3. What were some of the challenges in writing this?

The biggest challenge I faced in writing this novel was actually failing to anticipate how big this book needed to be. I found myself continually wrestling against my need for restraint with the responsibility I felt I had towards these characters of mine, who steadily grew fuller and richer to me the longer they resided within my mind.

Another big challenge also lay in determining the exact flow of the plot, in arranging all of the many years, places and situations of the story in a way that remained dynamic, entertaining, footloose. While the book is set across moments of reckoning located in Japan, in Spain, in Malaysia and in Singapore, the book also skips across time in a way that I believe will take many of my readers on quite a ride.

4. Do you have any favourite books or authors that have influenced your writing? Tell us who/what they are and how they’ve impacted your writing career/life.

I credit the writing of this book with two formative novels I read when I was a teenager. The first was Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, a book that taught me so much about the art of storytelling and how the practice of writing needs to reckon with its own duties, its burdens, its responsibilities. Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha also shaped the way I have come to accept the oftentimes cruel comings and goings of life, especially when it comes to friendship and companionship, and what it means to truly heal and detach oneself from loss and heartbreak — to live life in search of meaning and beauty while remaining welded to its pain.

5. What are some of your hopes for this book?

My hope is that readers take to the book with as much passion and ardour as I had in the making of it — that they feel they can’t put it down, can’t let go of it, not till the very end. 

When I think of the book I find myself imagining a comet, really: a streak of light making its arc across a vast expanse, before it returns once more to its point of origin. That, at the very least, was how it appeared in my mind, and I really hope that some of that feeling comes across on every line, every scene, every turn of the page.

Over the following five days Pooja continued to produce prompts that ranged from the earnest and heartfelt (look at Day 5: “Write a poem that states the things you know to be true”), to the downright naughty and suggestive, such as in Day 3, after a prompt that got participants to write about “the last thing they put in their mouth” inspired an entire series of haikus referencing the smell of fishes and the salty taste of seawater. For instance, go look up Pamela Seong Koon’s “Fish” online and witness the chaos that ensued.

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingde’s term as moderator commenced on Day 7, and anybody familiar with his work as both a teacher and an experimental riddler of language would have easily found his signature style interwoven into his prompts. Inspiring participants to produce list poems, diary-like entries, and even artist’s statements about their own poetics, Desmond’s approach was consistently methodical and sought to guide participants through the process of putting together their individual pieces. But perhaps his most vital contribution to SingPoWriMo would have to be his discovery of a long-forgotten poetic form known as the asingbol, which he introduced to the community as follows:

It is the expedient poetic form created for our expedient society. It’s also essentially an “impossible” poem, befitting of our “impossible nation”. [...] It is written like a dictionary entry espousing a single definition. It is also incapable of being read as symbolic. It celebrates the text as pure object.

Featuring 140 characters (with spaces included), the perfect asingbol features a single clause of entirely un-capitalised words, devoid of irony or metaphor, the sentence “always end-stopping on a period to emphasize its statement of exposition and assertion”. For amusement we’ve selected Christopher Quek’s pun-tastic “ASeNGBOi”, and for the heartstrings there is Faith Christine Lai’s “Commitment”, which states simply yet effectively:

commitment is the promise of your toothbrush balanced besides mine on the edge of the sink; me turning it over so the bristles face upwards

Yours truly stepped in as moderator for Days 13 to 18, and it had fallen into my hands to help this year’s participants rethink the possibilities of what a poem could or could not be, and I had enlisted the help of Tse Hao Guang and Ruth Tang. Of particular note are Kendrick Loo’s heartfelt “Examination Questions (50m)” and Luke Vijay Somasundram’s “F.A.Q.” on racial injustice, in response to Day 13’s Q&A prompt; Janice Heng’s “the government we deserve” and Ng Yi-Sheng’s sassy “*BTBS*” in Day 14; and Letitia Chen’s illuminating (haha) “Today I Am Glad For My Photoreceptors” in Day 17. What I found particularly memorable, however, was Stephanie Chan’s Framfield Road, February 2010”, an unfolding series of revelations in accompaniment to its photo. Moving from evocations of “wet feet, stale cigarette smoke” and “crème brulee” to gossip about mysterious seances, the poem shuffles sensory experience with memory as it paints intimate connections within a photo that is already rich with precocious warmth.

