Desmond Kon Zhicheng Mingdé - Beaded through this book, Desmond Kon’s crystals glitter instructively ‘like angels hanging onto tiaras.’ Both elegant and extravagant, they thread suspended between prose poem and multiplex narrative, a cubist’s sphere.

 

 

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, I Didn’t Know Mani Was A Conceptualist. Math Paper Press, 2014.

 “This collection of poetry by interdisciplinary artist Desmond Kon is an invitation
to ‘jump into the spray like raindance’ – between musings on philosophy, speech acts
and language play, the poet performs the role of conteur, archivist, marionette....
Kon offers eleven ways of looking at a square, a fable, and a republic. What does the world
represent for you? he asks in earnest. These prose vignettes are clever and defy categories.
They contain a wealth of references across time and cultures, its undercurrent of a
tragicomedy so irresistible that it feels like the ‘tongue tasting brown sugar’.” - Fiona Sze-Lorrain

“Here is a book few of us think a Singaporean could write! For proof, pick it up and read
almost any section/para.... and believe me, you will be astounded! Kon is a consummate artist
here, weaving strands of knowledge, wisdom, humor so porously that as readers we are left
baffled but wiser, perhaps even sadder. I don’t know how best to describe this book – perhaps
the word *fable* might well do the trick! Like the wizards of old, he weaves magic into words
seamlessly making us marvel and wonder. This is a book all educated men and women will find
thoroughly rewarding and refreshing. A damn good read!” - Kirpal Singh

“The crystalline structures of I Didn’t Know Mani Was a Conceptualist precipitate out of Eastern and Western religious and philosophical texts, out of tantra, science fiction, cinema, high art, collage and low camp, out of Singapore, China, Europe and the United States. Beaded through this book, Desmond Kon’s crystals glitter instructively ‘like angels hanging onto tiaras.’ Both elegant and extravagant, they thread suspended between prose poem and multiplex narrative, a cubist’s sphere.” - John Wilkinson

Nowadays in contemporary poetry, it's not a new story—this displacement/replacement of references to span across cultures, borders, styles, philosophies, arts, etc.  When done poorly, the result is a jumble.  When done well, the result can be elegance.  And the elegance is paradoxical given the multiplicitous references surfaced through the words.  Such is the feat achieved by I DIDN’T KNOW MANI WAS A CONCEPTUALIST by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingde.  It’s a collection that presents a poem like:

FIRST CONSCIOUSNESS

Georgia Demarais taps each wall to check for a weak spot.  A clue like Rodin first reading Dante, then Baudelaire. “Is today Wednesday or Thursday?  Where are the light switches?” Georgia is growing wary, her eye like Max Ernst’s Chinese Nightingale, its iron beak as cold to the touch. No warmth. No barrateen bedding. No food, water or electricity. Just coloured lines, and sometimes a mansard roof. Wenge door at the back, sealed shut. No windbrace or sprockets or windows although occasionally, the crackle of shrinking glass.  No turning weather. No mechanism or motif or memory. No handle to grab onto.

The poet is described as a multidisciplinary artist, which I take partly to mean the poet has empathy for or trained himself to be at home in different genres.  It’s not just about artistic genre; his bio notes he’s moved much through Australia, France, Hong Kong and Spain as a former journalist.  He received a variety of degrees—book publishing, sociology, mass communications, theology (world religions) and fine arts (creative writing)—from not just National University of Singapore but also Stanford, Harvard and University of Notre Dame. Such a training of course can affect—because anything and everything can—the poems made.  And while this disconcertingly results in one of the blurbers Kirpal Singh saying “Here is a book few of us thin a Singaporean could write!”—the fine poems coming from Zhicheng-Mingde’s pen (or keyboard) certainly illustrate the advantage of knowledge.  And also how knowledge expands imagination.  These poems benefit from such a background.

The risk in a collection like this—granted, as a “risk” it’s a mere “first world problema”—is that the poems can buckle under their own weight.  Almost halfway into the collection, I had to laugh agreeably over the (or, what I perceived as my) hidden message in

VIGNETTE 023

“I wish for a simpler life,” Resident 97 said. “Of eider duck down, and not these technical feats.” He swaddled himself in a beige towel blanket that was thin and soft like a breeze and yet provided warmth in layers.

But this may be just to say—and it’s the first time I’m saying this in a review (to do a review I usually start by reading a poetry collection from first page to last page instead of dipping around)—these poems may best be enjoyed when read individually.  They are simply so dense that reading them altogether creates an exponentially heavy effect.  Love those brownies but don’t eat 24 in one sitting (not, cough, that I’m saying I know anything about eating two dozen brownies all at once …).  For instance, take this poem:

A MYTHIC ENCRUSTING

Ought-to-live could be walking down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, dressed in chinoiserie and weighed down in Roberto Cavalli and Louis Vuitton. These could be pirated too like the Hermes Silkypop trying to look user-friendly and commonplace. Economy is like laktong and the body of water it breathes in, pure serenity, no power to ego or overcrowding. A hackneyed image best describes the Second Dakini who has achieved old-wine maturity by cruise-ship speed, 20 knots or so. Behind her Amelia-Earhart goggles is a sail plan that will ride out any wind force, the same flap and fluster one would expect of a dugong mistaken for a mermaid in the fog. The dugong wants to join the salmon in the Great Lakes. It wants to return to 1950, the days of unlisted phones that kept everything domiciliary and home-loving.

Stuff like that does not beget rapid page-turning reading.  But it does encourage breathing between poems (not a bad thing) and often contemplation that can be rewarding.

The nearly four pages worth of Notes also manifest the variety of thoughts and evocations that went through the poet’s head as he created this collection. Noted are a variety of art tendencies, artists, a variety of religions, religious peeps, koans, other poems and books, Greek mythology and literary criticism.  We see further evidence in addition to the poems’ own words of the erudite roots brought by the poet to the writing studio.

