Peel Street Poetry is an open mic poetry night at Social Room. It runs every Wednesdays of the month except the first and last. The environment is friendly and they love new performers, so come share your poetry or just listen along to some of Hong Kong’s sharpest poetic talents.
Peel Street Poetry Open Mic
Date: 2nd, 3rd (and 4th) Wednesdays of the month
Venue: Social Room
Tickets: Free
More info:
www.peelstreetpoetry.com
Hong Kong’s Eric Yip has won the UK’s National Poetry Competition with his poem Fricatives which talks about language, race, migration, belonging and the guilt of leaving one’s home behind.
Fricatives’ is a poem that makes its way ‘through the murky and treacherous waters of language, race, migration, and of being heard when “Nobody wants to listen/ to a spectacled boy with a Hong Kong accent.”
Speaking of his win the 19-year-old Yip said “It’s possibly the most surprising thing to ever happen to me. I’ve never had anything published before in a journal, let alone win any competition. I’m also honoured to contribute a small part to the growing literary space of Hong Kong poetry, which was carved out piece by piece through the wondrous efforts of many Hong Kong poets I admire.”
“I see the poem as a coming-of-age for the speaker, reflected through the transformation of his city. It’s about different types of oppression and how the speaker navigates them. The poem begins by looking at the legacy of colonialism in influencing how we speak, or how we think we should speak. Then there’s the political dimension, which feels impossible not to write about. There’s also submission in the sexual sense, but even that scene has colonial undertones. And finally, there’s assimilating into an English-speaking country. All this mirrors Hong Kong’s journey from a colony to a battleground, to a site of exodus,” Yip added.
“I think there’s definitely an element of survivor guilt in the poem. Hong Kong is experiencing its largest emigration wave in history, but not everyone has the means to move to another country. For me, being able to write this poem is a form of privilege”
Yip’s work was chosen by judges Fiona Benson, David Constantine and Rachel Long, who read all the entries anonymously.
Benson said: “Fricatives is an immensely ambitious and beautifully achieved poem. It puts its reader into the position of a student of English as a second language, the fricative consonants tangling our mouths as we speak the poem, and intriguing us with the alternate meanings that rest precariously on the pronunciation. ‘Proper’ achievements – the correct pronunciation, the good education abroad, and the proud parents – are countered by an underworld of political prisoners and risky, grim sex.”
She added: “This is an incredibly powerful, vulnerable story of an uneasy assimilation, and of government surveillance… It’s a poem of poise and counterpoise, and is personal, political and acutely musical. What a tensile, high-wire reckoning.”
To speak English properly, Mrs Lee said, you must learn
the difference between three and free. Three men
escaped from Alcatraz in a rubber raft and drowned
on their way to Angel Island. Hear the difference? Try
this: you fought your way into existence. Better. Look
at this picture. Fresh yellow grains beaten
till their seeds spill. That’s threshing. That’s
submission. You must learn to submit
before you can learn. You must be given
a voice before you can speak. Nobody wants to listen
to a spectacled boy with a Hong Kong accent.
You will have to leave this city, these dark furrows
stuffed full with ancestral bones. Know
that death is thorough. You will speak of bruised bodies
skinnier than yours, force the pen past batons
and blood, call it fresh material for writing. Now
they’re paying attention. You’re lucky enough
to care about how the tongue moves, the seven types
of fricatives, the articulatory function of teeth
sans survival. You will receive a good education
abroad and make your parents proud. You will take
a stranger’s cock in your mouth in the piss-slick stall
of that dingy Cantonese restaurant you love and taste
where you came from, what you were made of all along.
Put some work into it, he growls. C’mon, give me
some bite. Your mother visits one October, tells you
how everyone speaks differently here, more proper.
You smile, nod, bring her to your favourite restaurant,
order dim sum in English. They’re releasing
the students arrested five years ago. Just a tad more
soy sauce please, thank you. The television replays
yesterday on repeat. The teapots are refilled. You spoon
served rice into your mouth, this perfect rice.
Steamed, perfect, white.
