The Monthly talks to poet, Jonathan Chan – Part 3 – Influences and the work of a poet

Are there key poets who influenced you?

There are a few which come to mind instinctively. Langston Hughes when I was younger, then when I went to university, R.S. Thomas became a poet I was influenced by. Alongside R.S. Thomas there was Christian Wiman, the Singaporean-Australian poet, Boey Kim Cheng, and the Chinese American poet, Li-Young Lee and I refer to them as influential because I would read their poems, then I might listen to recitals of their work, and I found that their poems stayed with me. I could hear their voices lodged in my head.

Does structure and form matter to your work?

Sometimes when I get an idea for a poem, I think about what structure might suit that idea. It’s not always a ‘classical’ form per se, although it is possible I might think a sonnet would work for a poem. If it is a long poem, I might want a section of the work to be structured in a certain way, where portions might be in couplets or tercets, particularly when I am struck by an image or if I am working through a kind of moral knot. Other times, a poem might be driven by an idea or a concept or an image.

I don’t think you can escape an entanglement regarding form and structure, but you can be more or less conscious of it. I think one can never get away from that question.

I was delivering a workshop recently and I was asked this question, “When do you use form?” I was thinking through that question and I considered that sometimes form can be generative and you might be thinking about different ways to present lines, especially if you are used to one particular way of writing, or, on the other hand, if form becomes too much of a contrivance, you are probably better off not being too prescriptive when approaching such a poem.

This sounds like a difficult question?

I am really not doctrinaire on this issue, whether you have to be more or less conscious about form. I have experimented with a number of different forms and structures, I have written prose poems, poems with couplets, sonnets, sestinas, but my default setting is probably lyrical free verse. I would say that if a particular form is becoming too gimmicky, I pull back.

I think that there is a certain historical baggage that accompanies some forms of poetry, and some people will try and challenge that history. The poet who comes to mind is Terence Hayes who wrote American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), referencing Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets (1994) while taking this history of formal tradition and inversion to create a new vehicle by which to advance a critique against the first Trump presidency.

What about themes in your work?

I would suggest there are tendencies rather than themes. I think the question of faith, from a Christian vantage point, will always constantly exist in my work. I am a Christian, but I sometimes think about the vexed relationship one has with the transcendent or the divine. I would say this is the real R. S. Thomas shadow which looms over my work. There is the question of divine presence or absence and mutuality especially in poems which think about prayer or poems which think about the ecstatic or transcendent experience or the failure to aspire to that.

I have poems about the question of family which recur and I am at present working on a sequence of poems looking at the Korean diaspora. I am taking questions about experiences in my own life and thinking about them in the context of other stories and narratives I have been engaging with.

In my second book I was a little more polemical in parts although I don’t think my poems are the best place for me to be writing polemically. I do, however, write poems about war, genocide, injustice and about the climate crisis.

Where to now?

I am still having plenty of thoughts and ideas and I am still inspired and so I continue to write. I work on a handful of journals, editing and reviewing in Singapore and in the US, and I oversee a poetry archive here in Singapore called poetry.sg. Its function is like an encyclopaedia, so from anyone who wants an entry point to connect with a poet from Singapore, they can go to the website.

I am involved with the Singapore Poetry Festival and I organise readings for that, and I do on occasion get invited to deliver workshops where I can go through questions of craft. I was working with women who had come to Singapore as migrant workers and work now as domestic helpers. I was going through with them some ideas about poetry and what the key points are when you are trying to write poetry.

All of that activity, whether editorial or educational, circles my writing.