The excerpted poems may illustrate the difficulty of talking about these associative poems.  What one can say is that they could not have existed without a certain wild intelligence and earned knowledge by the author so that the process towards these poems can be admired as the results themselves. Kudos. - Eileen Tabios

 

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Singular Acts of Endearment,
Grey Sparrow Press, 2014.
excerpts

This is a story where nothing happens. Think William Gaddis minus the unattributed dialogue. Think Joyce's Ulysses when the citizen's biscuit tin gets hurled through the air. It's dramatic but the act doesn't have a purpose. It doesn't translate. After twenty years abroad, Jasmine Lee-Heschel has returned to Singapore to read literature at college. Jasmine is Jewish-Chinese. He insists on email correspondence, so she pays attention to what he's saying. Ma is a cursory presence, and Prof is an accidental father figure. Uncle Han checks in on Ah Gong, who's dying of cancer. A year to live is the doctor's prognosis. A caretaker at a plant nursery, Ah Gong is bent on building a garden for their HDB flat. To appease him, Jasmine seems tasked to take Ah gong to what small enclaves of nature still exist on the island. There's, of course, a boy. And there's the dead Nina who saw an angel. But everything stands still, like a tree in the middle of pasture. And everything, shifting in and out of perspective, attempts to dip into the eminently unreadable.
Of Robbe-Grillet, Barthes writes: "Description for Robbe-Grillet is always 'anthological' - a matter of presenting the object as if it were in itself a spectacle, permitting it to make demands on our attention without regard for its relation to the dialectic of the story". If Robbe-Grillet's novels are prolonged expositions on the objects around us with no implicit judgement, this story represents an inversion, revelling in a sort of violent catachresis. The metaphors are mixed, heaped in a huge mess. Everything seems at first to have meaning, and meaningful import. A branch, a flower, a kind of leaf, a tree. The epistolary provides the illusion of a continual epiphany, but for Jasmine , the explosive declarations or introspections lead to no real denouement, no real insight to life. At least not for her, when she starkly exposits that "nothing makes sense". Indeed, in the anticipation for death, there is little to no sense. No sense to be made of it at all. And by association, the language, its narrative and all the rest of it.

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, When Dada Rewrote Koans. Corollary Press, 2012.

We like to read dead authors because they can’t be disrespectful. We read them like posthumous prizes. “Do you like the Gospel of Judas?” Da-Ren asks the archivist. “Is it any good?” Tired of abstracting life as if life could be summarised, the archived reads from the backcover copy. “Life up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star.” He pauses for a response like a ready responsorial, the curator leaning into the cellist but still listening intently. The archivist has always felt maligned, as indicted as the world around him. “Is there any good in remorse and a new shipment of rice straw?” The archivist asks Da-Ren, with a Thomist gravity, waiting for another truism to ease the day. Da-Ren is tending to his small garden of wild herbs, dreaming of Esopus Creek. The archivist kisses him on the open plateaus of his palm, tongue tasting brown sugar.


Someone gave me this chapbook and said, “This is for you.” And it was. The interrogation of the psyche and the soma is an elongated and arduous exercise. Ditto any Zen state revised by Tristan Tzara. - Tan Lin

 

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, The Arbitrary Sign. Red Wheelbarrow Books, 2013.
excerpt
excerpt 2
 
The Arbitrary Sign is a poetry sequence that follows the shape of an alphabet; the symbols of twenty-six letters are used as title headings for the keywords of complex philosophical thoughts. If this sounds heavy, know that Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé’s poems are so rich in imagery, so neatly structured with the juxtaposition and compression of metaphors, that one can read the book with increasing pleasure without an erudite knowledge of the background.
The title The Arbitrary Sign comes from the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure, who believed there was no necessary connection between a symbol and its meaning, but while ideas behind linguistics are important here, this is really a book about encounters and connections—a labyrinth of passages of thought which, like the poems, may come to sudden or inconclusive ends. The look of the book, with its black pages between each section, lends itself perfectly to this, as does the unpunctuated, lower case form where meanings shift into ambiguity depending on how one reads each phrase. “beyond and beneath / the text,” says the author, “are its “inside and outside / all wound up together then dispersed.”
The central concept behind this sequence is Gilles Deleuze’s idea that everything is of one substance and on the same level of existence; although there are repetitions and simulacra nothing is ever identical, and with constant change reality is not a matter of being but of becoming. Underlying and underpinning this concept is the image of the rhizome. “because ginger candy is sweet / and so is the rhizome of deleuze and guattari / which reads like a big prank of a tome / or the roar of an opus of crackling laughs.” Prank or not, this is a fitting image to suggest connections, for the rhizome, like a labyrinth, is below the surface, may follow shortcuts or detours, and can shoot off in confusing and unforeseen directions.
Other images and allusions create atmosphere and enrich context. One of the strongest is the reference to Francis Bacon and his “bloodied history;” the poet devotes a section of his book to describing the “desire / to escape from one’s own body / its frame and bones and beating pulse / no less a prison than these four walls /we call home or an abode or comfort.” The philosophies of Jacques Lacan also have their part in The Arbitrary Sign, such as the idea that there is only a certain amount of pleasure a subject can bear; the poet sums this thought up in one neat image as “a limit to true enjoyment / so much you removed the chocolate / from the pudding and left / as little to enjoy as possible.”
This is a rich and fascinating poetry collection—elusive in that “no two things like utterances / are completely alike” and poignant too, because the last word is “dissipation.” We are left wondering if our lives are “a series of accidents” or if there is “something left of the vase of peonies,” something “post theory and naked,” a sense of quietude “before the tunnelling and the orbs tumble.” - Mandy Pannett

