Arthur's gems

SINGAPORE - Reading Arthur Yap in 2014 is both a challenge and a privilege.

In a Singapore literary scene replete with more poets and poet-wannabes than ever, he remains an enigma, copied but seldom bettered.

Seven years since the intensely private Singapore poet died of cancer in 2006, his poetry defies easy pigeonholing, try as you may. While the reputation of various canonised contemporaries has waned over time - some of their works now appear quaintly dated - Yap's standing is undimmed.

If anything, his stature has risen. His poems are strikingly modern and untethered to trends; ceaselessly interpretable according to a reader's own set of presumptions. Difficult, quiet, non-nationalistic, even ambivalently sensual (as is the valiant conclusion of poet Cyril Wong who teases out a homosexual subtext in Yap's poetry in a recent essay for Axon journal) - you can apply any of these epithets to him, and you're still far from comprehending the whole picture.

Perusing The Collected Poems Of Arthur Yap - containing an impressive oeuvre collating four collections and assorted poems in various journals - one sees the allure of his poems for a younger generation of writers.

Technically, he is a master. His sentences are so concise, each word is definitive. You feel you have been X-rayed, dissected, reconstituted, yet no one could quite figure out his thought process. Emotionally, though, his lowercase discreetness means he would not make a song and dance about issues, or, worse, point a finger or wave a proselytising flag.

Instead, he'd assiduously take things apart like a surgeon, then make you see them anew. The first lines from fair youth, among a handful of poems offered to Quarterly Literary Review Singapore in 2001, are telling: "they are handsome, perhaps had there been/a different set of good looks in any of them,/s/he would have stood out."

The linguistic precision belies a complex of possible reactions. Does one detect an admiration, or a tinge of jealousy, for youth's arrogant attractiveness? Or is there a tacit acknowledgement that beauty has its own cruel hierarchy? Later in the poem, Yap slips in a line so casually, the effect is shocking in its clarity: "on the sand, the loner averred in anguish: i have AIDS."

Youth isn't invincible after all, the poet realises - and that rare use of capital letters is glaring testimony. This piece, plus those latter-day poems which appeared in The Straits Times Life! books tabloid in 2001, show that Yap, a linguist by training, had sharpened his sociological scalpel. One such poem, in search - about one's pursuit to find a pet for a small flat, skewers the deeper human need: "one searches/ for oneself in another guise, whatever traits/in mirror-image empathy."

As he views it, "one is one's own existential pet -/a barracuda, a gnu, a tarzan's mate". It's a line so tart, it makes you laugh and weep.

That's the democratising power of Yap's art - he embraces flawed humanity even as he gently jabs at it.

The mission to unlock what makes humans tick and why they behave the way they do - and to ask "where does rigour end & rigour mortis begin?" (still life v, 1986) - makes Yap the perfect astute observer.

Such anthropological curiosity makes every line sing and sting. Whether it's his groundbreaking use of Singlish in 2 mothers in a h d b playground (1980), and that subtly satirical punch in old house at ang siang hill (1971), Yap neither sentimentalises nor embellishes.

In that respect, his poetry melds the strengths of two American innovators William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings - the former for creating a local, lived-in vernacular and the latter for his semantic and syntactic agility.

Often eschewing the confessional stance for objective distance, most of Yap's poems are fuelled by everyday happenstances, but they aren't slavishly literal nor predictably lyrical. They are personal and impersonal, questing and questioning. Few lapse into rich indolence. That industry, to me, is his gift to Singaporeans and, indeed, any disciple of poetry: Your mind is constantly attuned to every turn of phrase. He sculpts away, feels the words, continues chipping, to uncover something... but what is it?

The last lines of a less obvious poem as 'iteration' (1974) gives an idea of his sublime alertness to the flux of life and identity: "another day/you are yourself. changing,/your lips change the refrain."

kaichai@sph.com.sg

If you like this: John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987 by John Ashbery (2018/10, Library of America, $67.20, Books Kinokuniya). A comprehensive folio of early poems by America's seminal (and polarising) poet, containing works from his debut Some Trees to the award-winning Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror as well as some uncollected pieces.

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