Means To An End: An Interview with Toh Hsien Min
Interview By Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

For Prick of the Spindle, Vol. 4.2, June 2010

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Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé: The two words that registered after I read your book were “urban poetics.” From poems like “Birth of the Modern City-State,” “The Happiness of Meaning in the New Economy,” to “Photography in the Age of Digital,” these are distinctly pieces that situate themselves within an urban landscape. Could you share some insights on the work of seeing the poetic in our sometimes anesthetized megalopolis?

Toh Hsien Min : My instinctive response is not to close down possibility and hence that it helps not to see the world in terms of a dichotomy between a poetic pastoral idyll and an apoetic urban megalopolis. Anyway [Singapore is] less of a megalopolis than many other cities out there; because we have no countryside to which people can drive out and escape, we need to achieve some of the variety of landscape within the confines of the city, and I don’t think urban planning in Singapore has done poorly by that measure. The point remains, though, that the task of the poet is to capture and communicate an experience, and that can happen equally in an urban landscape, a suburban landscape or a rural landscape. Or maybe more accurately: it’s as difficult to do this in each of those landscapes. That our landscapes shape our thought is something I’ve suggested in Means, and I’m reminded of that by how I’d started this answer and had momentarily thought about structuring the sentence around probability rather than possibility, so it will seem a little sly to focus an answer on a human core, because that brings up a bunch of doubts around reflexive logic. Maybe I got lucky. In spite of that, it’s fundamentally human to think that what is human will transcend.

DK: I find myself encountering prose poem after prose poem, all well-handled, all prizing a high level of narrativity. Each piece seems to offer itself up as a vignette, even as some works read like travelogues, something exposited by the line—“Feel the life around the corner”—on page 35. Can you explain why you chose the form of the prose poem for your third outing, and its singular dominance throughout the collection?

HM: I’m not sure I agree with the description of the Means to an End poems as prose poems. I think of them more as long-lined free verse. They strive toward a cadence of their own, one that is apparently conversational yet highly structured and syntactically complex, that channels thought in such a way as to help form the thought, which is most easily seen, I think, in the way the cadence almost requires a certain elevated precision in the overt expression of the subject matter. Let me qualify that: it’s not that these poems need to be exact in what they deal with, but that there is a strong incentive for the poems to say: let me qualify that. Interestingly, some of the poems in Means were published in the anthology Over There, and the Singaporean editor Alvin Pang felt they nevertheless showed my “formalist instinct,” despite being apparently no less free verse than any other in that anthology. Did I say the cadence was conversational? I’m sure you can see how the narrative mode lends itself to that.

There’s a simpler explanation for the collection being, as it were, uniformly the same shape of poem, which is that I conceive my collections as being integral and whole by design, rather than simply a patchwork of random poems written in the last X years.

DK: The last time I went to Tiong Bahru was in the late '90s, and it was at the Plaza for a movie. So, I found your poem of the same title cut-to-the-bone intimate, and I found myself transported to the “flat,” the “stall,” the “pavements”. There was no caricaturizing of the district through its historicity—of the early settlers or their caged songbirds. What do you think needs to be worked into a poem which utilizes place names to prevent reader alienation and permit the indwelling you afford in ‘Tiong Bahru’?

HM: It surprises me somewhat how people have singled out ‘Tiong Bahru’ for authenticity— I’ve heard this also from a number of writers and at least one journalist—not only because I hadn’t set out to depict that suburb but also because the poem is entirely fictional. I can’t quite remember how I came to write the poem, but there must have been a lingering memory of a friend telling me about sharing an apartment in Tiong Bahru with some friends from university, although I didn’t get any details and had to make those up, and also the impressions from a couple of visits to another friend who did live in a walk-up in the area. But none of these really drove the poem. If you think about it, I could have as easily set the poem in Queenstown or Clementi without changing any other word. So the authenticity, or what you call indwelling, must have been a sort of emotional authenticity, which of course is much easier to fake. The lesson in this observation is, however, not dissimilar to what has been expressed elsewhere in Means, which is that the meaning of a place is only attained by the emotional investment that people put into it, which is why the constant reconstruction we have in Singapore runs the risk of making us a city without meaning.

DK: All right, given these dismal times, I feel compelled to bring up the poem “HR in the Time of Recession.” Again, I’m amazed at how the commonplace is enabled such reification through its recitation and retelling. Could you help us look through the lens with which you write out these accounts?