Desmond Kon is a two-time contributor to LR (his work appears in both issue 1 and issue 5), and both times that we’ve published him, Mia and I had a really hard time choosing just two of the poems he’d sent in each batch. Desmond’s work interests itself in philosophy, visual art, pop culture, and the sounds and textures of language: he is interested in dadaism and in other forms of the avant-garde, and has a unique gift for finding the music in both “high” language (such as academic jargon) and “low” forms of speech—slang, text speak, gossip column patter. The genius of his poems lies in their polyglot nature—the way that he mixes contrasting modes of speech and weaves easily in and out of a variety of languages. His pieces work because there is a delightfully haphazard quality to their approach, a lightness that plays against both the weight of the poems’ scale and subject matter and the deliberate care with which the poet has gathered, built up, and sculpted their many intricate layers of texture and pattern. Desmond, a highly prolific writer, has published multiple chapbooks (both in the US and in his home city-state of Singapore) and has a long list of journal and anthology credits to his name—and for good reason. I’ve no doubt The Arbitrary Sign—a philosophical twist on the form of the classic alphabet book—will be as delightful as the rest of his body of work.
For a sneak peek at The Arbitrary Sign, head on over to Kitaab to read six of the poems that appear in the collection. - www.lanternreview.com/blog/2014/01/24/editors-corner-books-were-looking-forward-to-in-2014-part-1/

 
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Sanctus Sanctus Dirgha Sanctus. Red Wheelbarrow Books, 
 

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé 

Last month, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé won The Missing Slate’s inaugural Poetry World Cup, receiving 1295 votes in a tense final against Pakistan’s Mehvash Amin. Our Poet of the Month interview series continues with Desmond talking to the magazine’s Literary Editor Jacob Silkstone about the connection between working on the page and working in clay, the political power of poetry, and the importance of humour as ‘an empowering force’.
As an interdisciplinary artist, is there a strong connection between your work on the page and your work in clay? Chronologically, which came first? 
Illustration and writing in the early years. Graphic design when it became lucrative as paid work. Ceramics came later, but happened fast and furious because the earthiness of the practice unleashed a very different side of my creative self. I do think there’s a lot of shape-shifting when the different practices dialogue with each other. And that happens a lot. The different disciplines inform one another in ways that have become almost second nature to me.
I’m usually not even conscious of the moment when it happens. Sometimes, the moment is sudden and abrupt enough for me to recognise the transition, like when I have to forcibly get off the wheel to pull a pen out of my pocket to write an idea down on whatever paper I can find. Or when I halt my design work, when some motif in it becomes something I want to write into a character’s life in a manuscript I’m working on.
In an interview with The Urban Wire, you’ve asked ‘how may a line in a poem animate itself into sculptured form?’ Can that process work both ways? If a poem can become a pot, can a pot become a poem (or, has one of your pots ever been the catalyst for writing a poem, the way those lines from Manley Hopkins were the catalyst for sculpting a pot)?
Yes, the process definitely works both ways. In the last chapter of my new book, ‘I Didn’t Know Mani Was A Conceptualist’, there are allusions to clay and its workability. Here is one instalment from the sequence:

 A Sonorous Altruism
“If you can’t find my hairdryer,” the Second Dakini says, “there’s the Bradley in the restroom.” The Bradley can be meaningfully worked into the Third Dakini’s slab of brick clay, now tightly wrapped in plastic to help keep in the moisture. “Clay reconstitutes itself,” the Second Dakini seems insistent on making such gendered statements, as the Bradley tosses its lustre, and takes in rust like a new leavening. “Clay is an involuntary displacement too,” the First Dakini radiates like a crystalline rock. “Clay will give you five handles and rhetorical instruction like cup-and-saucer landforms.” But the Third Dakini has escaped through the coupled roof, into the incumbent on a slant, the cant of the naysayers just as conceptual, just as au courant a sound. On the far right, that temple in Thailand is gaining excellent karma, its million green bottles hanging on the wall, and if one should accidentally fall, the Indian Ocean would churn, heliodor again.

I guess we’re talking about ekphrastic work here, when one artform inspires the creation of another. I find a lot more intersection between visual arts and literature. Sculpting, at least for me, holds a very special place. It also requires a great deal of time, something that doesn’t always avail itself to me. I’m actually working on a very exciting ekphrastic project right now. I’m editing and managing the “Eye/Feel/Write” special program at this year’s Singapore Writers Festival. Commissioned by the National Arts Council, the program has invited ten writers — these include Robin Hemley, Joshua Ip, Isa Kamari, Alvin Pang, Tan Chee Lay, Jollin Tan, Edwin Thumboo, Ramanathan Vairavan, Yeow Kai Chai, and Ovidia Yu — to write ekphrastic responses to ten artworks exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum’s “Medium At Large” exhibition.
Several of the writers have given me such beautiful insights into their creative process, that I feel compelled to share them here. Yeow Kai Chai decided to work on Ho Tzu Nyen’s audio and visual installation, “The Cloud of Unknowing”, which represented Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Of his response poems, Yeow Kai Chai had this to say: “In these three inter-linked poems, I’d like to explore the fluidity and transience of one’s identity; how porous the wall between reality and art is, and the ease with which all of us flit between personas in our everyday lives. Characters disappear and re-emerge, and words echo and ricochet. We make things, and ourselves, up along the way. In my fanciful mind, ‘The Imposters Triptych’ is an update of those classical altarpieces: propped up as a foldable contraption, with each panel echoing one another, and forming a larger picture — but of what?”
Joshua Ip was tasked with interpreting “BluRay_B” by Osang Gwon from South Korea. Joshua has also written about his experience. Here it is: “In direct response to the artist’s cheeky modern take on a classic form, I decided to employ the most traditional and dignified of Southeast-Asian literary forms, the liwuli. An 800-year-old poetic form derived from Southeast-Asian literary and rhetorical traditions, the epic beauty of the liwuli has only recently been rediscovered. I also constrained myself in thrice attempting the more difficult variation of the form, where a liwuli and its inversion, an iluwil, are juxtaposed to form a liwuliiluwil.”
I’m interested in exploring the rather anarchic humour that seems to be present in a lot of your writing. Even in the title of the poems we published recently, ‘…Wittgenstein’s whoopee cushion‘, there’s a fine balance between heaviness and lightness. I’m wondering whether humour can actually perform a very serious function: the necessary function of standing up to power… 
I’ve never been asked this question about my work, and I like how I’m needing to think through this properly even as I’m writing to you.