Image: National Poetry Competition
Poet Amanda Gorman has Instagrammed a video of herself reciting her new poem inside an empty theatre. Gorman said “I wrote A New Day’s Lyric both to celebrate the new year & honour both the hurt & the humanity of the last one.”
Ahead of the poem’s release, Gorman is quoted in a Vanity Fair interview that A New Day’s Lyric was partly inspired by the stories of grief and perseverance she’s seen shared on social media.
Earlier in December, Gorman published the poetry collection Call Us What We Carry.
May this be the day
We come together.
Mourning, we come to mend,
Withered, we come to weather,
Torn, we come to tend,
Battered, we come to better.
Tethered by this year of yearning,
We are learning
That though we weren’t ready for this,
We have been readied by it.
We steadily vow that no matter
How we are weighed down,
We must always pave a way forward.
This hope is our door, our portal.
Even if we never get back to normal,
Someday we can venture beyond it,
To leave the known and take the first steps.
So let us not return to what was normal,
But reach toward what is next.
What was cursed, we will cure.
What was plagued, we will prove pure.
Where we tend to argue, we will try to agree,
Those fortunes we forswore, now the future we foresee,
Where we weren’t aware, we’re now awake;
Those moments we missed
Are now these moments we make,
The moments we meet,
And our hearts, once all together beaten,
Now all together beat.
Come, look up with kindness yet,
For even solace can be sourced from sorrow.
We remember, not just for the sake of yesterday,
But to take on tomorrow.
We heed this old spirit,
In a new day’s lyric,
In our hearts, we hear it:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
Be bold, sang Time this year,
Be bold, sang Time,
For when you honor yesterday,
Tomorrow ye will find.
Know what we’ve fought
Need not be forgot nor for none.
It defines us, binds us as one,
Come over, join this day just begun.
For wherever we come together,
We will forever overcome.
In Conversation with Selina Tusitala Marsh
Date: 7:30pm, 5 December, 2018
Venue: Mettā
Tickets: Free (with email registration)
Celebrated writers from a diverse range of literary corners, including fiction, history, poetry, fitness and science, will come together this autumn at the The Hong Kong International Literary Festival 2018.
The festival takes places at Tai Kwun and this year’s programme will includes talks, literary lunches, readings, panel discussions and spans ten days from 2 to 11 November.
Full event schedule and tickets onsale soon.
Hong Kong International Literary Festival 2018
Date: 2-11 November, 2018
Venue: Tai Kwun
Tickets: tbc
More info: www.festival.org.hk
Vishal Nanda is a writer and spoken word performer, as well as an indie game designer, teacher, and editor. He spends his time writing poetry, scripts, screen plays, plays, short stories, novels and the like, as he cannot quite help himself.
Recently, he hosted an event with acclaimed novelist Omar Musa during Hong Kong’s Literary Festival and his poetry has been published in the literary journal Asia Cha. He has performed spoken word poetry at a variety of events, including TEDx Wanchai, comedy shows, fundraisers and on RTHK Radio Three. He can usually be found nervously performing In Lan Kwai Fong most Wednesdays at Orange Peel with the other Peel Street Poets.
How long have you been involved in poetry?
I’ve been writing sort of poetry since I was thirteen, if you could call what I used to write ‘poetry’. It would be more accurate to say that I was trying to write poetry. I am hesitant to call what I write poetry, or to call myself a poet.
It’s quite a grandiose declaration because for good or ill ‘poetry’ still has pretentious connotations. If we had another word for it in English, with the sense that you’re part of a rather large group of aspiring writers maybe in training, that could excise the pretence from the term, like writing ‘pooms’, then that would be more accurate.
Writing pooms was a solo thing for a long time, completely devoid of connection to a larger community, till I ‘joined’ Peel Street. Since then I’ve been writing far more than I have in the past, with far more opportunities to get read or listened to, so in terms of dedicating more time to poetry, I would have to say since joining Peel, which was about three years ago. Since then I’ve been lucky to have more opportunities to write and perform, and it all started with Peel.
Where do you get the inspiration for your writing?
