Writing Against Imperial Culture

KARAN

Jonathan, “diario verano | chronicle” is extraordinary. You’re writing letters to Lorca while traveling through Spain — Granada, Madrid, witnessing a wedding, visiting the Prado. “Lorca, how art activates a memory / of suffering.” The poem moves from tourist joy (jamón, flamenco, orange trees) to Guernica, to “the heirs to / El Greco, Velázquez, y / Goya.” What made you want to address Lorca directly? How does he function as guide, witness, ghost?

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JONATHAN

At the time that I wrote “diario verano | chronicle,” I had just finished re-reading Spencer Reece’s collection Acts (2024). The collection weaves between Spain, where Spencer had served as an Anglican priest, and the East Coast of the United States, where he had grown up. It is the poem “Poeta en Nueva York” where I encountered Reece’s own invocation of Lorca as muse and guide through the exhaustions of frequent travel. I’d heard Spencer read these poems as drafts during a graduate poetry seminar in 2022 where he’d been an invited speaker, and I was completely taken by them, especially the entwining of Spanish and English and the candour of the diaristic form. I had gone on to read Lorca’s work in a bilingual edition, trying to hear his music through the filter of my rusty Spanish, and allowed his experiences of elation and queerness to percolate in me. 

Arriving in Spain for the first time in years, there was a sensory intensity that I found arresting and consuming. I’d last visited with friends for Semana Santa in 2018, back when I’d had less exposure to Spanish poetry, and I had read the work of Hispanophone poets like Octavio Paz, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and of course Lorca, in the intervening years. It was both Lorca and Spencer’s vision of Lorca that would become a kind of muse through my week in Spain, amidst days of summer heat and strong drink, anticipating the celebration of my high school friend’s wedding. Lorca’s life of queer alienation, living in New York and Madrid, and eventual assassination by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War swirled in my mind over the days, as I thought of histories of empire and violence, his name repeating in my mind like an incantation. 

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KARAN

The Guernica section devastated me. “see how the / children watch Guernica / like television, legs crossed / on the museum’s marble / floor.” You write, “the image is disorientation, is dislocation / is discombobulation.” How do you write about violence and art without becoming desensitized? What does it mean to witness Guernica as a tourist, as a poet from Singapore?

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JONATHAN

Guernica was on the syllabus of my high school’s language and literature course and was presented as an introductory ‘text type’ for most of my classmates. As with any compulsory subject of study, learning how to ‘read’ and repeat facts about Picasso’s masterpiece became a bit of an inside joke, fluttering across our cohort. I remember seeing the grainy images of a black-and-white rendering of Guernica on sheets of A4 paper that year. What I hadn’t realised was the sheer scale and audacity of the work, which only became apparent when I beheld it for myself. I’d seen a facsimile of it at the train station of Málaga, but it paled in comparison to the massive mural that I saw in the Reina Sofía. Its scale meant that every detail suddenly became perceptible and conspicuous. The disfiguration of human and animal form, limbs maimed and mangled, and the ‘bombilla’, the double-meaning of the lightbulb, masking the brutality of bombardment. 

What surprised me was seeing a class of children seated on the floor–there were probably thirty of them–gazing at the painting, eyes darting across each gory detail. It was also then that I began to understand Guernica in the context of Picasso’s other work at the time, which were attentive to the deaths of children and the weeping of their mothers. It brought to mind most intuitively the naked cruelty of the bombing campaigns in Gaza, which has resulted in the murders of thousands of children and their families. 

Therein lies the question of how to bear witness to the ongoing violence of our time, one in which indiscriminate killings and ethnic cleansing have become normalised as a matter of course. I hesitate sometimes because I do not believe that one should make a spectacle of suffering, but it is a prick of conscience that compels me to continue writing about this cruelty lest the world forgets, looks away, obscures, or invalidates the reality of this depravity. The ongoing violence by the United States and Israel across Palestine, Iran, and Lebanon demands this, as does the violence in other sites of war such as Myanmar, Sudan, and Ukraine. 

