe shrinks to the present / tense”.
Finally, two meditations round off this collection. Lim Wei Khai’s “as mariners go”, and Felix Deng’s “Elegy to the Living” remind us that the poetry of the eternal and immanent still resonate.
Enjoy! And I look forward to seeing all of you at SingPoWriMo2021.