This is a crazy question. It would be hard enough to answer if you were referring to one specific piece I’ve written, let alone for writing as a whole. What was I thinking at the time? What series of events throughout my entire life, my childhood, all the media I have ever consumed, led to me producing that piece of work? How did I have the time to do it? What was I feeling back when I wrote it?
There’s a way to bypass the question entirely, and the assumption behind it, of the creator having agency in the cause. People are computers who take input, all the input our gloriously unique minds are capable of taking as the most powerful processing machines in the known universe, and then output something, like dick in the box, or Game of Thrones, or poetry. Although we have agency in the process we are far from objective observers of that process.
That said, if I had to give a tidier answer then I would abide by something Neil Gaiman said, which I paraphrase as ‘You walk by a dozen stories everyday. A writer notices at least five of them.’ In other words, there are stories and ideas everywhere, and it’s a matter of observation both internally and externally to recognise them.
And although I’m saying there is a lack of agency I don’t think there is a lack of craft. I use Evernote for everything, which means I can write on my phone, my Ipad, my desktop, whatever, it all goes to the same place, and if I have an idea I write it down, I file it away, whether I’m walking or sitting at home. I think there are two extremes for me when it comes to how I end up writing something, with a lot in the middle. I want to emphasise that I’m an amateur.
On the grandscale of global writers I’m just another guy on the cliff hoping to make his way up, but I think there’s some value then in telling you my work ethic, of the method in attempting to climb the cliff because it’s probably similar to a lot of other people who are trying but haven’t quite made it. I write all my ideas down. Sometimes I’ll have an abstract idea that I need to craft into a story- I had one about how children and what might be considered ‘the delusional’ have a lot in common, but how do I contain that in an actual narrative?
So I try to build something, which sometimes takes time, it takes outlines and planning and experimentation and editing. Or I had one about a guy who was ‘time displaced’ and could feel the past of any place he was at and I run with the idea, I imagine being that character and I take the story to it’s logical conclusions.
I don’t believe in writer’s block, my rule is that if I can’t figure out a problem, I’m only allowed to quit if I’ve sat in front of a desk and stared at the page for half an hour to an hour and truly come up with nothing, which I honestly think is a rarity. I try to abide by that rule.
On the other hand, especially with poetry, I’ve found that moments where I’m really emotional, often negatively, at those times writing out a poem is therapy, an itch, I have to get it out there because I feel like I’m going crazy, it’s like taking the chaos of an unformed internal monologue and shaping it into something, and times like those are times where it just flows out in one go.
So it’s both extremes, but I believe in the end it’s consistent work and the determination to see an idea to it’s end, no matter how crap the product, with the faith that it’s still practice and it still counts.
How does Hong Kong influence your writing?
It upsets me. It’s not exactly an ideal place, though it is idolised when it comes to safety, or the MTR or cheap, delicious food. I think a lot of writing, especially in English, when it comes to Hong Kong, attempts to focus on defining the place with the awareness that it’s unique. So that enough readers not familiar with it will find it compelling, it’s like travel writing.
I don’t want to write like that. I think there is a lot of isolation, a lot of unhealthy relationships, toxicity and loneliness here and I think that this is far from limited to this city.
I try to find the universal in the specific, rather than denying what is universal by focusing on the specific. Hong Kong, in the context of us as a species, is a remarkable trailer of a future to come. It has one of the largest income gaps in the world, a disgusting amount of people living in poverty juxtaposed with stratospheric decadence, rampant pollution and corporate-timescale-level-thinking (that is, in quarters, which is somewhat problematic when it comes to climate change), the highest average IQ and life expectancy in the world, cutting edge technology harnessed to make you buy shit you do not need, and a disturbingly high suicide rate among children who don’t fit the requisite mould.
I grew up here and frankly it makes me angry. I also love it, it is my home, and I’ve written celebratory pieces about it too. This is too big of a question to answer; how does Hong Kong influence my writing? If I have to sum it up, I’d say as a living computer I am forced to process it in all it’s neon madness, and that I’d hate to write about fields full of sheep instead.