Humour can be a very empowering force… bringing into relief what power might attempt to conceal

I have an awkward sense of myself in relation to humour. For one, I’m terribly uncomfortable with public humiliation, probably because my adolescence is marked — and scarred — by various occasions of traumatising embarrassments. I was very out of place, for years actually, and only started becoming a lot more comfortable with my self, whatever that means, in my mid-30s. That’s a really late acceptance, and a bit dismal and pathetic. To add, the way I sort of found a kind of cavern to house my personality was to crouch under the big, unwieldy cloak of postmodernism. To say one accepts oneself as a postmodernist is terribly ironic, which only underscores the point.
I remember discovering Wayne C. Booth’s ‘A Rhetoric of Irony’ in 2005 or 2006, all while the very notion of irony seemed ready to be jettisoned out of fashion’s window post-9/11. It was as if the new millennium was starting with the strange quandary of denying what seemed undeniable. Up till that point, I’d always viewed irony as one of the most sophisticated kinds of literary genius, the way Anne Hathaway’s Austen defends its use in the film Becoming Jane. But there’s that scene when Ian Richardson’s Lord Chief Judge character tries to demystify her understanding of its virtues. Of the dark nature of the ironic, a sort of bared-fangs-behind-wide-smile moment. That made me rethink irony completely.
Even as I’m writing this out, processing your question, I’m intentionally deciding against using the crutch of others’ words, and being as plainspeaking as possible about my relationship with humour and comedy. Channelling this kind of bare-bones narrative is the closest thing to confessionalist writing I’ll ever come to. I feel sort of lightheaded — not entirely because of the bottle of red on the table — like Hafiz, whose poem about laughing with God made me smile all those years ago. There was a softness yet levity to his lines. I’m usually so happy burying my emotion — difficult and evasive, most of the time — in metaphor because allusion and the crafting of it seems to help most in my confrontation with my own person and issues.
In your question, there’s the more important matter of the public function of humour. Yes, humour can be a very empowering force in bringing into relief what power might attempt to conceal or sweep under the carpet of nonchalance.
There’s a passage in ‘Rabelais and his world’ where Bakhtin writes that ‘Medieval laughter, when it triumphed over the fear inspired by the mystery of the world and by power, boldly unveiled the truth about both… This laughing truth… degraded power.’ I’ve never heard of an authoritarian regime with a sense of humour (or a sense of irony). Do you think humour is a necessary tool for a writer seeking to resist ‘the fear inspired by power’?
I don’t know if it’s a necessary tool but yes, it certainly is a serious one. Power has an insidious way of co-opting people into doing more readily what they might have thought twice about doing. The power that skirts and snakes around, within institutions, is even more invisible, more pervasive, and terrifyingly so. The image of the Panopticon, and the self-surveillance it engenders, is a classic one. Its stronghold lies in the way the strings remain unfelt by both puppet and puppeteer.
A lover of Foucault, I’m aware of the added dimension of how power has shaped whole epistemes of knowledge — and its civilising methods and functions. It’s the history of how power exacts its influence on what becomes epistemology. While it’s seductive to be judgmental of its process, it’s also fine to witness its legacy, its cold work through the passage of time. The arbitrariness of what kinds of values or knowledge become dominant discourse is what intrigues me.
I think where humour comes in is when it’s adopted as a way of coping. A coping mechanism. A language that allows a vocalising of what’s become obvious and apparent sans danger to the man or woman of letters. It is also an intensely humane practice in the way it also invites an open or reciprocal response — one that can be serious or funny or ironic, with its relevance to political reality up for grabs and interpretation. Humour has often been most effective in the most repressive and oppressive of regimes. It allows people their catharsis, in the face of hopelessness. This double function is very elegant, very charming. Coupled with the work of the symbolic and the metaphorical, the function becomes many-handed and a very beautiful trope in the making of literature.
The triumph over fear may be momentary and illusory but it’s an escape nonetheless. If the laughing truth does succeed in degrading power, and equalising relations, all power to the rhetorical device. How far the message goes towards real and good change is a whole other matter altogether. That said, I’m about as anarchic as a rabbit in a magician’s hat. I know that doesn’t say very much about or for me. But the world has been brutal and cruel enough. And then some. At least for me.
I think one follow-up to that would be to ask ‘how far does poetry go towards real and good change?’ Anthony Burgess once wrote, reviewing a novel (‘A Maggot’) by John Fowles, that all literature should serve ‘the forces of subversion.’ Having discussed the public function of humour, what about the public function of poetry? 
I get nervous and tentative being caught up in politics, especially when it falls on my lap without my choice in the matter. I like things to be absolutely consensual, like good sex. I shared this sentiment with someone once, and he gave me such wise words of advice. He said that the problem is often how politics comes knocking on your front porch anyway. He was trying to tell me how we must learn to deal with politics because it’ll come when we’re almost always not looking. Not to run from it, that was his point. He was a learned man, so I’ve taken his wisdom to heart.

