Our 2021 Interviews

The fourth edition of the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry awarded a total of $2950 and two Honourable Mentions. For the first time ever, the cash prizes were also split evenly between the winning poets and their editors. The winning poems may all be read here.

To highlight their achievements and dedication to publishing quality poetry, Station Director and writer Daryl Qilin Yam interviewed Christine Imperial, Cara Ow and Yasmin Mariam Kloth alongside the editors of TLDTD and The Tiger Moth Review. A bonus interview with Alfonso Manalastas was also conducted.

Editor Esther Vincent has plenty to celebrate. Her nominations of Cara Ow’s “reclamation” and Yasmin Mariam Kloth’s “Banyan Song” — both from the third issue of The Tiger Moth — earned them Second and Third Place respectively in the 2021 Hawker Prize.

Sing Lit Station's Daryl Qilin Yam chats with Cara, Yasmin and Esther about their respective wins, and what their definition of the perfect poem is.

DQY     Congratulations on winning second place, Cara. "reclamation" to me functions as a catalogue of lost treasures, a display for all the beautiful but heartbreaking things one has managed to pick up while walking along a trash-strewn beach. Does this description resonate with you at all? What was the process of putting together this poem like for you?

CO     Thank you so much; I’m honoured to come in second place, and to hear what you thought of my poem! I’m always worried about not being understood, or not being given the space to reach someone’s understanding, so I’m really glad to hear about the image you got. 

 When I was writing the poem, I wasn’t really writing from the perspective of a human — perhaps the human embodiment of the sea? I was in my final year of uni at the time, thinking heavily about ecopoetry and how binaries like Man vs Nature don’t exactly exist — humans are as much a part of Nature as Nature is a part of us. It’s this dance we’re partnered to for the rest of each other’s lives/existences, and perhaps it is our own hubris that makes us think that we’re entirely separate entities. 

As with a lot of other societal issues, I suppose the idea of separateness gives people the comfortable distance we need to exploit the Earth/other people without our conscience getting in the way.  

So that got me thinking: what if I merged parts of my body with Nature? Would anything change? It ended up as a short collection of pictures and ecopoems called a body of ecopoetics that literally and figuratively stitched together parts of my body. 

This poem in particular was my first, which dealt with my hair. I’d just done the biggest cut of my life around that time, and there was this really moving news article about Burmese hair. Wigs were the Kardashians’ latest find then too, and hair was all around me, but until that article, I’d never thought about the people behind the hair, their connection to it: religion, commodity, the cost of living and did it hurt at all? It’s another form of separateness to not think of it. 

But again, it’s also a dance. For as much as the world has taken from Nature and Burmese people, there will be a time where they rise back up again. In the article, one of the interviewees, Win Ko, compared Burmese hair to the colour of pearls — what poetry! And then I dug deeper: cyclones start over seas, Cyclone Nargis was Myanmar’s most devastating, and a woman called Khin Hla was miraculously saved from it… because of her hair. In my mind, there was an inextricable link between hair and the sea. What we’re waiting on right now is the rebalancing act. 

DQY     And dear Yasmin — one of our judges, Annaliza Bakri, said that your winning poem “forces us to face our very own guilt of not realising that culture is the price we pay in return for 'progress and prosperity'." What would be your response to such a comment? What was the process of putting together this poem like for you?

YMK     This is a thoughtful and challenging comment to unpack and I think it will be difficult to put down an adequate response. In fact, along these lines, my maternal grandmother very recently sent me a note about a new poem I had written in which she said: We left our country with a lot of pain; we had two choices — broken heart or a broken career; so we broke our hearts. 

There are layers to the loss felt by a family that leaves their home country. There is the immediate loss of home and disconnection from the loved ones who remained behind; there is the long-term loss of culture, language, music, and food as next and new generations are born away from “there.” If explored from another perspective, there is also what is gained — new lives, futures, and opportunities that may not have otherwise been possible. 

We make decisions and choices for our families and loved ones everyday. Whether big or small, those decisions carry weight and come with a price or gain, which are sometimes not fully elucidated until many years later. For my parents, their decision to leave their home country provided opportunities, experiences, and a life for which I will always be grateful. I also acknowledge that loss of culture is felt in ripples across the generations — as I was born and raised in the U.S., I will never be able to replicate for my own daughter what my parents were able to share of their upbringing with me, an understanding and a love for Egypt that follows me like a shadow, and a country that I find myself missing from a place in my heart. Time and distance are a sieve. Had my family stayed in their home country, would there have been a comparable price, a comparable loss? What is worth more, “progress” or culture? How do we define these terms? And can we have both? 

I answer your comment with the very questions I know I will continue to explore through my poetry for years to come; especially as my daughter — the next and newest American generation — grows and asks her own questions about her heritage. 