The amount of silence in such a noisy place is mind boggling. So few people have an actual voice, instead we are bombarded with manicured ads and artificial TV shows claiming to define our existence in Hong Kong. Everywhere you look in Hong Kong, on the walls, on buildings, on magazine covers everywhere, there are words telling you how to be or think, via telling you what to buy, or what is considered of value and this gets to people, this affects us.
In Hong Kong, I try to consider what isn’t being said, but from my very, very narrow perspective. There’s a hell of a lot of noise here. I think a lot of writing at the moment is focused on articulating a perspective that can then be cozily placed in a category like ‘culture’ or ‘gender’ or some space from which the consumer and creator can feel comfortable in being associated with.
What is lost in that movement is the attempt to discover the universal, or even admitting that the state of us as a globalised species, like our genes, is 99.5% similar and cultural fetishisation for the sake of it is a form of self-inflicted blindness.
Hong Kong as an influence, is a noisy place, which inspires me by refusing to keep things simple or quiet, even if most people are rendered silent by it. Mental health is a box I’d like to say I try to fit a lot of my writing into- the state of Hong Kong’s popular perception, treatment and education when it comes to mental health is an absolute disgrace.
Google the government website on mental health, there’s a questionnaire for depression and if you succeed, if you have symptoms that fulfil the requirements for a diagnoses, the website effectively tells you to ‘take it easy’. There’s barely any help. It’s an absolute disgrace, and it’s not the rich that are being let down, they can afford private treatment, it’s the larger majority that have to count on a government doctor with ten minutes every two weeks to see you and the popular stigma that you can’t talk about these things.
The social environment is, in many ways, psychologically toxic. That said I have it easy compared to most people, I’m aware of that, I try to stay aware of my privilege. But the BS is dripping from the walls.
Poem:
Things I wish were or that I could see in the city but don’t because the world is not moulded by the whims of my imagination.
Like when I stop,
Like when I pause, to give a beggar change,
Another hard-eyed walker strides towards us,
He’s from this mangled person’s mysterious past.
He’s got a deformed limb,
He’s engaging in disabled kung fu,
Flipping around on one functional leg,
And beating the shit out of this guy wearing a suit.
Is that as offensive as ignoring him?
At least in my fantasies I pretend to care.
Behind an office lady’s perfume trail,
I surf a happy wake- wish it was colored,
Maybe purple, so I can
Hmmm
Sniff the smell of happy.
It’s not stalking, going in the same direction,
It’s not like there’s any space on the escalator.
See the perfectly looking douchey guy in the suit,
See the way too sultry blouse wearing office girl,
See them engage in Mortal Kombat.
A look passes between them,
Sudden recognition,
Eyes flare
An accusatory YOUUU
One person kicks / the streets clear,
To form an orderly circle.
They pose,
I become one of those dudes in the backdrop,
Moving my hands up and down,
Like in the Super Street fighter backgrounds.
Outside the Landmark,
Fenced-in trees inhale car fumes,
Like hardened smokers talking shit to one another,
About how dumb humans are.
You know the waterfront used to be right by my roots.
Yeah thank the Sun they covered that stuff with concrete. Smelled horrific.
Sometimes on a skyway,
When a double decker passes so close,
I think of jumping, and rolling, then running on the roofs,
But I’d need something to escape from for it to make sense.
Like reality.
Or something to chase.
Like office ladys.
How about the neon signs,
Unravelling to become neon snakes,
They float through the sky like Doctor Who monsters,
Neon eels,
If they touch you, they either electrocute, or seduce,
And next thing you know you’re in a Wanchai strip club being choked to death
By the fairy lights.
I want a class one Tai Tai laden down with shopping bags,
Wearing Armani everything and sunglass occluded eyes,
To walk into HSBC,
Chill as fuck,
And from her shopping bags drop,
Two tommy guns.
With perfect diction, her lines would be:
Everyone be cool this is a robbery.
Any of you pricks move and I’ll execute every last mother fucking one of you.
In my fantasies I don’t bother not to plagiarise,
This is why copyright is unnatural,
Her lipstick is as red as the HSBC logo,
Or the dead kids those terrorists they accidentally funded killed.
Oops, too far, good thing none of this is real.