I like poetry best when its meaning is at its most fluid

I fully understand Orwell’s statement that even an apolitical attitude is a political one. There’s no escaping an utterance possessing some kind of political stance, even beyond intentionality. This inevitability also helps one muster some measure of courage. I think language can be naturally “subversive” in how it evolves, how it’s constantly negotiating its own use, its own acceptability, its own form and vocabulary and grammar and syntax. Its being is not static, and morphs as if struggling against an established structure, or a kind of lazy contentment with that structure. Language is wonderfully organic. The perceived order is actually only a respite from a larger architecture of unpredictable change, transformations that go beyond even the language community’s awareness or intention.
Because I like poetry best when its meaning is at its most fluid — in my dreams, it goes beyond even Derridean ideas of eternal slippage (an infolding-pluralising cornucopia of meaning as opposed to meaninglessness) — I think poetry is possibly terribly equipped to become an effective instrument of politicking. How can one propagandise something with a language that pushes against the literalist imagination? Of course, there are poetic manifestoes which are wonderful to read. Even those, however, seem to attend more to the beauty of their expression than said matters of contention.
We’re really asking Dana Gioia’s question of whether poetry can matter, aren’t we? Now that the art of poetry only belongs to a subculture, a pale presence within America’s artistic and intellectual life. Then there’s Auden, who boldly claimed that poetry makes nothing happen. The exact lines are: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives… / A way of happening, a mouth.” Actually, I think the work of poetry lies in exactly that — the precise phenomenon that is “a way of happening”, the utterance — for sometimes, the voice is enough, in and of itself. No need to calculate its mileage, or how far our words can take us, to purchase themselves something beyond their own presence and being. It should be enough to exist, not to exist towards some specific ideal or goal or objective or destiny or end.
Despite that tentativeness when it comes to ‘being caught up in politics’, there’s a certain sense of subversion implicit in the form of your work: for example, the prose poem that won our Poetry World Cup stood out partly because it was so different from the other poems — it looked so different on the page. Do you ever begin writing a poem with any deliberate sense of being subversive?
Perhaps my subversion as a poet lies in the questions I level at trendy or accepted or celebrated poetries. I actually don’t think I do enough of that inquiry. Every time I think I’m pushing against the limits of language, I realise it’s not very new after all. I love adopting experimentation, and work in hybridity and transformation. Like the World Cup poem, ‘I Didn’t Know Mani Was A Conceptualist’ (published by the awesome Math Paper Press), comprises four chapters of similar forms. One of the aesthetic questions I was investigating was the fine line between the prose poem and microfiction. The lyric quality elevates and drops when one moves through the different sequences. I like the way Robert Pinsky puts it in his essay ‘The Pursuit of Form’ — that “the poetic line is a means of performing energy and balance in writing”.
I conceptualised the four chapters as suites of poetic narratives, so there is a lovely coherence when they’re read in sequence. That said, each piece can stand on its own, like a koan or fable or parable. Just like how one may enter a poem at a random image or line or sound or metaphor, I like the idea of readers being able to enter the book at any point, and still come away with something.
I have another poetry collection to be launched at the Singapore Writers Festival in November. It’s titled ‘Sanctus Sanctus Dirgha Sanctus’, and it comprises sestinas stripped down into monostiches. I’ve always admired the sestina for its structural complexity. It’s an extremely difficult form. Cate Marvin first introduced me to the sestina, and I fell in love with it completely. It’s a ridiculous challenge to cycle the word permutations, and keep the poem from derailing altogether. Or becoming totally contrived and efforted. I felt that dismantling the 39 lines into their constituent units allowed the page to breathe, something that just doesn’t happen in a whole sestina. It allows the ineffable to enter, to creep into the space of the poem, and thereby achieve a different kind of reading. This book will be published by Red Wheelbarrow Books, which also put out my other poetry book, ‘The Arbitrary Sign’.
Talking of ‘The Arbitrary Sign’, can you sympathise with a kind of Dadaist quest for arbitrariness/meaninglessness? Does poetry suffer when it’s tied too heavily to theory?
In the Mani collection, there’s a chapter titled “When Dada Rewrote Koans”. It’s the first chapter. It opens the book. At the centre of this suite stands Da-Ren, which translates from Chinese as “Great Man”. A significant motif in traditional Chinese thought, Da-Ren is first found as a term in the Yijing under the first “Heaven” or qian hexagram. It is later found once in the Analects, characterised as a sage in the Mencius and as a state ruler in the Zhuangzi. Chinese poet Ruan Ji’s protagonist in Daren Xiansheng Zhuan is hardly ascetic. He lives a wandering existence as a counter-narrative to the harsher realities within society.
And theory? I absolutely love it. I love isms. They can sometimes seem so artificial and false, mere constructions to create familial resemblances for what are essentially other constructs. Yet, I love them. Does poetry suffer when it’s tied too heavily to theory? What may be lost is an easy read, the poem’s accessibility. That may or may not be a real loss.
In the Mani book, the individual chapters seemed to write themselves out. They had an internal logic of their own, despite their theoretical underpinning or apparatus. In fact, I felt the theory helped push the aesthetic into what it finally settled into. Because I love compression and tropic density, dipping into the work can seem like wading through a mud swamp or slowly sinking in quicksand.
Again, I take a leaf from Pinsky, who does not shy away from difficult and complex writing. When asked whether there’s still room in poetry for discursive poems, Pinsky had this to say: “The verb ‘to essay,’ to try, to vocalize one’s way along a sort of heuristic journey into things . . . I like the essayistic element, an element that finds the scope of lyric poetry limitless, completely wide, as embracing (and as vulnerable) as the human voice. There is room in poetry for absolutely everything, I think.” - themissingslate.com/2014/08/06/poet-of-the-month-desmond-kon-zhicheng-mingde/

On Meeting Gertrude Stein With Local Wordsmith Desmond Kon

Philosopher, hermit, journalist, historian, poet: Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

Desmond Kon: Of Pots And Poets

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé : Mining the Limits of Literary Experience

Based in Singapore, Squircle Line Press founding editor and publisher Desmond Kon  Zhicheng-Mingdé is the author of two poetry collections, I Didn’t Know Mani Was A Conceptualist (Math Paper Press) and The Arbitrary Sign (Red Wheelbarrow Books).  He has edited more than ten books and co-produced three audio books. A former journalist with the entertainment weekly, 8 Days, his travelshave taken him to Australia, Spain, France and Hong Kong, where his features on such notables as Donna Karan, Jackie Chan and Morgan Freeman culminated in authorship of the limited edition, The Top Ten TCS Stars (Caldecott Publishing).

He is the recipient of numerous honors, awards and prizes in the literary arts with his poetry and fiction appearing in nine chapbooks, various anthologies, and over 200 literary journals.  As an interdisciplinary artist, Desmond also works in clay.  Through his Potter Poetics Collection, he has designed and sculpted  commemorative pieces for Albert Camus' 50th Anniversary, the Dalai Lama’s 50th Year of Exile, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 120th Anniversary, Jack Kerouac's 40th Anniversary, Thomas Merton’s 40th Anniversary, Edgar Allan Poe’s Bicentennial, Simone Weil's Birth Centennial, Cave Canem’s 10 Years of Service to African American Poets, and numerous other events. His stunning ceramic works are housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

“I am naked as a bowl on a rock. Its rings ring clean in my ear.”
(From “Scholem in Forty Winged Hours”, Terrain, 2011)

Sculpted for the closing event at the Singapore Writers Festival		“Jonas” Commemorating Albert Camus’ 50th Anniversary

a haiku is an escher echo one postmodernist left, right, left to take warm baths shandy, flute, fused glass against butter knife body of sintered clay, whey grey, hail, storm, the stir one palm warbler perched angel, yellow feather like a salve, requiem (Poem Pigeon, 2013)

Trained in Professional (Book) Publishing at Stanford University, Desmond studied Sociology and Mass Communication at the National University of Singapore, and later received his Master of Theological Studies (World Religions) from Harvard University and Master of Fine Arts (Creative Writing) from the University of Notre Dame.  He is the recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant, awarded at the launch of the First Prague International Poetry Festival for his anthology For the Love of God, which brought together 35 award-winning religious and literary contributors worldwide.  The gilt-edged anthology enjoyed a limited edition 1,000 print-run of one hardcover and four softcover designs.