The question of the touristic gaze also complicates this, for it is a fundamentally consumptive or extractive gaze. There are certain instances where the artefacts of war are presented in ways that cater more explicitly to this, such as in war museums or replicas, but the aesthetic distance of art alters this. Our present historical distance from the Spanish Civil War allows this degree of reflection and mediation, though I could not help but think that it represented to me the delivering of imperial and colonial violence in a domestic context. My only suggestion here might perhaps be that the tourist, while an outsider, must also recognise the responsibilities that come with being a guest, and hopefully an informed one about the place that has extended its hospitality. 

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KARAN

You give regards to Spencer Reece in the epigraph, and the poem has his influence — that long-lined, accumulative, devotional quality. You write, “i met / this city in Spencer’s poems. i meet it / again in spirit and in breath.” How does reading another poet’s work about a place shape your own encounter with it? What does poetic lineage mean to you?

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JONATHAN

I think the very possibility of my writing poetry has risen out of engaging with the works of other poets. For a long time I felt like I was writing in isolation, in part because I had yet to find trusted readers, but also because I had yet to properly understand what it meant to be part of a literary lineage and tradition. This is especially fraught when we speak of poetry in English, that language of the colonial imagination and imperial expansion in empires past and present. I believe it was Viet Thanh Nguyen who said that to master English is to master the language that has conquered the world. 

It was my reading English in the United Kingdom as an undergraduate, to return to that British academic parlance, that allowed me to understand the continuities, cruelties, and fissures reflected in the history of poetry in English. I learned of its emergence as a literary language in the Middle Ages to the concomitant flourishing of literature in English at the same time that the British Empire began to encroach other lands, to the dispersal of English into the Englishes we have across the places that were once ruled by Britain, as well as the United States. The notion of canonicity is one that I have acknowledged and resisted especially when remembering how so many pioneering postcolonial and revolutionary thinkers were schooled in the English canon. Yet, it is in understanding an imperial culture and history that one can both appreciate and write against it. 

To return to Spencer, one of the reasons I felt a sense of kinship was because of our shared interest in devotional poetry, more specifically the poet George Herbert. I had read Herbert when I studied Early Modern literature and remember a feeling of sheer warmth reading his poem ‘Love (III)’. As someone of the Christian faith, coming to read these poets suddenly helped ground my poetry in a more coherent devotional tradition. From Herbert, I would read John Donne, Thomas Traherne, Aemilia Lanyer, and Henry Vaughan, “metaphysical poets,” whose curious conceits and metaphors would gnaw at me. Spencer wrote his master’s thesis on Herbert, drawn to the hospitality of his vision and presentation of the priesthood, which would guide his own journey toward becoming a priest. The other muse, as you’ve rightly mentioned, is Lorca. In writing my own poem, I felt this sense of kinship partly out of a shared appreciation for a common poet, though it feels disingenuous to say that I am of Herbert’s lineage or of Lorca’s, though I cannot speak for Spencer. What I would say is that engaging with the work of a poet set in certain contexts gives glimmers and impressions of what can be noticed, what details and idiosyncrasies, but also what more there is to observe about places that have changed and will continue to change. 

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KARAN

The lowercase throughout these poems feels deliberate. No capital “i,” no capital letters at all except for proper names like Lorca, Picasso, Madrid. What draws you to lowercase? How does it change the poems’ relationship to authority, to the self?

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JONATHAN

The tendency to write in lowercase has been characteristic of my poems from early on. I have often battled the allure of the ego in my writing, thinking about what it means to resist narcissism and self-indulgence in what can sometimes feel like a self-centred act. The rendering of the “i” in lowercase has been one such attempt to decenter the place of the self, the all-seeing, all-knowing “I” that one might encounter in Whitman’s poems, for example. Perhaps it is a self-effacing impulse that is Singaporean in a way – a tendency toward modesty or understatement. The contradiction therein is that we can never really get away from ourselves either. I can only write from what I know, observe, and experience, even if the position of my speakers is of an observer or as being on the periphery. To write from the self but not of the self. It is a tension I grapple with constantly in my writing. Aesthetically, I have also liked the way that lowercase letters create an evenness in the line that I have sometimes felt to be democratic, though that’s not particularly grounded in anything. The paragon of lowercase poetry has been e. e. cummings, but I have often found my concerns and style to be very different from his. 