The Victoria Harbour channel monster would be unfathomable.
Doubly terrifying because of the layers of nasty that film the water,
Would make it invisible till it was a few feet from the surface,
Armoured in plastic bags, translucent scales that warp the image underneath,
Lovecrafted out of Vita Box cartons that inflate and deflate as it breathes,
It’s touch is asthma,
It’s straw appendages piercing skin to suck out all your dreams,
Right through your pupils,
You won’t be able to get a good night’s sleep again,
It will find you in every toilet bowl and stagnant puddle,
The urban mosquitos are it’s eyes.
Skyscrapers are secret spaceships,
Rocket boosters buried in the concrete,
Waiting for the signal,
They lift up all at once,
Hidden steel shutters locking down windows,
For the inevitable space exodus.
Inevitable, in my fantasies at least.
Maybe they are missiles,
Anti-alien weapons,
Filled with angry bankers coked up like Viking berserkers, unable to distinguish friend,
From the ignorant average person investing with them,
They take their ties off, tying to them stationary,
Wielding silken nunchucks against the bugger ships they board,
The antennas and weird spiral shit on roofs were always
Disguised ramming prows.
If all the cars, lorrys and bus’s horned at once,
Would the sound blow out all the buildings glass?
If the PLA in admiralty took on the cops,
Would the triads decide a tie breaker?
I want a crazy brown guy to walk into a crystal shop,
With a tennis racket,
And systematically smash everything at once,
Then maybe buy it all afterwards,
Take that mainland billionaires.
I’m a fucked up patriot in my head.
I want to see ten thousand people take to the streets,
Yelling slogans from the 1970s,
I want to sit cross legged in the middle of the highway
While the Hong Kong police go full police state
And radical students are threatened with pepper spray,
Would be cool to feel a part of history,
Especially to be on the losing side.
I want graffiti on the government buildings,
And street art outside the IFC,
I want a declaration that anyone can be Batman,
Hanging from a skyway.
I want to see it again,
And pretend that a seven million strong city,
Educated and liberal,
Could field one hell of an army
For change.
For a change,
I want my fantasies to be real,
Also
I don’t think theres anything wrong with having an office girl fetish,
I mean I grew up in Hong Kong.
It’s not my fault.
That I want you
to give me
a raise.
Peel Street Poetry is an open mic poetry night at Orange Peel. It runs every Wednesday of the month except the first. The environment is friendly and they love new performers, so come share your poetry or just listen along to some of Hong Kong’s sharpest poetic talents.
Peel Street Poetry Open Mic
Date: 2nd, 3rd, 4th (and 5th) Wednesdays of the month
Venue: Orange Peel
Tickets: Free
More info:
www.peelstreetpoetry.com
Tegan Smyth (Carling) wows, entertains and provokes her audience while winning the 11 Anniversary Peel Street Poetry Slam.
Peel Street Poetry an open mic poetry evening that originated at the now closed Joyce is Not Here on Peel Street eleven years ago. When the bar closed, the poets upped pens and moved to their current location Orange Peel, where on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Wednesdays of the month you can enjoy an evening of poetry and good conversation.
How do poets celebrate, with a slam of course. 10 minutes to write an original poem based on a word or phrase picked at random by the judges. This year’s slam saw over 20 entrants necessitating three high quality elimination heats.
It was tough for the judging panel of Nury Vittachi, Collier Nogues, Henrik Hoeg, Nashua Gallagher and last year’s winner as the quality of the hilarious/clever/personal/provocative poems was high. But eventually six emerged.
https://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2016/Peel-Street-Poetry-11th/i-3JDRcZv
Watch the other Poetry Slam finalists in action – they were given 10 minutes to write a poem on/about/using ‘simply put’.
Denis Tsoi
Angus Gallagher
Akin Jeje
Vishal Nanda
Steph Carter
Tegan was a unanimous winner amongst the finalists but it took the judges some time to decide.
Simply put it was a night where everyone was a winner. All the poets rose to the challenge of the slam and we the audience enjoyed some great poems, both in the slam and in the open mic sections that bracketed the slam.