For the Love of God:  A Creative Anthology

Desmond divides his time between his art and teaching creative writing. He has received four teaching awards, as well as the Hiew Siew Nam Distinguished Academic Award.  

Kon’s writings are rich collages, wildly lyrical, sensual Alice-in-Wonderland landscapes of infinite explorations; they leap over boundaries, weaving in and out with the effortless ease of a mind that is endlessly inventive, pulling the reader along with him, possibly a bit bewildered, but delighted by the exploding stimuli. Uncharacteristically, Desmond makes a case for this style in his poem, “Ars Poetica: Today”:

 

“…We were never made to be machines, forcing movement into limbs to work out signs like a formula. We are cells and vessels but we don’t have to follow them. Will you follow me? Will you follow me into eternal wonder of no beginnings, and thus no endings? That will help me survive; it will help me live. It will help me write poetry as if tomorrow I forgot I ever wrote. That is how I want to remember this, this precious machination of moments that gears itself for no cabal. That is my secret. My secrecy was to write without condition, without limits, as if punctuation could free itself into fields and how one would mind. If only my inhibitions allowed such inhibition, I say to Deleuze, as his fingers spider my spine.”

When readers enter Desmond’s poems, they may not be prepared for what lies ahead, but it’s a thrilling ride. Hybrid meanings and vistas unfold, and readers are swept away by rapidly moving images and a powerful lyric:

teasdale’s blue squills behind a gogyohka like a layaway an hour, commentaries planted from without within her window boxes duchess decorative – the fleur de lis, fierce face she longs to touch of praxis – the precentor from without the wheedling sudden rapid beats his heart entreating touchstone of the same more poster parchments carding a quaint sound

His poems may not always translate for readers who tend to interpret text literally because his work is multidimensional.  His ability to take disparate subjects—elements of literature, pop culture, religion, science and history—and create seamless images is fascinating. In a previous interview, Desmond says of his own work:
“Any effort to pigeon-hole my poetics always makes me shift uncomfortably in my seat. My work in the last five years has been a response to the America I witnessed in my time there. Call it a social commentary, satirical, a parody, a bit of tongue-in-cheek, a lyric ode or a ballad. An eclogue epic of diamonds and contusions, arsis after thesis after anti-thesis after indices rubbing up against appendices. Oil-rigging the collective unconscious at war with the noosphere. Call it a postmodern verse fable, culture shock, then catharsis, perhaps narrative therapy, maybe a third-party observation. A channelling of the muse. Senseless drivel. Even journalism. A leaf off every conceivable canon. A ring-necked dove perched on an obelisk. I’m quite fine with any label, randomly slapped on or otherwise.”

Mr. Kon obviously has a deep affinity for symbols and metaphors but finds outrageous and unique ways to use them.  He loves poetic experimentation and harnessing the energy that lies in the liminal. His phrases free themselves of preconceived images and tropes, releasing their own stream of colors:

illuminism is a fleck of tanka this rathayãtrã a stork lifts her blade leg within a clearing throat a wan ballad to the babies beside it scheherazade is asleep her fugal carriage moving left towards the crests an event, a heritage aria crowning our histories, unlinked burling this, our spare way of never minding the way writers repossess old metaphors, wherewithal

His disparate subjects are handled with a variety of treatments that ultimately lead to a purely original aesthetic. In the fabric of his complex and textually dense work, the visual and aural elements propel meaning and further exploration:

ben trovato :: if it is not true, it is well found

Is it you who’s talking? Is it you who’s made the medicine woman angry, deranged almost? She has thrown the women into a hysteria that alternates between mania and a deepening sadness. One of them has mentioned killing herself, which doesn’t seem right. She’s convinced herself that it’s morally reprehensible but her sadness is a cavern, an abyss that will drives her to the ends. Of the yonder, black as onyx, its stony silence that will kill her over and over again with its deafening solidity. It’s very different there than the white that surrounds us now. Even this place – this ethereal notion and premise, if the words even approximate what this is – is not something we can grasp or convey in language. The white seems alive, sometimes tranquil and still, a homogeneous blanket of liquid that rises like a tent into an endless sky. There is no sky, there is no canopy to speak of. Only vastness. Sometimes, there is a walkway, or a tunnel, as if a road needed to be paved to make things more sensible for those who arrive. Many who arrive feel the whiteness, the expansive light, its million bulbs of fluorescence capable of evoking pure joy. Or terror, the paralysing fear that makes us look on them, and allow them to return to the world of the living. They do not know that it is we who inhabit a world worth living in. This whiteness is not just an environment or atmosphere. It is not a cloud. It is animate too, and like us, it takes on many forms. It moves among us. It feels, it reaches out to connect with us, it stops in its tracks, it walks in big strides, sometimes heavy steps, sometimes light, sometimes as if it’s floating into our space. It’s like the breath beneath our noses. But it hasn’t spoken for as long as we can remember, and for that, it seems there’s a need to grieve.

All writers know the process of writing is organic; they may start with one primal idea before the writing begins to grow of its own volition, shaping and reshaping their ideas. In Desmond’s work this is even more evident: the strong intertextuality naturally allows for ideas to speak, shout and wave to each other. While his pieces can be read as separate entities, often a connecting narrative weaves them together. “My strongest poems keep their own secrets, and keep them from me,” he says of his work.