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KARAN

In the June 2nd entry, you write about the Alhambra: “preserving / this edifice is a cruel, / beautiful, and triumphal / act.” You’re addressing the violence of preservation, how monuments erase the people they displaced. “it seems more / and more desire only / to forget.” How do you think about tourism and memory? Can we visit these places honestly?

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JONATHAN

So much of this poem was informed by the material I was reading as we toured the palace grounds and examined its fortified towers and its ornate gardens. I thought a lot about the design of Islamic architecture, as well as the Islamic history of Spain that seems often to be obscured, if not forgotten. The south of Spain still maintains much stronger cultural links with the Muslim world given its proximity to Northern Africa. I thought of the gutting of the palace and its preservation as a tourist destination, a hollowing of what was once a seat of power, wealth, and indulgence. I thought also of the Reconquista that led to the fall of Al-Andalus and to the emergence of Spain after the capture of Granada itself by the Catholic monarchs, and how this would precede the discovery, and further conquest, of the “New World” under their aegis. There is a certain triumphalism embedded in preservation, with the act of maintaining a former ruling power being a display of power in and of itself. In my mind, it was a reminder of the complex, sometimes palimpsestic, nature of Iberian history. 

Of course this is all beyond any living memory given these events occurring in the 15^th century, but I mulled over the Islamophobia that has surged across Europe and the ways that far-right movements can distort or obscure history. I am inclined to believe that the position of the tourist is always compromised to a degree, given the acts of transaction that sustain tourist activity and the remove that comes with being a foreigner. We can seek to be better guests, doing what we can to learn something about the places we visit, their scars and terrors, the things that cannot be forgotten, and consider then the decisions we choose to make. 

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KARAN

“you must go to the edge of all desire” shifts registers completely. It’s a quieter meditation after the sprawling chronicle. “you must go to the edge of all desire, / of your desire, to the moment when it has begun / to thin.” So much poetry is about desire – desire for love, touch, god, childhood, joy, deathlessness, nature, peace. Is desire a preoccupation for you?

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JONATHAN

Ironically, “you must go to the edge of all desire” is also a touristic poem of sorts. I wrote it while in Seoul, spending time with my maternal family, visiting galleries and art shows, and spending time with friends. It was a period where I had been thinking about love and the compulsions that emerge in moments of solitude and loneliness. When I am in Korea, I feel the ambiguity of not quite being a tourist but not being fully at home either. Part of this barrier is linguistic as I am not fully fluent in Korean, and part of it is the feeling of imposture when I am not regarded as a foreigner. To the question of desire, the poem is also a reflection on how in my life there have been moments that only when my desire for something has diminished that that something presents itself. To want too much is to diminish the possibility of receiving an object of desire. There are many yearnings that are woven around this that have shifted and moved over different seasons of my life. This is not to say that ambition is something to be discarded entirely, but that to indulge in the fantasy of yearning can swallow one up as to be unhelpful, even if it is often the catalyst for many poems I’ve written. I hesitate to call it a preoccupation, though I remember what Christian Wiman has said about how every poet is really asking themselves the same question over and over again in their work. 

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KARAN

The chronicle poems are about Spain, but you’re writing from a Singaporean perspective. How does your relationship to Singapore shape these poems about elsewhere? What does it mean to write about Spanish history as an Asian poet?