Joshua Ip took over as our fourth moderator on Days 19 to 24, and that was when things got really out of control. Inciting participants to take past poems and “upgrade” them, a flurry of intertextuality, cross-referencing and hotlinking ensued and soon took over the Facebook group, creating long chains of posts that also became opportunities for poets to speak to one another via their own creations. Several poetic forms were also encouraged during Joshua’s tenure, including the recently revived udaiyaathathu (or, “the unbroken chain”) and the visually appealing twin cinema, with Janice Heng’s “i have” on Day 22 going completely viral across social media as a testament to her incredible talent. Finally, Joshua’s final prompt pushed SingPoWriMo into the cultural spotlight, with features on The Straits Times and Mothership.SG chronicling our collective effort to write a poem for every MRT station in Singapore. Qamar Firdaus Saini’s “how to breathe – bakau (for H)” in particular is a moving tribute to an oft-forgotten LRT station, its slimness of form capturing similarly transient moments of tenderness:

This is how

I come: in the day,
before Ma gets home.

Where we hide, away from
others. Below, a bus stop

to Jalan Kayu, where we
have dinner; sometimes,

how I leave. Near the door,
an altar mirroring self.

I watch you pray.
Below, a bus stops

and leaves. A door closing.

Alvin Pang was our fifth and final moderator of the month, choosing to frame his prompts in alignment with the seven deadly sins: on Day 25 we have Ng Yi-Sheng’s impressive “*Burn After Reading*”, which chronicles in ten sections the pain of death and the difficulty of paying penance, and on Day 26 we have Natalie Wang’s “After Sodom”, in which two sisters plot their mother’s death to feed their hunger, resulting in a series of stunning lines:

Her hand broke off in mine, and hours after,
when we had finally stopped running I realised
I was still clutching it like a lifeline.
Or an afterthought.

When my older sister told me her plan,
I cried more salt than I held.

Days 28 to 30 picked up where Joshua left off, with Alvin constantly inspiring participants to read, critique and respond to one another’s work as a way to cap off SingPoWriMo. Benzie Dio wages #CivilWar against Ruth Tang’s “Crabs Against Slow Cooking” with his own “carbs against slow cooking”, while Ang Shuang pits and pairs Janice and Ruth’s work against each other in her own seamless twin cinema. And on Day 30 we’ve chosen to end our anthology with Joseph Ong’s “Larkin Express”, referencing Min Lim’s adroit use of mantous in her poem “crazy susan” while spinning a swan song to affection, marred by the ever increasing lengths of time and space.

*

This year’s anthology marks the second time I return as co-editor. It will also be Joshua’s third and final go at the job, and Ruth’s first stab at the putting together of a manuscript. From what I’ve gathered, Joshua would like to hand the reins of the anthology down to younger, fresher blood, and that three also happens to be a nice number to round things off. Ruth, in the meantime, probably feels excited at the prospect of tackling #SingPoWriMo2017 and beyond, and I say “probably” because it’s hard to gather what she’s actually feeling at any point of time, having constantly claimed to have no real feelings. In any case, Ruth’s love for language is a constant, unwavering thing, and she has taught me and Joshua much in how to have a sharp and exacting editorial eye.

Echoing the more fluid structure of 2014’s anthology, we’ve decided to spread our selections of Days 1 to 30 over the course of the book, with three carefully curated sections interspersed in between: Joshua has put together a #languages sidebar showcasing the sheer variety of lingo that had popped up this year, while I’ve got a sampler on various poetic #forms both fun and somewhat outrageous. Ruth is in charge of #noprompt this year, a series of poems that didn’t necessarily answer the moderators’ prompts but were nevertheless wonderful in their own right. As usual, we have chosen to present the poems sans names in order to let the words speak for themselves, with work properly credited in our “Index” section at the back of the book.

As the editors of this anthology, Joshua, Ruth and I hope that you’ll enjoy reading what’s to come in the following pages. Come join us again next April, and remember – #poetryiscoming.