I started to write “Bayan Song” with some of these questions in mind, but I was also haunted by this idea of distance; the distance from “here” to “there”; the distance from my parents’ Cairean upbringing to my birth in America; the distance from my family’s Lebanese/Syrian ancestry to an Egyptian cultural homeland. When I recalled this particular memory of my then four-year-old daughter hugging my then 90-year-old grandmother in the doorway of her Canadian apartment, I couldn’t shake the distance — across locations and generations. I couldn’t shake the deep love, or the depth of this indescribable and tangible loss. I chose the word “song” carefully because I wanted to evoke the sense of a lullaby that soothes, with the enduring banyan tree at its centre, a tree built on distance, the root “measured in meters/from its leaves to the earth.”

DQY     And now, last but not least — congratulations once again Esther! How does it feel to have two poems win second and third place in the 2021 Hawker Prize?

EV Thank you! I’m honoured that two poems were awarded second and third place this year, and thrilled for Cara and Yasmin!

DQY What were your impressions of Cara and Yasmin's poems when you had first received them? How was working with their respective poems like? Was much work demanded at all?

EV     I found Cara’s poem “reclamation” to be intriguing and refreshing in how she engaged with the topic of reclamation through the narrative of hair. There’s a lot going on in the poem, and what stood out for me was the speaker’s voice amidst the many intertextual references that were braided together to create the pastiche that is the poem. I especially liked the poem’s form and the final imagery of the speaker “carrying the wrath of the sea/ cut short/ on [her] shoulders”. The female voice is strong, defiant and subversive, and I see how this female strength of spirit is an act of reclamation, both the woman’s and the Sea’s, in the face of death, loss and the commodification of nature as a resource. 

As for Yasmin’s poem “Banyan Song”, what drew me to her work was the way the speaker’s grandmother is compared to a banyan tree, and how the themes of migration, displacement, nostalgia, loss and intimacy are encompassed within one poem-tree-woman-song. I liked how Yasmin presents inter-generational maternal relationships, between speaker and grandmother, between great-grandmother and great-granddaughter as fragile and deep-rooted. What stood out for me was the distances created by the loss of cultural language, but also the potential for restoration through non-verbal acts of love that transcend the linguistic: “My grandmother consumes / this knowledge / with a nose / in my daughter’s hair”.

I also just realised both poems carry the motif of hair and water! 

Both poems were published as they were, and in terms of working with them, I did not have to provide in-line editorial input, so it was more a matter of seeing how they would fit in with the other works from the issue. 

DQY     On that note, allow me to ask Cara and Yasmin — why submit to The Tiger Moth Review?

YMK     The Tiger Moth Review is a really special online journal. The way the outlet spotlights voices, stories, and perspectives from all over the world is what drew me in to submit. I think it’s also beautiful how editor-in-chief Esther asks authors to share the countries that they most identify with or are influenced by. This creates a diverse and global writing  community. I’d recommend anyone with a story to tell about space and place to submit to The Tiger Moth Review.   

CO     It felt like something of a perfect fit — which other Singapore publication champions such a strong ecopoetic message?  

Lots of publications have poems that are inspired by the natural world, but The Tiger Moth Review specifically curates ecopoetry: poetry where nature isn’t a vague theme to be drawn on, but an active player that calls to mind our interconnectedness with each other and our world. It was exactly what I was going for in my poem. 

The publication is clear-sighted about ecological devastation, and yet it’s hopeful but not naïve; it doesn’t default to bland apolitical statements like Reduce, Reuse, Recycle or attempt to condense or simplify the thoughts and feelings we might have about the state of our world.

Every issue of The Tiger Moth Review is exciting. Right from the contents page, you see contributions from international poets, which country they’re from, and to have me and my poem stand alongside everyone else? It feels like we’re all a part of this big, ongoing dialogue about something we share and care deeply about. 

We can all only do so much alone; it’s really something else to feel like a part of a bigger whole. 

DQY     Can the both of you describe what your poetic practice is like?

YMK     I wish I could say I was a more disciplined writer; that I wake up at a particular hour every day and sit down to write. Instead, I often find myself composing a poem when I’ve experienced a visceral response to something I’ve seen, a line I’ve heard, or a scent that has crossed my path. In those moments, the lines to a poem start to form in my mind and they won’t let me go until I’ve put them down on paper. I know a poem is emerging because I can feel it, like a rising current just beneath my skin; like goosebumps. I will frequently write the poem in my mind first, replaying many of the lines over and over again, until I’ve had the chance to put them down on the page. This results in many “draft” versions of my poems that I revisit a few days later to properly revise and edit. 

CO     It starts with a knot in the stomach… and then a lie-down in bed. 

