Last night, the curtain fell on a spectacular show titled Poets Among the Stars. Poets Among the Stars is a Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) satellite event, and is the 11th one at that. There were no curtains around though, for we performed under the massive Omni Theatre dome. It is not a stretch to say the event was a performance, not a reading. The National Arts Council (NAC) commissioned 8 local writers to pen poems set to the Omni Theatre’s planetarium display. We were to be disembodied voices floating in the dark, lending our poetry to a medley of light and music. For the NAC, this is the first time they are collaborating with the Singapore Science Centre for an event of this kind. Collaboration is a recent buzzword in creative circles, implying synergy, hybridity and shared burdens. Some collaborations implode while others explode in hitherto uncharted directions. What the 8 of us participated in last night represented an earnest, if tentative, melding of science and art. Singapore society tends to box reality into discrete categories, and I for one am pleased that this SWF event brought us out of the box. Being out of the box also meant stepping out of comfort zones. Some, having come from a fiction-writing background, were not confident of penning poetry. Others, like me, have always written for the page, not the stage. Sure I have done readings on stage before, but I have always done so on my own terms: I speed up when I want to, I read according to line breaks and punctuation marks, my lines orbit round my tongue like Saturn’s asteroid rings. Yet with Poets Among the Stars, I could not read willy-nilly anymore. There were no mad flailing hand gestures or facial expressions to deflect a badly read line; my voice was all the audience got to understand what they were seeing in the dome. I had to read according to the music and visuals: my voice had to be a comet they could catch. With their ears. Bearing in mind such considerations, I therefore decided to write a series of 5 tankas) a tanka is a short pithy poem similar to a haiku). Each tanka corresponded to a planetarium visual of my choice. For instance, this tanka: When a galaxy smashes into another and no one sees it, do the stars still hold our dreams, readable in the ether? was read to 2 galaxies colliding as one in the dome. Another tanka bordered on toilet humour in a black hole:
If waiting for you is like crossing the event horizon, I would rather pick another stall than search for signs of flushing. My editor said outer space was the last place he’d expect to hear flushing. By NAC’s grace I learnt that reading poems to a crowd is not merely a matter of putting on a “poet voice”. Doing so puts people off, especially to those new to literary events. Already poetry has fairly cavernous shoes to fill compared to prose in terms of reader accessibility; there is no need to make the barriers to entry higher with a put-on persona. I must understand my material, breathe nuance and cadence into its lines, so my words can glow radiant like a moon from the borrowed light of sight and sound in the audience’s inner mind. My reading wasn’t excellent, but like my writing there is still much to learn, plenty to try. For more on the creative process behind my commission piece, visit Kitaab.
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