Peel Street Poetry Open Mic
Date: 2nd, 3rd, 4th (and 5th) Wednesdays of the month
Venue: Orange Peel
Tickets: Free
More info:
www.peelstreetpoetry.com
New Zealander Blair Reeve has been writing and performing a rhythmic and comical style of performance poetry since 1995. He spent the first seven years of the new millennium teaching English in Japanese junior high schools before moving to Hong Kong where he continued to teach phonics to primary students until 2013. He graduated from Massey University (NZ) in 2012 after studying Japanese and English Literature and then turned his attention to more sustained creative writing by joining the City University of Hong Kong’s Masters in Fine Arts program. He completed this in 2014, and one year later published his first children’s book Hogart The Hedgehog Turns Nink. In September 2016 he published his second book for young readers, Greta von Gerbil & Her Really Large Lexicon. Currently he works from home, caring for his infant daughter and mentoring post-grad students at Chinese U for their portfolios in creative writing. He was a feature author in the Hong Kong Young Readers’ Literary Festival in March 2016 and will be performing at the upcoming TEDxWanChai event on October 29.
How long have you been involved in poetry?
I’ve been involved in poetry since I was a kid in the 70s. First as a reader of comic verse—things like Spike Milligan, limericks & nonsense verse. In high school I really took to analyzing poetry, but I didn’t start writing until I was about 20. I was a pretender of anguished verse, which came from being one of those dyed-in-the-wool Cure fans. I then took up writing poetry as something to be read aloud and performed. This transition from pretender to writer/performer happened around 1996.
What inspires you to write?
My inspiration comes entirely from other poets and poetry. When I see writing I like it makes me want to write better. Hence my early poems were all like bad Goth lyrics. Then I was inspired by other performer-poets during my Dunedin days of the 90s and some of the old Victorian stuff I read at that time, especially Gerard Manly Hopkins who had a really playful word thing going on. Dr. Seuss continues to be an inspiration when I read to my daughter and that led me to wanting to write comical anapestic rhyming verse. This is so much fun I’m sticking with it for the time being.
How does Hong Kong influence your writing?
Hong Kong influences my writing in an indirect way. My social scene is miscellaneous and so it frees me to be as experimental as I like. It also means the cultural inputs into my writing are diverse, and I like that. I like that my poetry is informed by so many different perspectives. But my writing tends to be interior and imaginative rather than worldly, and in that sense, Hong Kong as a direct subject has yet to make it into my writing.
Here’s an extract from Blair’s new children’s book.
Flaytoo the Friendly Mayfly (extract)
Said Phlooty the Mayfly to Flaytoo his boy,
“You’re four hours old now, you’ve played with that toy
since the moment your mother gave birth to you son.
You’ve only got twenty more hours to have fun,
so don’t hesitate, Flayt, get out in the sun.”
“We’re fish food, young chap, and that’s perfectly fine.
I’ve nothing against fish who do need to dine,
but there’s no need to hurry yourself to their plate.
Your time here is precious. Their stomachs can wait.
So listen up kiddo, go fly to the ends
of the field and make lots of new wonderful friends.
Because mayflies like us—we don’t live very long.
We’ve only one day till the end of our song.”
Then Phlooty the Mayfly unflicked his four wings,
and left Flaytoo flying alone without strings.
“Say what?” exclaimed Flaytoo, “I’ve only one day?
That barely leaves time for a Mayfly to play!
Well I certainly mustn’tly waste my time ruing
those four hours gone when I ought to be doing
what Phlooty suggested—travelling and seeing
how other flies spend their lives living and being.”
Peel Street Poetry is an open mic poetry night at Orange Peel. It runs every Wednesday of the month except the first. The environment is friendly and they love new performers, so come share your poetry or just listen along to some of Hong Kong’s sharpest poetic talents.
Peel Street Poetry Open Mic
Date: 2nd, 3rd, 4th (and 5th) Wednesdays of the month
Venue: Orange Peel
Tickets: Free
More info:
www.peelstreetpoetry.com
Edited: 1 November 2016 – extract amended, last line was missing
