- Cyril Wong
-
Cyril Wong 
Born June 27, 1977
SingaporeOccupation Poet and short story writer Nationality Singaporean Ethnicity Chinese Education National University of Singapore Notable award(s) Golden Point Award (Singapore, 2004), National Arts Council's Young Artist Award (Singapore, 2005), Singapore Literature Prize (2006) Cyril Wong (born 1977) is the author of nine volumes of poetry and one collection of prose.[1]
Contents
Biography
Born in 1977, Cyril Wong attended Saint Patrick's School, Singapore and Temasek Junior College, before pursuing a doctoral degree in English literature from the National University of Singapore. His poems have appeared in journals around the world, including Atlanta Review, Fulcrum, Poetry International, Cimarron Review, Wascana Review, Dimsum, and Asia Literary Review. They have also been featured in the 2008 W.W. Norton & Co. anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, and Chinese Erotic Poems by Everyman's Library. Cyril was guest editor for Gangway (#35 - Travel and Transitioning), and a featured poet at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the Sydney Writers' Festival, and the Singapore Writers' Festival. TIME magazine (Dec 10, 2007) has written that "his work expands beyond simple sexuality...to embrace themes of love, alienation and human relationships of all kinds."[2]
Cyril's Poetry
Cyril is recognised as Singapore's first truly confessional poet[3] and "has many styles, all of them limber, which combine the anecdotal and the confessional with the intuitive and the empathetic."[4] His poems are known for their "lyrical intensity" and for "training an almost anthropologically curious eye on the laws and customs of his own family: their strange taciturn ways, their gnomic references to disappointment and guilt, and their penchant for self-delusion."[5] In a way that makes him especially distinctive within the Singaporean poetry scene, his work possesses "a heightened awareness of the physical body, and a desire to probe its visceral materiality for emotional truths."[6] Edwin Thumboo has praised Cyril's poems for their "remarkable inwardness" and how, "without exception, they leave us with the feeling of subjects - occasion, non-happening, an especially poignant experience - explored to unusual limits."[7] With regards to his third collection and its play of presence and absence in the context of Singapore's urbanity and cultural memory, John Phillips described Cyril's poetry as offering "an affirmation of emptiness in a time and place where this is barely possible."[8]
Although Cyril has also been popularly known as a gay poet,[9] Singaporean critic Gwee Li Sui has stressed that readers need not perceive the poet's persona in terms of gay exceptionality, "his qualities of spaciousness and morphing images also manifesting an interest in a kind of New-Age irreligious spirituality."[10] This interest is fully expressed in Cyril's book, Satori Blues, in which the author "teases us out of our complacencies and directs/guides our thinking along the long, hard route to self-awareness...Hence 'blues'. Hence the extraordinary attempt to seduce the reader into somnambulance-via-rhythmic, rhymic language, the language of meditative poetry."[11] In a review by the Southeast Asian Review of English, Cyril's poetry has been described as "an art that works simply from a personal plane, and from within such a plane we have some of the most sensitive, articulate probings into the nature of one's self that have never been seen before in all of contemporary Singaporean verse."[12]
Books
- Satori Blues (Softblow Press, 2011) ISBN 9789810873615
- oneiros (Firstfruits, 2010) ISBN 9789810845803
- Let Me Tell You Something About That Night (Transit Lounge, 2009) ISBN 9780980571714
- tilting our plates to catch the light (Firstfruits, 2007) ISBN 9789810593858
- Excess Baggage and Claim, co-authored with Terry Jaensch (Transit Lounge, 2007) ISBN 9780975022856
- like a seed with its singular purpose (Firstfruits, 2006) ISBN 9810559305
- unmarked treasure (Firstfruits, 2004) ISBN 981050408X
- below: absence (Firstfruits, 2002) ISBN 9810475926
- the end of his orbit (Firstfruits, 2001) ISBN 9810443293
- squatting quietly (Firstfruits, 2000) ISBN 981042826X
eBook
- Fires (Book Merah, 2009) ASIN: B002P8MPK8, Kindle Edition
Chapbooks
- You Cannot Count Smoke (Math Paper Press, 2011) ISBN 9789810898380
- The Boy With The Flower That Grew Out Of His Ass (Math Paper Press, 2007) ISBN 9789810583873
Awards
- Singapore Literature Prize (2006)
- National Arts Council's Young Artist Award (Singapore, 2005)
- Golden Point Award (Singapore, 2004)
References
- ^ Writer's website
- ^ TIME Magazine (Asia Edition)
- ^ National Library, Singapore
- ^ Patke, Rajeev S. and and Philip Holden. "Contemporary poetry 1990-2008." The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010. 185.
- ^ Holden, Philip, Angelia Poon and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, eds. "Section 2 (1965-1990): Introduction." Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature. Singapore: NUS Press/NAC, 2009. 370-371.
- ^ Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature. Singapore: NUS Press/NAC, 2009. 370-371.
- ^ Thumboo, Edwin. "Introduction" IN Cyril Wong's Squatting Quietly. Singapore: Firstfruits, 2000. 9.
- ^ Phillips, John. "The Future of the Past: Archiving Singapore." Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. Ed. Mark Crinson. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 160.
- ^ TIME Magazine (Asia Edition)
- ^ "The New Poetry of Singapore." Sharing Borders: Studies in Contemporary Singaporean-Malaysian Literature II. Ed. Gwee Li Sui. Singapore: NLB/NAC 2009. 250.
- ^ Singh, Kirpal. "Poetic Meditations: Two Singaporean Poets and a Personal Reflection." Kunapipi. Vol. XXXII No. 1-2 Dec. 2010. 109-110.
- ^ Jeyam, Leonard. "The Poetry of Personal Revelation: Reviewing Cyril Wong's Unmarked Treasure." SARE. No. 47 Apr. 2006/07. 99.
External links
- "Into The Abyss We Go", Quarterly Literary Review Singapore
- "In dreams: Cyril Wong's Oneiros", Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
- "Excess Baggage and Claim (Review)", ABC Radio National
- Postcolonial Web: Singaporean Literature
- Audio recordings at The Cortland Review
- Wong's poetry in The Other Voices International Project
- More poems in The Drunken Boat
- More in Shampoo
- More in Cordite
- Poems and prose in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore
- A long poem in Criticine
Categories:- Living people
- 1977 births
- Singaporean poets
- LGBT people from Singapore
- Singaporean people of Chinese descent
- Gay writers
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