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JONATHAN

I think my being Singaporean has always felt somewhat fraught. I moved to Singapore as a child from New York and both my parents were initially not Singaporean, being Malaysian and Korean. My naturalisation as a Singaporean happened when I was eighteen, just before I was conscripted for national service. To that extent, my perspective isn’t necessarily representative of most Singaporeans. That being said, Singapore still remains my home base and an anchor for me relationally and creatively. I learned Spanish in Singapore in high school and found much of my interest in and affinity for Hispanophone art and culture cultivated in Singapore, such as through Chinese Cuban American family friends who lived here. The other thing I would add is that because of the sheer size of the Spanish Empire, that Spanish history was once Asian history. The country that bears the scars of Spanish colonialism in Asia is the Philippines. At the same time, Asia was linked to Spain and the Americas under the ambit of Spanish colonialism, with the Manila Galleons making routine voyages across the Pacific Ocean from the Philippines to Mexico. There is a greater degree of connection across these regions culturally and culinarily than one might intuit. 

Singapore, as an Anglophone country, might not have these affinities so readily with the Hispanophone world, nor feel as viscerally the legacies of violence, genocide, and forced conversion that accompanied imperial expansion. Nevertheless, Singapore exists in a region that was once carved up and contested by European powers, including the Spanish. To write about an experience of Spain, therefore, demands a recognition of this history. I felt this most acutely during my visits to the Prado and Reina Sofía, thinking about the development of art and image that sustained the Spanish monarchy, imperial conquest, and the Eurocentricism of the Christian imagination, but would eventually face the disarray of two World Wars and a Civil War, lurching into surrealism and deconstruction. 

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KARAN

The diary form allows you to track time, to show the accumulation of days. June 1st is a wedding, June 4th is Guernica. How does the diary structure shape what you can say? What does daily-ness do for poetry?

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JONATHAN

I am several weeks behind but I do maintain a diary. Admittedly it’s been a largely descriptive exercise, with most of my entries detailing what I did on each particular day, but there are days where there is a particular emotion or reaction of mine that I recall. Those are often the days that provoke reflection. Part of this practice has extended into my poems, which can sometimes read diaristically, collating thoughts and feelings across images encountered over the course of a coherent period. During that trip, however, I set myself the task of writing a poem each day to capture the intensity of the experience, with the ghost and muse Lorca hovering over my shoulder. 

There are many adages about the beauty or particularity of ordinary things, which I think many people experienced strongly at the peak of the pandemic, and there are also adages about how keeping a diary is itself a form of discipline in writing. Of course, the constraints of keeping to the form of a diary are temporal – one can only write about what happened over the course of a day – and epistemological – one feels too strongly the importance of fidelity to a day’s events. These can be both advantages and disadvantages depending on what guides an act of writing. 

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KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, because the answers are always so wildly different: there’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes—poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all?

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JONATHAN

Instinctively, I feel that these axes are more entwined than not – the sensation of the body interacts with the associations of the mind and are framed by the feelings of the heart and the compulsions of the soul. If I were to speak of where my poems emerge from out of this separation, I might be more inclined to say the soul. Much of my writing erupts from the frictions and tensions I have felt within myself as well as with the perception of an absent God. Much of my work deals with my grappling with moral or ethical difficulty, which occurs most fundamentally where the soul resides. At the same time, if I were to quote the mystic Meister Eckhart, it is the ground of the soul that is private only to oneself and to God, a certain precious place from where poetry can be cultivated. That then is what provides the bones for the other sensations and preoccupations that occur across the somatic, the intellectual, and the affective in my process of writing. 

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KARAN

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received, Jonathan? Also, what would you tell other emerging poets about writing travel, about writing to the dead?

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JONATHAN

One thing I remember was a suggestion, or even plea, from an older poet to not abandon or give up on poetry. Many writers falter in their journeys just from a lack of habit, or from abandoning their craft altogether in favour of other pursuits. I have often felt that writing is a way to honour a compulsion in me that has yet to leave me. I don’t know if that entirely counts as advice, but it is something I have thought of in the nights and days where I have felt the need to draw myself to one side and work out an image, a line, or an idea. The other bit of advice that has helped has been to read widely – across traditions, contexts, and translations. Sometimes the work of another writer lends a certain permission to not write about a subject in one way or another. Sometimes something clicks in seeing how a writer has linked subject matter and form. Sometimes works in translation show how to shed certain literary baggage. 

