On Poetry and Communication

[I wrote this on 2 May 2019 and it was originally published on lazyiroh.wordpress.com ]

ODE to Meta Poetry (by Yann Wong)

April 2019 was a weird month for me. On the first of April, on an impulsive whim, I decided to take part in Singapore Poetry Writing Month (i.e. SingPoWriMo) where you write a poem per day for 30 days based on prompts released by moderators. I’m not a poet. Heck, I’m not even a “Literature” guy. I don’t read all that much fiction, and pretty much all my literary “tastebuds” were developed over watching (too) many movies. But something about the creative challenge (and perhaps the desire to procrastinate from my dissertation writing) compelled me, and in the end I did write 30 poems (some mediocre, others downright terrible) over 30 days. It was a fascinating (and sometimes, frustrating) experience, but one thing in particular did stand out to me – the sometimes unexpected disconnect between the poet and reader. I’ve experienced this a lot when I was the reader of poetry (and you could tell from other comments that some folks connected to the poem which I struggled to comprehend), but I’ve also experienced this as the poet, when I tried to be clever to work in references, or subtle concepts…which nobody seemed to get. Did that make me a poor poet? Was there some kind of community of “clever things” poets can do, but different kinds of “clever things” outside of community norms are inaccessible to the poetry reading crowd in Singapore? I don’t know, I didn’t “grow up” with this crowd, or with SingLit. But it’s fascinating to some extent (and deeply frustrating at times).

Another thing which happened was that I wrote an article for Rice Media on the Monica Baey incident. I admit I didn’t spend as much time drafting the article as I should (partly because I didn’t want to spend TOO much time on it), and in the end I wrote something a little technical and inaccessible. Perhaps I was hoping that Rice’s editor would do some work to make it simpler, but Rice had always edited with a light touch, and I guess on some level they thought my article was good enough. An interesting thing was that when my article was published, there was quite some diverse reaction to it – the older folks (those in their 40s and above in particular) really liked it, and most of the younger folks disliked it (or fail to comprehend it). Again, yet another disconnect between white I write and my reader. To what extent is this the fault of the reader? Of the author?

Deep fascinating issues to ponder – especially if the aim of writing is to successfully communicate something. Is our audience (especially the large swathe of Singaporeans online) simply too diverse such that you cannot possibly communicate the same point to all with equal clarity? Or, perhaps like movies, poems and other art forms, the intrinsic value of your creative product is independent on whether people “get it” or not? But that doesn’t totally make sense either, does social commentary have “intrinsic value”? I do think that, while “artistic” and “non-artistic” writing do have some apparent differences, on a deeply fundamental level they are similar from a phenomenological perspective. Only when an author can speak into a reader’s “context”, can there be actual “resonance”. Unless the author desires postmodern “reader response” from the get-go, some responsibility of “getting” the reader’s context lies with the author. But readers are a deeply heterogeneous mix, with a deep variety of worldviews, values, vocabulary, and emotional reactions to the same stimulus. A slight worry that I have is that younger Singaporeans are actually losing vocabulary, narrowing their own worldview, and thus the possible emotional responses that can be evoked. It therefore becomes harder and harder to “connect” or discourse with these younger Singaporeans – and perhaps there lies no more point in social commentary (unless couched in the same narrow framework by which they occupy).

Am I overly pessimistic about young Singaporeans? Am I guilty of dehumanizing them due to their lack of literary prowess? Or actually, has this always been the norm, just that social media had made a once-invisible portion of society visible? Interesting, but perhaps useless pontifications – the onus is on me to communicate as clearly as I can, as accessibly as I can, tapping into whatever emotional and intuitive resources as I can, and then live with it no matter how many people “get” what I write or not.