The Monthly talks to poet, Jonathan Chan – Part 2 – A Canonical Education

It does sound like you got a lot of support at school?

If I address this from the perspective of public policy perspective first, I was very privileged to be offered the level of support at school that I received because initially, in those years when I was going to school, the creative writing extra-curricular activities were the preserve of those schools offering the Gifted Education Programme. It wasn’t offered to the broader swathe of schools and therefore wasn’t widely accessible and available to all students at that time. Rather, it was provided primarily in those schools where the students were considered to be academically gifted.

Nowadays, that Gifted Education Programme has been dissolved and they are trying to widen access to creative writing, offering more opportunities for applications and therefore allowing access to a broader grouping of students. In my own capacity, outside of my day job, I do get invited to do poetry workshops, and give talks, to a wide variety of schools.

That sounds like there is more support, in general, for students now?

Today the landscape has changed markedly and the internet has offered many more resources than used to be available, for everyone. I think there is an effort to provide more support for creative writing, however I wouldn’t want to say that there has been a wholesale democratisation of the situation. I think it is reasonable to say that there has been a shift in education policy, in that there seems to generally be more support for students who are interested in writing and poetry.

However, this is not to say that Singapore is not a haven for the creative arts, or writers, because that trajectory is still mostly disincentivised. Singapore still has a primary orientation for industry. The educational direction is quite pragmatic, with the key aim for students being to become proficient in maths and science, because that will allow you to work in industry or pursue a career in other areas. Most Singaporean writers, you will find, have a day job, either as lawyers, or working in government agencies, or banking, and they work on their poetry alongside these vocations.

What about support at home?

My parents are big readers, novels mainly, and are well spoken and articulate, but not great readers of poetry. They have always been happy for me to plod along with my writing. They will attend my readings and they will buy my books to pass on to their friends, but perhaps they might not always grasp the key ideas I am exploring. They have never had any objection to my writing, and I am respectful not to overshare when writing about my family. I am aware of being careful with how much of my family details I should delve into.

Did you go on to study literature at college or university?

I read English when I was at university in the UK, I went to Cambridge University for my undergraduate studies.

Is that where you developed your craft?

Before I went to university, I did my military service and, in that period, I was quite active in the Singapore Poetry Writing Month, which is a cousin of the National Poetry Writing Month. What happens is that someone posts a prompt every day, once a day, and you respond to the prompt. I think that developed my creative muscle, writing a new poem every day for a month and I did that for 3 or 4 years in a row.

Your craft is developed before you get to university?

I did find at university that I felt an enlargement, that I was increasing my understanding of literary history and of the history of poetry, particularly in the English language.

Which university did you attend?

I attended Cambridge University and it was a “canonical” education. We were reading lots of English poets, or at least poets who are more familiar in an English context, mostly poets I was not familiar with.

What poets had you studied in Singapore?

When I was studying literature in Singapore we had a much more international curriculum, so we would read Shakespeare, Singaporean anthologies, literature in translation from China and Russia, Maya Angelou, Angela Carter, Wordsworth, and I wrote an extended essay in school contrasting Langston Hughes with Jack Kerouac.

For me, Langston Hughes was one of my first big influences, given his transformation of the English language at the time through the incorporation of the African American vernacular into his poetry, sometimes as part of the morphology of the poem itself. I had a sense that I could write in a more familiar way because he was writing in a conversational or vernacular style, and I felt I could draw on that approach, in a way that felt made sense for me and my relationship with the English language at the time.

How did the experience of attending an English university impact you?

When I went to university it was almost as if I had jumped all the way back in time, not quite all the way back to Beowulf, but in the first term we were looking at Middle English. I had a real feeling of dislocation because part of the undergraduate studies involved translating Middle English into contemporary English. We were digesting the Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl and other writers, and works, of that time.

Eventually, though, I found some kindred spirits, writers who I ended up admiring, John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughn, Thomas Traherne. Then we did a whole term of Shakespeare. That was my first year of university, digesting English poets from the 1300’s through to the 1700’s. Perhaps that informs the ‘classical’ approach that you’ve described of my poems.

What happens after that?

In my second year I rebelled a bit by writing a dissertation on a novel by the Korean American fictionist Min Jin Lee, and by reading other poets beyond the curriculum. I did find myself coming into contact with other canonical poets, and I became a big admirer of John Clare. I learned about the Enclosure Act and the segmenting of the greenery for which John Clare had a great affection.

In the third year we were exposed to a hybrid of poetry, but I did end up writing one of my dissertations on R.S. Thomas and Derek Walcott, looking at the theological frame of poetic language responding to the experience of natural beauty, while overlaid with the idea of a post-colonial relationship with the English language in their respective Welsh and Caribbean contexts.

Does that educational experience impact your writing?

That was the underlying academic education that shaped my thinking and familiarity with literature and literary history, but there was no creative writing pedagogy associated with that degree. I was reading and digesting that work, but I was also continuing with my own writing separately.

A friend who knew my writing before university told me after my first year that my poetry had changed. The fact that someone could notice that change and I couldn’t say what that change was, I couldn’t see it. Maybe it was rhythmic, maybe it was the language I chose or the diction, or the way I was presenting the lines, but there was a change in my writing according to that friend. It was more than likely something subconscious, that the education I was immersed in had had an impact on my writing.