For some reason, my body is determined to make me feel pain — Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the creative genius rushing through you, filling you up with ideas and inspiring you to write, but mine seems intent on also stabbing me with little knives. And then I write.

Before that though, I try to keep myself open to a lot of influences, from research papers to poems to music to shop signs to Netflix shows to art to brochures to podcasts, etc. I find that I’m most affected by sound, so I try to listen to things as far as possible. I think bell hooks has a similar method of doing multiple things and reading multiple books at once, because the idea is that, over time, your ideas will transfer from one thing to another, and the amalgamation of ideas, the connections you find — that’s creativity.

This method has been working out pretty well for me — I’ve never been one to stick to something to completion anyway — because lots of my poems find really bizarre connections between disparate subjects. It helps me say what I want to without getting arrested by too much emotion, without getting too paralysed to write. My uni professor Sandy Pool called it “writing from an angle”. 

This sort of painful inspiration usually comes at random intervals. It’s not very convenient. I’m kind of held hostage by it. I get stabbing pain, and then I have to sit (or lie) down to type poetry into my Notes app in order for the pain to go away. While I’m writing, my thoughts get interrupted by other thoughts and so I have to leave little slashes within sentences as placeholders, or format phrases so they line up. That’s why my poems have gaps within them; the links are being made there. 

It takes me a very long time to write though, which is both good and bad. I’ll come back to something written a couple of years back and tear it all up to make 2 poems, or find that I’ve changed so much that continuing to write the poem doesn’t make any more sense to me. I don’t know. I’m still working on this. I just wish it didn’t physically hurt so much.

DQY     What, to you guys, is a perfect poem?

EV     A perfect poem says what it needs to say, no more, no less. 

A perfect poem nourishes you. 

A perfect poem shocks you and haunts you and reminds you of what it means to live and love and die wholly on an imperfect Earth as imperfect beings. 

A perfect poem helps you remember what you never knew you had forgotten. 

A perfect poem sings the song of your soul. 

A perfect poem makes you stop for a moment to listen and just be.

CO     A difficult poem.

People have very strong opinions against this sentiment, but personally I’m not looking for a two-liner off of Instagram written by a man who hides his face in a paper bag. If you know you know.

All jokes aside, I do echo Jorie Graham’s sentiment about the difference between information gathering and sense feeling in reading poetry. A lot of our world has become so fast paced that there isn’t much of a place for poetry that challenges us to slow down and come back to the body. We’re conditioned to favour what’s cut and dry, what can get to the point. We’re reading and rereading the same variations of “she’s broken but he’s ok” since 2009 because it’s easy to digest; it’s easy to stagnate.

To me, a perfect poem is one that’s so (initially) difficult to me that the meaning barely matters, just how the words make me feel. It’s the same way with art — you let it wash over you. 

I remember reeling at 17 after reading Stevie Smith’s God the Eater in my Lit exam. Everyone came out of the exam hall frustrated that they couldn’t unpack it, and I stumbled out like a madman muttering, “I understand, I understand.” It was the first time that, out of sheer desperation, I had to let go of a “logical” way of understanding something, and rely more so on the tugging of an inner knowing. Needless to say, I’ve gone on to have many more epiphanies both in and outside of the exam hall. 

One last point about difficult poems: A poem’s difficulty is not quite the same issue as that of accessibility. Poetry can be accessible without infantilising the human capacity to think and feel. What I mean by difficult poetry is perhaps best explained by my sister: Difficulty is just a signal. It’s how you know you’re at the edge of your current knowledge. It’s an invitation to push that boundary, to expand it, so eventually you open yourself up to what’s out there. What’s difficult will forever be changing as you grow, and that’s wonderful; what of a lifelong challenge!

YMK     A perfect poem is one that breaks all the rules — the lines crack at unsuspecting places, or the writer cobbled together a metaphor made of disparate pieces. A perfect poem surprises you; it gives new light to the ordinary and the absurd by shifting your point of view, forces you to confront difficult questions, and invites you to turn your frame ninety degrees in any direction. Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my favourite poets and her poem Kindness is one of those perfect poems. Her opening lines alone are ones to make you catch your breath: 

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.

DQY     Esther — in our interview with you for the 2020 Hawker Prize, you said: "It's hard to put into concrete terms but once I read a poem, I know if it belongs in the journal. Something stirs within me, and to continue the musical metaphor, I know it will be a crucial note to the rest of the score." Now that the journal is in its seventh issue, how has that score evolved for you? How has the music grown for you?

