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Seven Studies for a Self Portrait
"Seven Studies for a Self Portrait," Jee Leong Koh's third book of poems, subjects the self to an increasingly complex series of personal investments and investigations. Ever-evolving, ever-improvisatory, the self appears first as a suite of seven ekphrastic poems, then as free verse profiles, riddles, sonnet sequences, and finally a divan of forty-nine ghazals. The discovery the book makes at the end is that the self sees itself best when it is not by itself. "Seven Studies for a Self Portrait," "Profiles," "I Am My Names," "What We Call Vegetables," "Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet," "Bull Eclogues" and "A Lover's Recourse."
- GenresPoetry
124 pages, Paperback
First published January 6, 2011
25 people want to read
About the author
Jee Leong Koh
24 books186 followersJee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK's Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the USA. His hybrid work of fiction, Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet, won the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction. He was also shortlisted for the prize for The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press/Awai Books) and Connor and Seal (Sibling Rivalry). His second Carcanet book, Inspector Inspector, was published in late 2022.
Koh's work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, Russian, and Latvian. Originally from Singapore, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound, the indie press Gaudy Boy, and the journal of Asian writing and art SUSPECT.
Koh's work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, Russian, and Latvian. Originally from Singapore, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound, the indie press Gaudy Boy, and the journal of Asian writing and art SUSPECT.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 7, 2011
Jee Leong Koh: The Poet as Artist
Jee Leong Koh is one of the more sensitively creative poets writing today. Those who have read his ecstatically beautiful collection of his poems - EQUAL TO THE EARTH - know his talent well. But with this new collection - SEVEN STUDIES FOR A SELF PORTRAIT - he introduces even more evidence that not only is he a poet of great style and substance, but his is also a painter of poetic images whose core is self investigation and observation with few peers.
Technically speaking this book of poems is divided into seven sections. the first section 'Seven Studies for a Self Portrait' is a set of ekphrastic poems (Note: Ekphrasis is the graphic, often dramatic description of a visual work of art. In ancient times it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience) - each 'Study' referencing a painter (Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Schiele, Kahlo, Warhol, Morimura) in which he defines himself in the style of each painter. An example follows:
Study #4: Egon Schiele
Look at me, cock in my claws,
combcrimson from scratching.
Skinny arms kink around my back
but can't kill the screeching itch.
The hand can't scratch its bones.
I snap off the blackened arrows
but their featherless beaks stab
the crying katydids, their broken
feet catch in the scattered flesh.
I stretch the canvas on the rack.
The second section, 'Profiles', are free verse in form, interrelated and titled 'He Went', 'He Liked', 'He Had', 'He Knew', 'He Remembered', 'He Watched', and 'He Danced':
He Remembered
He estimated the cab fare
from sugar to quietus,
and carried the metal sum in his mouth
when he took his first trick home.
He still remembered the man
had excellent teeth, and how sweet
the stirring, and then
the disappearing
'I am my names' forms the third section where in seven poems he poses descriptions and follows each with a last line such as 'My names is Answer. I am a son.' or 'My name is Variable. I am a Chinese.' as though he has created riddles and then given us the answer. The next section, 'What we call vegetables' is a series of poems obeying many of the rules of sonnet writing, but breaking them into seven instead of fourteen lines, as in 'Stem':
Stem
We spar, we spear
softly, secretly,
your gut. We spare
most of you
our acrid smell.
A few get us.
Asparagus, Proust
says, perfumes
his chamber pot.
As do doctors.
As do saints.
And he then offers us full sonnets in the sections 'Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet' and 'Bull Ecologues', and completes his collection with what for this reader is the most emotionally charged and eloquent section, 'A Lover's Recourse', a series of forty nine ghazals (Note: 'a ghazal is a poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets and a refrain, with each line sharing the same meter. A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain. The form is ancient, originating in 6th century Arabic verse.') It is in these poems that Jee Leong Koh rhapsodizes on his sexuality and the result is an examination of the scope of joy and pain that love touches.
In another poet's hands these repeated collections of sevens, each section drawing on the study of poetic forms, would be considered an academic braggadocio, evidence that the poet knows his craft and must prove it. Not with Jee Leong Koh: each section teaches us, yes, but also bathes us in profound thoughts and emotions that just happened to be contained and controlled in forms the poet uses the way a painter changes brushes and media and pigment. Brilliant! The book design, multiple photographic fragments of the artist’s face, both photographed and designed by Stephanie Bart-Horvath is stunning.
Grady Harp
Jee Leong Koh is one of the more sensitively creative poets writing today. Those who have read his ecstatically beautiful collection of his poems - EQUAL TO THE EARTH - know his talent well. But with this new collection - SEVEN STUDIES FOR A SELF PORTRAIT - he introduces even more evidence that not only is he a poet of great style and substance, but his is also a painter of poetic images whose core is self investigation and observation with few peers.
Technically speaking this book of poems is divided into seven sections. the first section 'Seven Studies for a Self Portrait' is a set of ekphrastic poems (Note: Ekphrasis is the graphic, often dramatic description of a visual work of art. In ancient times it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience) - each 'Study' referencing a painter (Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Schiele, Kahlo, Warhol, Morimura) in which he defines himself in the style of each painter. An example follows:
Study #4: Egon Schiele
Look at me, cock in my claws,
combcrimson from scratching.
Skinny arms kink around my back
but can't kill the screeching itch.
The hand can't scratch its bones.
I snap off the blackened arrows
but their featherless beaks stab
the crying katydids, their broken
feet catch in the scattered flesh.
I stretch the canvas on the rack.
