Lit Day

Fwah today has been a purely lit day. Spent the morning writing a story, then read On the Road all the way down to Orchard, then spent a whopping 4.5h vetting publication poetry at the Coffee Club in Wisma, and then wrote a second short story on the way back. And then there was a long email, and then this entry. If I have as much motivation for writing on my Hist exam days as I did today, I'd be overjoyed.

The first story was inspired by CNY visitings and musings about the convoluted troubles that developed from the Monday Incident nearly two weeks ago. My gosh, it's quite intriguing to think that one misplaced SMS and one passionate diary entry could spark off such troubles and tribulations. Anyway Valentine's Day is coming up, and like last year I wrote about something to match the general spirit of the age, except that this year I tried to stamp out the saccharine sentimentality. Incidentally, for a rather hilarious take on VDay, read Solitary Music's blog =P

The publication vetting thing was quite exhausting. Well, it was a nice surprise to discover JY and Joel and Risse were on the team too, and of course Dawn provides the basic guarantee of quality, but going through fifty poems in four and a half hours is murder. Heh some of the stuff was quite tricky, because we didn't define from the start the criteria for choosing the poetry, which meant that there were the usual philosophical disputes about whether poems needed central points or if stylistic flair was enough. The whole postmodernist-traditionalist shebang. And knowing some of the writers makes it even trickier, cos it takes lots of self-discipline to retain a measure of objectivity knowing that you could demolish someone's ego by being too harsh. And I find that by compensating, I end up overpenalising the people that I do know. How do you choose, then, if you can't separate the professional and the personal?

Speaking of being careful with the great power invested in the vetters...what happens when you're critical of the work of someone who's on the vetting team? I really took a sock at a scifi piece, forgetting that the writer was right opposite me. Bleah...politics was never a strong point. Good thing that he took it graciously enough, but feeling my heart drop out from my chest was most uncomfortable. Hmm...and hearing Jem Au's poem, and thinking that I know what it's about also made my heart dip. If you know the context, then the sentimentality becomes excusable, understandable. I should know; I write that kind of stuff all the time. Unfortunately, people are too often not interested in the context.

Hmm, but I notice that a lot of the writing has a certain common thread of tone running through them. The most popular poems tend to have obscure or convoluted imagery, intriguing and provocative because they are so strange and yet so precisely accurate, and they have a certain haughtiness or aloofness in tone. And most of them are in free verse...though they aren't very good, the rhyming poems stand out because of the rarity of their structure. Hmm...and I figured that it's actually quite easy to sound pro; you just have to slop images all over the place and disregard certain grammatical rules. The mark of a really good poem, however, is that all these smatterings of strange images are united towards some kind of artistic purpose. The problem is that it's so easy to make cheap imitations of the good stuff that the chaff sounds like the wheat on a superficial level, and after the fifteenth poem, you really don't pay attention to the details.

The final tally...unsurprisingly, HC got the lion's share of approvals, and RJ the least (partly because the original submissions were lukewarm too). There was plenty of angst and sappy romance (which I personally am biased against), but many passed through on their stylistic merit (though I think if a poem sounds nice, that doesn't mean it's a good poem). I was particularly impressed by Dawn's epic Surfacing however. The merged techniques of prose and poetry, and the expected ingenious obscure imagery and the good central theme make the three-page poem quite a pleasure to read. And reading it inspired today's second story, about writing. Heh...it's the result of me trying to be as stylistically flamboyant as the HC writers; you should try it too, and you'll learn to appreciate the rarity of the warped perspectives that are needed to discern those kinds of metaphors that are so popular among them.

Speaking of which...I do think that plagiarism is a large part of the artistic process. The three schools have distinct poetic styles. RJ's tend to be more realistic and frank, VJ talks a lot about love and darkness, and HC is the most stylistically brilliant with their crazy and brilliant images. The influential figures in each school sets the general opinion on poetic style, and everyone tends to write in that style in order to maximise the chances of their poetry being considered good. That's why, unfortunately, the best poems sound roughly the same in terms of stylistic flair. And when you can't think as colourfully as the greats, like me, you borrow their approach and their ideas and strive to be like them.

The greatest compliment that I expect from the vetters is that my work sounds like Dawns =P

But then again why is it that we can't appreciate other forms of style as much as the one that we're comfortable with? Maybe it's just me; I find myself recoiling from the love poetry (partly because of the Monday Incident) and HC's style is bewildering in its brilliance. But of course there will always be general personal biases. The thing is to guard against the HC style becoming a fad, for its effectiveness partly relies on its rarity. If everyone can pull off a convincing Dawn-esque epic then it would become as valuable as a flavour of the month.

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Arthur Miller passed away today. The passing of the greatest modern playwright of our time is fleetingly saddening, even to someone who has never read any of his stuff before. I wonder what he was like. The Crucible and Death of a Salesman brought him down to fame; did he let Marilyn Monroe get to his head? Unfortunately my minute of silence is only motivated by his reputation, and the fact that it is so difficult to become a great playwright, and not by actual acquaintance to the man or his works. Nevertheless from the documentaries of American drama, one can tell that he was a big influence, and his passing leaves a big howling vacuum.

pondered by phoenican @ 12.2.05