Readers are invited to check out some of Kon’s new work below to discover those secrets for themselves:

arriere pensee :: ulterior motive or mental reservation

“The rich have no place here,” the medicine woman says, glancing at their two boxy suitcases, and heap of book boxes. She has turned to her left to take a used register out of a drawer. This is a document of who has visited this commune, and Gigi and her lover are to add their names to the list. There is no visa, no stamping in your passport to acknowledge one’s arrival and departure. You might as well have disappeared, no toll booth or border guards. The rest of us are standing by, helpless. The feeling is a different kind of ennui, and it feels different in every different place we go to. “This is a world of equals. If you live with us, you’ll learn how we live by certain rules. They are simple rules. Made to hold us together, to keep the peace. People come and go all the time. We’d like you to stay, and help us build our commune. But you are free to go as you please, if you choose to do so. As and when you like.” Except for the fact that there is no chartered bus with a route into this village, Gigi’s lover almost says out loud, but he restrains himself. “We’ll love it here,” he says, in the friendliest manner, and the medicine woman smiles back in return. In the register is a fresh page on which we write our names. There’s no need for a signature, only our full names, to be neatly handwritten. “In print, eh?” Her lover says, thinking it a safe enough comment. The thinly veiled sarcasm is not understood by the locals. Gigi thinks it’s a jerk thing to do, and notices the torn pages from the front of the register. It’s one of those ruled books you see at the provision shop. The lines smudge under sweaty palms. The cardboard cover has an abstract pattern. It comes in safe colors. Blue. Green. Brown. And the pattern looks like a bottle of ink has been spilled over the cover. It also looks like a flock of bats emerging from a deep cave.

rara avis :: a rare bird on this earth

The woman who saw the angel has a special place in this congregation. She still sits with everyone else, but someone invariably rises, to let her have his seat. The woman has a gift, it’s a rare gift, and everyone wishes they had it. The stories are various, the truth of her account now blurred, in as many shades as the times it’s been retold. The angel is said to have appeared by the back wall, its arms by its side. “It had arms?” Geronimo asked the woman standing to his right, cocking his head as if genuinely interested. “Its mouth was open,” the woman added, “as if it had something to tell us. But no sound came out. It had an aura of light around it. This aura grew slighter around its hips, and I saw that it had no knees or legs.” By now, Geronimo was looking straight ahead, at the altar. The medicine woman was behind it, her eyes closed. The front wall had a sideboard, and arranged on it were numerous religious artefacts. “Looks like Freud’s room,” Geronimo whispered to Gigi once. “It’s syncretic here, eh? I’ve seen this elsewhere as well. It seems efficient, this all-embracing gesture, but I don’t think that’s the intent behind it. I don’t know if they’re aware of the conflation, not that it’s off the mark or anything, everything being symbolic anyway.” To Geronimo, the sighting or visitation was also symbolic. Rather, the way the story had run in all directions. It was symbolic of a need for this community – not commune, as everyone likes it – to have something material to hold onto. Something like their land back. The farms, the rice in them. And a real hope. Their children having real schools, with real classrooms. Chalkboards. Textbooks. Actual teachers. Never mind an ideological worldview, this community needed the simple mundane, their heads so lost to the transcendental and otherworldly, they needed anchors tied to their feet to bring them back to reality.

q is for quietude because there is meaningful import in the language that unsays itself like derrida’s idea of how the post works that it might hiccup and burp and really all that’s at work is a series of accidents if only to correct itself upon arrival to say a straight hello then a fond goodbye as if to invoke dylan and whitman asking his spirit to become an enfolder of light before the tunneling and the orbs tumble in

Regarding his numerous and varied literary pursuits, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé remains in discovery mode, always in search of newer forms to venture into.- www.pirenesfountain.com/archives/issue_14/showcase/kon.html

"Excerpts from Inland Island" menageriemagazine.com/malgre-lui-in-spite-of/
"Three Poems" www.glintliteraryjournal.com
"Eunoia Eye to Eye: A MoMa Sestina" www.cutbankonline.org/magazine/magazine/
 "Button Under the Couch at 20 Maresfield Gardens"www.smartishpace.com/issues/
"The Object of White Noise: The Oak Park Sestina" www.georgetowncollege.edu/georgetownreview/
"A Month of Poems" tupelopress.wordpress.com/3030-project/
"Fourteen Hours Before Exile" booksactually.bigcartel.com/product/twenty-four-flavours-century-egg
Poems of Desmond Kon Zhicheng Mingdé at Poem Hunter

Five Prose Poems

Poems at Ditch

Other Books:
Dress Shoes and Lemon Soap (lu lu publishing, 2013),  
Gorgonzola Cheese Sandwich (lu lu publishing, 2013),  
Whitman's Secret Staircase at Howth (lu lu publishing, 2013),  
Boat at Sandymount Strand (lu lu publishing, 2012),  
Ormolu Chandelier and Walking Stick (lu lu publishing, 2012),  
The Citizen's Biscuit Tin (lu lu publishing, 2012) 

Chapbooks:

500 Favourite Words (Naissance, 2011),  

Changeling in the Boustrophedon’s Outfield (Right Hand Pointing, 2011), 

Dear Physical Environment (Naissance, 2011),  

In Memoriam to a Marionette: Caudate Sonnet of the Year Ad Interim (Silkworms Ink, 2011), 

Let Dinggedicht Speak (Silkworms Ink, 2011),  

This Is Visual Poetry (Naissance, 2011),  

To Whose Mandolin It May Concern (Naissance, 2011),

Living Room Aphorisms: The Only Story Arc in Santa Monica (lu lu publishing, 2007)  

