Forum Q&A: Alvin Pang responds

With more questions than there was time to answer them, our inaugural ‘What’s Poetry Got To Do With It… Got To Do With It?’ forum in July concluded before our panellists could respond to the many provoking queries raised by our attendees. In this post-Forum Q&A, Singapore-based poet Alvin Pang offers his response to some of these audience questions.

—I was wondering, do you think poetry serves a purpose in its non-essential nature for those who don’t write or read it? i.e. does it fan out in a kind of ... invisible viral way or does it stay contained to those who make and consume it?  

—I love that poetry needed work but wasn’t work, that it offered different possibilities of being within a society that didn’t value it, I think that is mirrored in Australia for me. How do you maintain the lack of an end goal, the doing for the sake of doing, when you are a poet and poetry is expected of you, or is that a stage and you are somewhere else now with your process? 

—I’m interested in the audience response to your work, and I’ve seen you perform the same poem—I think it was ‘China’? Or perhaps ‘Singapore’?—at two different events where in one performance, before a live crowd, your boisterous reading provoked so much laughter, while in the other performance, which was recorded privately for an audience to view later, your reading was slower, considered and moving in a different way. So my question is about the multiple in the poem, which can only be realised at the point of reading. Are you in control of that multiplicity? Does it arise from a relationship with your audience? 

ALVIN PANG

In answer to your question: YES the experience of a poem (whether as poet or as audience/reader) certainly changes acc to the context in which it is encountered, experienced or presented. Mastery is, acc to thinkers like Ingold and others, about negotiating the warp and woof of the material one is working with—and the working environment or circumstance being part of that.  Some of this can be controlled, through the application of skill, technology, different styles and methods, and knowing when to use what approach is part of that mastery. But so is knowing when to let go, and to allow the circumstances to speak back to us, to be part of the experience. 

So there is a time for laughter and camaraderie and connection, and there is a time where that immediacy just isn't available—and the distance, sobriety and grief becomes part of what is conveyed, including the irony of, say, trying to read an energetic, humorous poem in a setting or in a tone that doesn't lend itself to that levity. The creative decision at those moments might be to defy circumstances ("I'm going to try and be energetic and funny despite the circumstances, and power through with force of will or charm"; or "I'm going to read a depressing elegy at a wedding celebration"), or to go with the flow in different ways. 

It's not just the relationship with the audience but also the relationship with the text (what a particular text means to us: whether we feel closer or further away from that sentiment at that time), l as well as our relationship with the context of its presentation (is it an exam? a leisurely reading? to woo a lover or to impress a peer?).  

So there are poems that move me that are unlikely to move an audience no matter how they are performed, because the resonances are deeply personal. And there may be poems that remain popular in performance that no longer quite match my own tastes or values: that I outgrow, as it were. And you get a different feeling reading a poem for the first time vs the hundredth time. I imagine rockstars having that experience after doing concert after concert!  In that sense, we poets, in performance, are always cover versions of ourselves (of the relatively static versions readers receive from our books or events). 

And I like that about writing (and poetry in particular): it has a life of its own. Not just because it passes into the possession of others, but also because we are different people over time, and the same words mean different things at different times and places.