Revisiting the Ballad of Bukit Brown

Wed, 30 Sep 2020
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I’m proud to announce my collaboration together with my good friends from General Lee titled “Revisiting the Ballad of Bukit Brown”.

This is an interdisciplinary piece combining literary arts and music, in which I wrote “Revisiting”, a twin-cinema poem, in response to “The Ballad of Bukit Brown” by General Lee, from their eponymous debut album released in 2016.

We’ve also recorded a music video, which you can stream on Facebook and YouTube (videos embedded below for easy streaming).

From the blurb:

In this cross-disciplinary collaboration, both band and poet tell their stories in a new way and for a new age, brought about by the societal shifts and cultural changes of 2020.

Exploring the tension between conservation and progress in Singapore through the lens of the defunct Bukit Brown cemetery, the video contains images and footage of old and contemporary Singapore, sourced from both private collections as well as Creative Commons.

This includes scenes of Bukit Brown, pictures of historical figures, as well as modern-day Singapore.

This visual juxtaposition illustrates the various facets of the conversation on conservation and progress, and mirror the duality of the twin-cinema format used in the poem.

Keynote: Where is writing in an age of everything digital?

Sun, 18 Mar 2018
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All In! Young Writers Festival logo.

Keynote: Where is writing in an age of everything digital?
Writing has always evolved with the medium by which it is used for–from stone and bark, to papyrus reeds, from paper and moveable type to changing the way Man tells his stories. Where is writing now, in the midst of the digital and augmented reality revolution, and where is it headed?

I presented the keynote address for the All In! Young Writers Festival 2018 on the topic “Where is writing in an age of everything digital?”

The session was moderated by Graham Gamble and took place on/at:

Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2018
Time: 10am to 11am
Venue: The TreeTop (Function Room), *SCAPE

Check out the speech here.

A luxury we must afford

Tue, 3 Jan 2017
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A Luxury We Must Afford: An Anthology of Singapore Poetry. (PHOTO: Math Paper Press)
A Luxury We Must Afford: An Anthology of Singapore Poetry. (PHOTO: Math Paper Press)

My poem, “Where The Wild Things Are”, is in A Luxury We Must Afford: An Anthology of Singapore Poetry.

The anthology is edited by Christine Chia, Joshua Ip and Cheryl Julia Lee and published by Math Paper Press.

Details of the anthology launch:

Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2017
Time: 6pm to 7pm
Venue: The Chamber at The Arts House (1 Old Parliament Lane, Singapore 179429)

Synopsis:
What does the future of Singapore hold?

In 2015, the anthology A Luxury We Cannot Afford commemorated 50 years of man-made myth – 50 years of mysteries and ministries, Marxists and memorandums, the Merlion and The Man – and whether the 1969 assertion that “poetry is a luxury we cannot afford” still held true in the 2010s.

Instead of looking back, this companion volume to the first looks forward to everything SG51 and beyond. It is a collection of bold narratives of Singaporeans shaping their own future, a cornucopia of hyper-modern dreams of robots and aliens, yet also tales of muted despair at a future slipping out of touch with the past.

In the face of a fraught, uncertain future, there is no longer any need to debate whether poetry is an unaffordable luxury. In times like these, writers are the ones who must step up and reimagine possibility, speak out for hope and humanity, and inscribe the circumference of our soul. In 2017, poetry is…a luxury we must afford.

Please go for the launch by signing up here.

Read my poem here.

You can also read “Horrowshow”, which appeared in A Luxury We Cannot Afford, here.