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| Dimsum in Singapore |
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| Mother on the phone |
I’m not proud of it, but I’ve always been ashamed of my mother. A garrulous busybody, an empty knucklehead, a cesspool of neediness, she smothered me with love when I was growing up. She cared for me more than she cared for my younger sister, even though I could see from the beginning that my sister was a better person than I, kinder, more caring. When my mother got drunk at wedding banquets, she slobbered all over the bride and groom and flirted grossly with the men until my father and I dragged her off to find a taxi home. When my father stayed out drinking on payday, she got mad. Once, she got so mad that she threw our clothes into shopping bags and pushed my sister and me out of our small flat because she hated her life. I fantasized too that she was not my mother, that I was a fairy child.
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| Mother wetting her whistle |
She covered every part of my life with her fingerprints and so school was a relief, for there I could get away from her. I pleaded with her not to attend school events, such as sports day and prize giving, for I didn’t want to be seen with her. I sought surrogates instead. My favourite primary school teacher was the school librarian. Every Saturday, after the library closed, in its quiet solicitude we wrapped new books in transparent plastic covers and pasted pockets neatly in them for the loan card. My Sunday school teacher, who also taught primary school, showed me how to use the fork and knife at a buffet. She asked me to come up with questions for a science assessment book that she was writing, and paid me. Even now, in New York City, where I live, I look for strong older women who would take me under their wings but would not demand too much of me.
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| Eavan Boland Photo credit Sara Barrett |
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| Eilean Ni Chuilleanain Photo credit Paul Sherwood |
Poets make the best mothers. I can pick up their books and be inspired and instructed. When I tire of them I can put them down. Women poets seek poetic mothers (if they do) for all kinds of reasons, but common to them all, it seems to me, is a need for identification. That is impossible for me, being a gay man, socialized differently. So in quoting 34 women from 14 countries, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present-day, in my new book Steep Tea, I am picking up poetic mothers as quickly as I am putting them down. The poems owe their existence to the closeness of mothers, more intimate than sex, but they owe their life to our separation.
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| Elizabeth Bishop |
A few mothers I return to over and over again to continue our conversations—Eavan Boland, on marriage, history, and the forked tongue of colony; Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, on love and religion; Elizabeth Bishop, on travel and migration; and Singaporean Tzu-Pheng Lee, on the hardnosed culture of a young nation. I am grateful for these talks. In their passion for their subjects and their devotion to poetic craft, they challenge me to be a better person and poet. To be completely honest, however, going back to them is like flying back to Singapore once a year to visit family. I’m glad to do it and glad to be done with it. Poetic mothers are mothers at a safe distance. I get to decide on the terms of our engagement.
I’ve written about my flesh-and-blood mother in earlier books, trying for honesty tempered by art,
and the reverse, trying for art tempered by honesty. Those poems were inked by my feeling of shame. Re-reading Steep Tea, I observe that in the new poems the feeling is enriched by guilt. Incredibly I am becoming old, my mother always still older. Once, she missed her step while getting off a bus and fell on her face. On the phone, she made light of it, but the less she made of the accident, the heavier the fall weighed on me. I was first heavy with guilt for being nearly 10 000 miles away from her. Then I was resentful of her growing frailty, not least because I saw in it my own fate. The resentment added, in turn, to the weight of guilt. That’s why I don’t call home often. When I fail to call for weeks and weeks, my mother calls me, sounding accusatory while saying she is not, talking without pause or proportion, complaining about my sister behind her back. It is as if I have never left.
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| Tzu-Pheng Lee |
Jee Leong Koh is a Singapore poet and essayist living in New York City. He has published three books of poems and a collection of poetic essays titled The Pillow Book, which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. Other essays, blending autobiography and literary criticism, have been published in PN Review, Prairie Schooner, At Length, Lambda Literary, and the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore. His new book of poems, Steep Tea, is out now with Carcanet Press.
The Carcanet Blog Sale
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Jee Leong Koh's Steep Tea
All books come with 10% off and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOGTEA (case-sensitive). Happy reading!