 

d² is for determinacy
insomuch that frege instructed kangarewe
to cut up the pine planks in perfect shapes
angular but with sharp and distinct boundaries
like how we define the world we live in
and chart its topography the way we hike
through shenandoah national park then
drive back taking the blue ridge parkway
where a cherokee miner invites us over
to old tanasi where there is nothing at all
but memory making its trail to chota
where a cyclist points in the direction of
old copper road and says follow the fennec fox
before the first mile and you’ll be able to
determine for yourself the truth of things
and what simple elements need to be added
into the big mix to muster completeness
a definition neither inexact nor vague

e is for electric eel
inasmuch as its nest is no more than
its own saliva as if a dribble of thought
was expected of it like kangarewe’s drivel
about barthes’ exegesis of brecht
his epic theatre snaking through berlin
like the eel and its four hundred volts
like a cry of indignation from its abdomen
just as brecht wrote der jasager first as if
to say he said yes made him a logothete
but there was der neinsager where no
means no as if hating the ache of
affirmation when the dingo howls at
the moon the way the grey wolf does
and says we’re not all wild dogs
and we’re angry at the label and culling
and the tragedy lies in all misnomers

ignotum per ignotius :: the unknown by the means of the more unknown

Gossip. Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf had to live with her good measure of gossip during her lifetime. It must have sickened her, made her ill enough to stay indoors where the sun wouldn’t get her. The book on Austen is becoming less like its title, “A Truth Universally Acknowledged”. Readers are charmed by the recurring themes in the novels, and readily submit to their elements, looking out for the moments that rear themselves as if not to delay gratification any longer. This seems like a surface reading, Gigi thinks to herself. She returns to the matter of gossip. “But the gossip says of Jane Austen that she was perpendicular, precise, and taciturn—‘a poker of whom everybody is afraid.’ Of this too there are traces; she could be merciless enough; she is one of the most consistent satirists in the whole of literature.” Gigi brings her mirror up to her face, with both hands, as if to ask it a question. Is she aging appropriately? Do the smile lines and bags under her eyes add more years to her age? If the neighbours talk of Gigi and her lover, what do they say in their dialects, and is the gossip accurate, more importantly, complimentary? “Life is its own satire,” Gigi says out loud, to no one beside her. She angles the mirror to catch a glimpse of the hair on the side of her head, and in it is reflected a picture of her in Sommerville. She is seated facing a busy street, and behind her is a baseball game. The park has high fences, and they are painted a metallic red.

 

 

first falling, to get here, ferric by foot

"To the impeccable poet,
to the perfect magician of French Letters,
to the very dear
and very venerated master and friend."
~ Baudelaire to Gautier

between iron roads, the valley shoulder plummeting, red gullies
somewhere subterranean; she is hair falling straight, a fast tear;
such a thoroughfare, open albeit behind us, bullet-proof shields
and windows; his square teat perfectly spaced, boccioni's brawn

the szolnok mural painters hate the minimalism, the tunneling
the regression into everybody can, that every frivolous red can;
for us, thick nuances as mascara run that rends red foundations
a breast-beating, yawning routine too but also red-set preludes

can a farmer be mere auteur, a redder process, of roomy view?
unfinished business is that four-leaved clover framing, crushing
charlotte reds; the rest trimmed, many equal petals yanked, soft
from high boughs but that's just us and wildness; of red like her

rimbaud rolled on his side, all elbowed and hipped; once trophy
now slice of a pillar, a bit of toast; but no, no victory madness
nervous sweetness a mood, overtone song for another wanderer;
the sublime embeds such a red, a street wall; a steady clearance

like the selling; we're collecting our tears, red magnolia now run
through the grind, through that mill, a flattened fictive between;
there we go again, dabbling in dreamscapes, raffish and animist
red opiate showing, pink trilling down her fingers, bleary edges

a vent unbolts; the collie phoenix looks away, embarrassed too
as if ashamed also; such chalkydri have no eyes, one wing bare
pink of its blouse buttoned down; and unshod, open hearts too;
the big pearls won't be painted in, calla lilies pointless in a bleed

make this stationary; but it is already weighed, moresca motion
four cruel columns twisting into beams and arches; an epigraph
lush, square entrée in single moves, last resort; her french tears
an old rending, red wailing still wailing, today an altered chord

 

Personal Favorites, Favorite Books:

“Zen and Comparative Studies” by Masao Abe; “Rooms Are Never Finished” by Agha Shahid Ali; “Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948-1994” by Yehuda Amichai; “Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love” by Suzanne Barnard & Bruce Fink (Eds.); “The Neutral” by Roland Barthes; "Library: An Unquiet History" by Matthew Battles; "Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews With Hunter S. Thompson" by Anita Thompson (Ed.); “Girly Man” by Charles Bernstein; "Romaji Diary and Sad Toys" by Takuboku Ishikawa; "The Country is Yours: Contemporary Nepali Literature" by Manjushree Thapa (Trans.); "How the Two Ivans Quarrelled" by Nikolai Gogol; "Steppenwolf" by Hermann Hesse; "The Infinite Conversation" by Maurice Blanchot; “Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory” by Sanford Budick & Wolfgang Iser (Eds.); “Interrupting Derrida” by Geoffrey Bennington; “History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn” by Elizabeth A. Clark; "The Utopian Function of Art and Literature" by Ernst Bloch; “A Faithful Existence” by Forrest Gander; "Metaphysics and Transcendence" by Arthur Gibson; “Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History” by Amy Hollywood; “T. S. Eliot’s Civilized Savage” by Laurie J. MacDiarmid; "Monsieur Pain" by Roberto Bolano; "Vacation of a Lifetime" by Andrea Brady; “The Erotic Phenomenon” by Jean-Luc Marion; “New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories” by Adalaide Morris & Thomas Swiss (Eds.); "Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time" by Gary S. Morson; “Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge” by Harryette Mullen; "A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area" by Sarah Rosenthal (Ed.); "Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir" by Anatole Broyard; "Letters to Milena" by Franz Kafka; “Poems Retrieved” by Frank O’Hara; "Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship" by Michael Pakaluk (Ed.); “Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary” by Marjorie Perloff; “Foucault, Christianity and Interfaith Dialogue” by Henrique Pinto; “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism” by Gershom Scholem; “Far Side of the Earth” by Tom Sleigh; "The Good Soul of Szechaun" by Bertolt Brecht; "Socrates and Aristophanes" by Leo Strauss; "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman; “On the Shore of Nothingness: A Study in Cognitive Poetics” by Reuven Tsur