Passionate Poet from Straightlaced Singapore

Oh, okay. I could resist lifting Ishaan Tharoor's headline from his article about Cyril Wong in Time magazine (Asia edition):

It is one of the more delicious workings of karma that Singapore, which criminalizes homosexuality, should have as its leading young poet an openly gay man. But while Cyril Wong relishes waving "a purple flag" in socially conservative faces, his work expands beyond simple sexuality — being "just a gay poet," as he puts it — to embrace themes of love, alienation and human relationships of all kinds. His latest volume of verse, Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light , is due to be published this month, hopefully to burnish further the international reputation that the previous five collections have established for him.

Wong, 30, burst onto the scene in 2000, with Squatting Quietly. It was, like many debut collections, a document of rebellion — in this case, against the values of his Christian, middle-class Chinese upbringing, and the social alienation that his sexuality entailed. Much of the latter had been brought into stark relief during 2 1/2 years of national military service, during which, he jokes, he was "too campy in the camp." His natural levity masks the loneliness and vulnerability he felt in the barracks. But ultimately it was poetry, rather than humor, that gave Wong a means of working through the frustrations driving him, at times, to a suicidal state of mind. "It helped me wash my dirty linen in public," he says.

You can read the rest of the article here.

The soft launch of Cyril's Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light will be held at The Arts House at 8p.m. tomorrow.

Beneath the Bali Moon

You'll probably recognise Ann Lee on the right in this picture, but who is this thoroughly obnoxious Malaysian government minister who wants to appropriate the Ubud Festival next year and have it happen in KL because, of course, the country does everything bigger and better?

This was once of the cabaret performances at the Jazz Cafe in Ubud last Saturday night. Other highlights of the evening were Indian author and contender Shashi Tharoor's stand up comedy with lots of UN jokes (the author was a contender for secretary general's post) , and Singaporean poet Cyril Wong's beautiful counter-tenor voice (he sounds like a cross between Andreas Scholl and Jimmy Somerville with not a note misplaced!).

A scene from Ann Lee's play Hang Li Poh: Melakan Princess being performed at The Yoga Barn on the first night of the Ubud Writers' and Readers' Festival. It was eerie and surreal ... but was this the way Ann intended it to be played when she wrote the piece?

I must confess though, that the full Balinese moon in the coconut trees did somewhat steal the show.

Postscript:

A much better account of the Writers' Caberet on Isman's blog.