Mystery and instinct

We are often taught in school that a poem is like a watch, an artificer’s construction and feat of engineering — take apart the mechanics and we can understand how it works. In this mode, the poem is also a puzzle: break down its logic and arrive at the answer.

On some level this is useful, and even true, but it is not how I like to write. To make a poem is not simply reverse-engineering a desired outcome; it is not fundamentally assembly. I think magic is key, and the magic happens when one relies on instinct — instinct, and a mysterious access to some larger animating force distinct from one’s rational processes. It is a kind of double consciousness, at once lucid and dreaming.

Instead of starting with a proposition, as if planning for a lecture, one must deliberately make room for mystery — then navigate this space with instinct and intuition. Often, for me, this reveals itself via image. Try being a little mystical about it. Subject yourself to mystery. Let the images come and see where they take you.

Discipline and patience

To write a poem one must see things, must locate truth in surprising places. To see well requires discipline. Living in this moment entails seeing far more than what we can process. We are inundated with images. The contemporary instinct is to gorge ourselves on image to a degree where digestion is impossible; we have image fatigue and meaning fatigue. There is simply too much to see.

What a poem can offer is a little pocket of quiet amidst all this noise. Entering into the world of the poem, one finds space: space to see without encumberment, to draw connections, to become new. This space exists because a poem is a world contained in itself. The reader enters and is surprised.

In order to make this world real, a poet must whittle down what they see. I think part of this boils down to skill, which can be practised — when you let the images come, resist committing to what is familiar, because the power of a poem is often located in the distance between what is placed side by side. Be honest with yourself about whether an image is carrying real weight or not, then be ruthless.

But it also boils down to patience; we can only see within our own limits, and it takes time and living to stretch those limits in any meaningful way. To borrow from Rilke, try to resist numbering and counting your writing life. Instead let yourself ripen like a tree.

Intimacy and vulnerability

To write a poem is to create conditions of intimacy so that the reader may enter and be, if not transformed, at least met where they are. There is something about the compressed power of a poem that generates a commensurate emotional response — you’re at close quarters with the language. It is a brief and intense conspiracy between writer and reader, a love affair that plays out on the page.

Creating this intimacy requires taking a risk. It’s no good thinking in propositions, in narratives of imperative and familiarity and expectation — the reader is jolted into closeness by image surprise. But the risk is that you might fail. You might (you will) write a lot of bad poems. I certainly do. That’s fine; to be a writer is to persist in taking meaningful risks. You will, after all, always risk being read wrongly, or in ways you don’t want to be read, or not read at all. That’s fine too. Move towards intimacy anyway.

The precondition of intimacy is vulnerability. Every poet I admire is able to access the emotional core of silence, the thing that comes before language and even before image; the reader feels because the poet feels, not merely gestures at feeling. So we must first be vulnerable with ourselves.

And true vulnerability is always surprising in its honesty, an honesty specific to the moment or issue at hand — it is always defamiliarising, because in that moment you are being made new. You have shed the old protective layers to become something that, before the shedding, you have not allowed yourself to be. I think this is what we owe and what we gain when we write.

Lisabelle Tay is a Singaporean writer and poet. Her poetry appears in Anthropocene, Bad Lilies, and elsewhere, including New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Boy, 2022); her debut pamphlet was Pilgrim (The Emma Press, 2021). Her fiction appears in Sine Theta Magazine and elsewhere, including NO FLASH (National Gallery Singapore, 2024). She was part of the 2023 Black List Feature Lab with her screenplay MOMO, which is currently in development.

We are delighted to host four writers in virtual residence, with support from the National Arts Council of Singapore. Joyce Chua, Marylyn Tan, Lisabelle Tay and Jerrold Yam will be in virtual residence from June to December 2024.