HM : This one unfortunately had less of a fictional origin. I was working at a startup during the last economic downturn, around the time of SARS, and it being a startup meant we all had to multi-task, and among other things I had to oversee the HR function. The first time I put out an ad for a sales and marketing manager, I received about three hundred CVs within a week. I read every one of them, and was struck by how the majority of applicants didn’t actually come close to meeting the criteria we had outlined. We did get one from a Chinese nuclear physicist, by the way; that one was somewhat unnerving actually. It occurred to me how strange the task I was carrying out was: I had to somehow pick out the right person for the job based on these innumerable small clues embedded in the middle of all these CVs. The experience taught me that job searches should never go through HR if at all possible: because every incremental divergence from the stated requirements doubles or triples the number of candidates to consider, HR is motivated to be as literal as possible with the requirements. It is tiring to read each CV with empathy, much less so to scan and chuck. And then I thought, well perhaps I could write something out of this.

DK: What I’m most drawn to is discovering how much of the characterization of the speaker “I” and the “you” in question resides so much in what lies between—in the small gestures, in the mannerisms, in “Peeling a Clementine” and “Snake Wine.” In “Aubergines.” If you don’t mind, please share with us the intentionality behind these pronoun/ced voices? Also, share with us a bit about the book’s dedication to poet-painter Arthur Yap, who passed on in 2006?

HM: If you took that one step on, you could say that poetry is what lies in between. These gestures, these things we do or don’t do, are what we use to communicate with other people, not least the ones who mean most to us. They’re absolutely subject to what you call intentionality, which may not be clear or unequivocal, but these contribute the shades of color in our personal relations. These shades of color cross over naturally to poetry; think of Eliot’s Prufrock, for instance, or the intense yet mystifying detail in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Arthur Yap was my mentor when I was participating in the Creative Arts Programme, which among other things gave promising young writers access to established writers so as to aid their development. He had a tremendous confidence in my ability to write, more confidence than I had and certainly more than I merited at the time, and was instrumental in encouraging me to keep pushing at the edges of what I could do. Dedicating this book to him was my small and woefully inadequate acknowledgement of this debt.

DK: How would you describe your evolution as a writer from the time you published Iambus in 1994, through The Enclosure of Love in 2001, to last year’s Means To An End?

HM: It’s probably better for others to comment on this… I’ll try briefly, nevertheless, if you accept that these comments continue to be provisional at best. Iambus was something that had to be done; it gave a young writer confidence to push on. Means to an End sounds like something that had to be done, but arguably wasn’t. It’s the beach holiday in the middle of the nine-to-nine work days, necessary for reasons that are wholly other to the reasons that are usually thought of as necessary. Enclosure was always the more ambitious work. I should hope the next book makes these comments unnecessary, which means it’d probably add to the confusion.

DK: The question I end my PROMOSAIC/PO-ERM* interviews on. Erm, if you could have Means To An End made into a film, how would you imagine it?

HM: Ooh, this is a difficult question. You need to give me a month or two! If you had asked me last month I would have guessed there would be a toned-down Wong Kar Wai feel to the direction, but I’m increasingly drawn by the idea of Agnès Jaoui having a crack at it. Maybe we can keep Cédric Klapisch in reserve if she’s not free. I also thought of Woody Allen—this being not the Woody Allen of Manhattan but the one of Scoop—because he could push the talky bits, but I imagine he’d push them into an orbit way beyond the flight plans they’re designed for! Having said all that, I’ll probably get back to you next year with a different answer!

* Desmond Kon created the PROMOSAIC/PO-ERM interview for authors whose work has made him pause on seven separate occasions, hard and heavy enough for him to put together seven pressing questions, ranging from the very specific to very broad, and always ending with the film question .

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has edited more than 10 books and co-produced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. His work in lifestyle and developmental journalism took him to Australia, Cambodia, France, Hong Kong and Spain, and saw him writing numerous stories, including features on Madonna, Björk and Morgan Freeman. Trained in book publishing at Stanford, with a theology masters in world religions from Harvard and fine arts masters in creative writing from Notre Dame, Desmond is a recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant and Dr Hiew Siew Nam Academic Award. His poetry and prose have appeared in Agni, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Monkeybicycle, New Orleans Review, Retort, and Versal, with work forthcoming in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Ganymede, Pank, and Spilt Milk. Also working in clay, Desmond sculpts commemorative ceramic pieces for his Potter Poetics Collection. These works are housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

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