EV     I think the fundamentals remain the same: The Tiger Moth Review publishes work that is eco-conscious and environmentally-engaged. Work that looks beyond the self to Earth to make important connections. The pieces that make it into our issues speak to these themes, and are typically intersectional in the way that they recognise the self as located within a web of relations. In this way, Cara’s poem locates the self within the national, regional and ecological, and Yasmin’s poem locates the self within the cultural, familial, transnational and intergenerational.

Recently, we welcomed a new Poetry Editor, Rina Garcia Chua (PhD, UBC) to the team. I met Rina at an SWF panel organised by the Singapore Book Council last year. Our interests overlapped, and during the panel, I knew I wanted to work with Rina in some way. I think our evolution as a journal can be seen in the expansion of the editorial team, with Rina’s editorial and creative writing experience in the environmental humanities being an example of how we remain focused in our work but expanded in our vision. 

DQY     You also mentioned to us a "hope that more [Singaporean] writers will address the topic of climate change in their poems, novels, essays, etc. because that’s an important conversation for literature to engage in." Has that been happening, in your opinion?

EV     Yes, I do think this is happening. 

One example which you might already be familiar with is the recent Commonwealth Short Story Competition winner (Asia) Sofia Mariah Ma’s “The Last Diver on Earth”. While I have yet to read her piece, it sounds riveting from the judge’s comments. 

I am also aware that artists and practitioners are engaged in the topic of climate change/ sustainability/ the environment in their various ways. For example, I was at a Sing Lit Station Block Party climate panel earlier this year speaking alongside visual artist Robert Zhao and theatre practitioner Ang Xiao Ting, moderated by Carolyn Oei, and I learnt so much from each one of them. I’ll also be in conversation with Melissa De Silva and Natalie Sutanto about climate writing in an upcoming NLB panel.  

Personally, I’m doing my part by conducting ecopoetry workshops in schools and the Singapore Book Council, and one exciting project that’s coming up is an eco-writing workshop that I’ll be facilitating for T:>Works as part of their 24-hour playwriting competition programme line-up. Where I teach, I’m also designing a new Eco Lit module to engage students in the climate conversation through literature. I appreciate that organisations and institutions are supportive of this dialogue, and this to me is one indicator of a healthy ecosystem. 

As for The Tiger Moth Review, it’s always encouraging to receive submissions from Singapore, especially from younger writers. Look out for Issue 8 in July! 

DQY     What are your future plans for The Tiger Moth Review?

EV     I shared the news of welcoming a new Poetry Editor, and so part of the future plan will be to continue to grow the journal in terms of editing work that is both grounded in the local and globally resonant. To foreground diversity and plurality whilst recognising our shared struggles, joys and senses of home. 

I’m also working on some exciting collaborations. For one, we’re stoked to announce that we’re a publication partner for this year’s ComSciCon, a prestigious Communicating Science workshop for graduate students, founded in 2012 by graduate students at Harvard University, MIT and the University of Colorado at Boulder. 

Locally, we’re in conversation with NLB regarding a potential collaboration so stay tuned!

DQY     And finally, back to Cara and Yasmin — can you guys share with what you are working on at the moment? Is there anything in the future you'd like us to know about?

CO     I’m currently working on a couple of poems written in three languages — it’s wild! In the last few years, I’ve become barely trilingual (learnt my mother tongue), and it’s caused a lot of everyday confusion. I’m trying to embrace the fact that I’m forever going to be literally and figuratively misunderstood, so these poems are attempts at representing that, and through the confusion, offer up some sort of understanding either ways.

I’m also trying to figure out better ways to convey my experimental poetry to open mics like the fantastic Spoke & Bird and of course Destination:Ink, which has my heart. I remember reading a poem that I wrote in 2019, which borrowed lines from the Constitution, and my laptop doubled as a visual. It’s not my most “out-there” poem, so I’m stumbling through various methods now to convey weirder pieces — please do come for the open-mics whether or not certain individuals force you to squint at a tiny screen!

YMK     I had shelved a collection of poems that reflects on the loss of my mother after her death in 2010 — an experience that runs parallel in the poems to becoming a mother myself as my husband and I raise our own little girl. I’ve been finding myself writing more about my mother and daughter this year and would like to revisit this collection with fresh eyes, words, and perspective. 

I will also have a debut collection of poetry published by Kelsay Books this fall, which is really exciting. Ancestry Unfinished: Poems of a Lost Generation explores a lot of the themes that arise in “Banyan Song” — what it means to be from “here" — as I explore my family memories through this first-generation American lens and influenced by my parents’ own experiences as they emigrated to the U.S. and Canada from Cairo, Egypt in the 1970s. The poems unfurl in three parts and through the generations of women — grandmothers, mothers, and daughters — who taught me “how the felucca travels;” and how to mourn the losses I know my own daughter collects each year she’s “pull[ed] in a current/further from her heritage.” It will be available through Kelsay Books and Amazon.