Kim Cheng Boey
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

How does such displacement inform or alter your writing?

Displacement has always been there in my work. The feeling of not-being-at-home. The quarrel with the self and where one is. In a sense, displacement is what makes writing possible and necessary. Moving from one place to another, adopting different positions of seeing and being. In hindsight, the move to Sydney was an inevitable step. It was like many other things I have done, a leap into the dark, a throw of the dice, but I couldn’t bear to see the way the places I loved in Singapore disappear, the thoughtlessness, the carelessness with which the country discards its past.

But as the cliché goes, you leave home in order to come back to it. I have come home, in a way, through the essays in Between Stations. It’s about resurrecting the old Singapore, the Singapore of my imagination and memory. Till I wrote these essays, I had no idea how much I loved what I saw, the Singapore of my childhood and youth, how much I miss them now. Change Alley. The old Raffles Place. The unrenovated Chinatown. And my father walking me through these lost landscapes.

When reading your poems, I thought of Pseudo-Dionysius of Areopagite, The Desert Fathers, of John of the Cross, even Jacob Boehme, but contemporarised into something immediate, relevant and determined. Does Muse exist for you? How does it manifest and translate into poetry?

Inspiration is something that is rarer as you age. Maybe I never had it, but what I possessed, or rather what possessed me was a restlessness, a sense of questing, journeying, driven by something that I have yet to find a name for. You are carried by it and feel lifted out of yourself, carried by something numinous to the brink of clarity and grace. Looking back, I find myself longing for the fervour of the young man who wrote those poems, his energy, openness and availability to the moment. These are highly flawed poems, some embarrassing now, but I can understand why they were written. I can still feel that intensity, that delirium or state of possession as the poems rushed out, one after the other, in a two or three-week period. Especially when the poem for Chatwin came and “Requiem for a Mountaineer;” it was close to a religious experience. I haven’t felt anything like that since, writing those poems in Another Place and Somewhere-Bound, that fever, that sustained lift into something beyond. Hopkins calls it “the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.” It was good to have travelled on it, to have been buoyed, transported.

As a writer who works with religious tropes from across different world religions, I’m intrigued by how you frame your own spirituality, against your own writing.

I am no longer the fervent seeker/pilgrim I think I was, a young man inspired by an eclectic mix of voices — Hesse, Rilke, Katzantzakis, Dostoevsky, Merton, Zen… but where and what I am is because of the fumblings, the strayings, the wayfaring of that young man. Once I thought I would make an ultimate sacrifice — renounce poetry. Choose silence. We write because we don’t know the answers. And to paraphrase Rilke again, it is sometimes sufficient to be able to frame the right questions.The idea of monkhood was quite attractive, especially after reading Merton’s Elected Silence, till I realized it was just a romantic notion, not different from wanting to be a poet. Besides, I made three attempts at catechism but couldn’t bring myself to take the last steps. Reading Simone Weil didn’t help. I don’t think I was conscious of engaging with spiritual themes in any of the collections. There were a few poems that were influenced by R.S. Thomas or Elizabeth Jennings, in Somewhere-Bound. It was the uncertainties, the doubts, the questions that nudged the poetry into being. We write because we don’t know the answers. And to paraphrase Rilke again, it is sometimes sufficient to be able to frame the right questions. It was also the very lonely years, just before going into the army, of reading Kierkegaard, Kafka, Nietzsche, listening to Mahler, that perhaps changed my life irrevocably, and made me aware of the existential disquiet, the sense of the tragic. I don’t know how that equates with spirituality but it started a journey, a kind of quest that hasn’t yielded any answers yet.