To questions of writing travel and writing to the dead, I think that understanding one’s positionality fully is vital. Tourism is a fundamentally privileged activity underpinned by the desires for consumption, pleasure, and extraction. It is both a lifeline and a corrosion to many communities around the world. Yet it remains essential in allowing us to understand that our own lives and the ways we live them are not the only important or valid ones that exist in our vast world. In terms of writing to the dead, I would wonder what the aims of this necromancy are. The dead cannot speak, but one can speak to the dead. There is embedded therein another question of ethics in representing figures who cannot represent themselves, nor wish to. I think one has to be clear-minded about one’s intentions when writing to the dead. 

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KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt—something simple, strange, or rigorous—to help them begin a new poem?

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JONATHAN

Write a diary entry about a day in which you experienced terror. Halve the words, then break the lines. 

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KARAN

Please recommend a piece of art (a film, a song, a painting, anything other than a poem) that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could experience.

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JONATHAN

I’ve been listening to the albums Arirang by BTS and Another Dimension by T.O.P. a lot recently. I wouldn’t consider myself part of their respective fandoms, but I have admired both acts as pathbreakers for Korean artists globally. My mind has also been oriented toward my next project azalea dialogues, a collection of poems bringing together narratives of the Korean diaspora globally, away from the main diasporic centres of the United States and Japan. Out of that, I have been thinking about the impulse to reach into history, into common songs and myths that form the basis of an ethnic identity. Arirang reflects a similar interest, at least in a song like “Body to Body,” which references the songs “Hand in Hand,” the theme song of the 1988 Seoul Olympics when Korea really burst into global consciousness momentarily, and “Arirang,” a folk song that almost every Korean knows. There’s another song on the album called “Aliens” that contains a reference to Kim Gu, an icon of Korean independence and political leader of Korea’s government-in-exile, referring to the paradox of Korean culture becoming embraced beyond Korea while also being presented in English-language lyrics. Arirang is meant to signal a reinvention, or reintroduction, of a reunited BTS after years of individual projects and military conscription, synthesising recent tendencies to use English in their songs and older hip hop roots.  

By contrast, T.O.P.’s album is a reinvention of a different sort, after his return to global attention playing the character Thanos in the second season of the show Squid Game. The album represents a decisive rupture from his past as a member of the group BigBang. It is an unusually confrontational album in the context of Korea, featuring in unsparing terms T.O.P.’s harassment and targeting by the Korean media amidst charges of marijuana use nearly 10 years ago that led to his departure from the group, with it being said that he did not want to further tar his groupmates by association. This severance is cited repeatedly throughout the album, such as in the song “Studio54”, referencing his love for his experience with the group in his 20s. T.O.P.’s work also features its own literary and artistic allusions, such as its reference to Vincent Van Gogh in the song “Stendhal Syndrome”.  While Arirang has been vaunted into the Korean mainstream because of the strength of BTS’ global fandom, Another Dimension has been relegated somewhat, with its songs being barred from broadcast in the Korean Broadcasting System because of profanity and references to products. Both are interesting to me as manifestations of Korean hip hop that are informed and attentive to sounds and approaches from Korean hip hop in the last 30 years or so since its emergence, which in turn is heavily indebted to the work of Black artists and musicians from the United States. 

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KARAN

And finally, Jonathan, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, who are the poets or artists who’ve most shaped your sense of what’s possible in language?

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JONATHAN

For a long time, there were a few poets whose voices I simply could not get out of my head when I wrote – Langston Hughes, R. S. Thomas, Boey Kim Cheng, Christian Wiman, Li-Young Lee. There was a certain cadence to their lines and line breaks, a precision to their images, and a surfeit of feeling that seemed to hover over me. Min Jin Lee is a writer who opened my mind to questions of representational and cultural politics in literature, especially given that Pachinko was the first work I’d read in English about Koreans as a minority community in an Asian context. Many other writers who came after would prove formative – Lucille Clifton, Ada Limón, Wong Phui Nam, J A Baker, Nam Le. More recently, I have found myself tremendously moved by the work of Faisal Mohyuddin and Richard Siken. And of course, I cannot forget to mention Spencer.