The second section, 'Profiles', are free verse in form, interrelated and titled 'He Went', 'He Liked', 'He Had', 'He Knew', 'He Remembered', 'He Watched', and 'He Danced':
He Remembered
He estimated the cab fare
from sugar to quietus,
and carried the metal sum in his mouth
when he took his first trick home.
He still remembered the man
had excellent teeth, and how sweet
the stirring, and then
the disappearing
'I am my names' forms the third section where in seven poems he poses descriptions and follows each with a last line such as 'My names is Answer. I am a son.' or 'My name is Variable. I am a Chinese.' as though he has created riddles and then given us the answer. The next section, 'What we call vegetables' is a series of poems obeying many of the rules of sonnet writing, but breaking them into seven instead of fourteen lines, as in 'Stem':
Stem
We spar, we spear
softly, secretly,
your gut. We spare
most of you
our acrid smell.
A few get us.
Asparagus, Proust
says, perfumes
his chamber pot.
As do doctors.
As do saints.
And he then offers us full sonnets in the sections 'Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet' and 'Bull Ecologues', and completes his collection with what for this reader is the most emotionally charged and eloquent section, 'A Lover's Recourse', a series of forty nine ghazals (Note: 'a ghazal is a poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets and a refrain, with each line sharing the same meter. A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain. The form is ancient, originating in 6th century Arabic verse.') It is in these poems that Jee Leong Koh rhapsodizes on his sexuality and the result is an examination of the scope of joy and pain that love touches.
In another poet's hands these repeated collections of sevens, each section drawing on the study of poetic forms, would be considered an academic braggadocio, evidence that the poet knows his craft and must prove it. Not with Jee Leong Koh: each section teaches us, yes, but also bathes us in profound thoughts and emotions that just happened to be contained and controlled in forms the poet uses the way a painter changes brushes and media and pigment. Brilliant! The book design, multiple photographic fragments of the artist’s face, both photographed and designed by Stephanie Bart-Horvath is stunning.
Grady Harp
Read
May 27, 2013"I wrote Seven Studies for a Self Portrait in two years. As I wrote, the number seven acquired and transformed its Christian meanings—the days of Creation, the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Eshuneutics, who reviewed my book, puts it well, “This silent structuring … evokes a tradition running from the mediaeval period and sets a context for the spiritual enquiries within the book.” Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from which my book got its epigraph, was an inspiration for the post-Christian enquiry.
As vital as the spiritual quest was for me, so was the musical composition that the number enabled. A sequence of seven poems has not only a beginning and an end, but also a well-defined middle. It also breaks up into two unequal parts—four and three—half of the sonnet’s proportions. The first six sequences in fact culminate in two sonnet sequences, one English, the other Italian. Breaking through and re-working that framework is the final set of 49 ghazals, each made up of seven couplets about love. The ghazals raise, in my imagination, a 7 x 7 x 7 cube. In planning this structure, I was thinking very much of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, in particular, the last game that the Magister Ludi builds from the floor plan of a Japanese house.
. . . I consider myself a lyric poet living in an anti-lyric age. The illusions of the lyric “I” have been well catalogued: the simulation of psychic wholeness, the privileging of atemporality, the masking of social injustice, the marginalization of the Other. The new social media reinforce the fragmentation of the self. And yet I think the lyric answers to some very deep human need for complex music made by the human voice. By looking at the self in various ways, I try in Seven Studies to rework the lyric for our highly self-conscious times.
I look at the self through various lenses in the book. The title sequence is written after master self-portraitists—Dürer, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Schiele, Kahlo, Warhol and Yasumasa Morimura. In contrast, the second sequence “Profiles” sketches the self sideways. “I Am My Names” is a series of riddles. “What We Call Vegetables” describes the organic basis of identity. I “translate” an unknown Mexican poet in one sonnet sequence, and speak as Ted Haggard, the Evangelical pastor accused of paying for gay sex, in another. The fragmentation of the self follows the example of Roland Barthes in the final ghazals, where I beg to be reconstituted by a lover-reader."
-from an interview by Wendy Chin-Tanner in the Lantern Review Blog.
As vital as the spiritual quest was for me, so was the musical composition that the number enabled. A sequence of seven poems has not only a beginning and an end, but also a well-defined middle. It also breaks up into two unequal parts—four and three—half of the sonnet’s proportions. The first six sequences in fact culminate in two sonnet sequences, one English, the other Italian. Breaking through and re-working that framework is the final set of 49 ghazals, each made up of seven couplets about love. The ghazals raise, in my imagination, a 7 x 7 x 7 cube. In planning this structure, I was thinking very much of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, in particular, the last game that the Magister Ludi builds from the floor plan of a Japanese house.
. . . I consider myself a lyric poet living in an anti-lyric age. The illusions of the lyric “I” have been well catalogued: the simulation of psychic wholeness, the privileging of atemporality, the masking of social injustice, the marginalization of the Other. The new social media reinforce the fragmentation of the self. And yet I think the lyric answers to some very deep human need for complex music made by the human voice. By looking at the self in various ways, I try in Seven Studies to rework the lyric for our highly self-conscious times.
I look at the self through various lenses in the book. The title sequence is written after master self-portraitists—Dürer, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Schiele, Kahlo, Warhol and Yasumasa Morimura. In contrast, the second sequence “Profiles” sketches the self sideways. “I Am My Names” is a series of riddles. “What We Call Vegetables” describes the organic basis of identity. I “translate” an unknown Mexican poet in one sonnet sequence, and speak as Ted Haggard, the Evangelical pastor accused of paying for gay sex, in another. The fragmentation of the self follows the example of Roland Barthes in the final ghazals, where I beg to be reconstituted by a lover-reader."
-from an interview by Wendy Chin-Tanner in the Lantern Review Blog.
February 18, 2012
Jee Leong Koh's latest collection Seven Studies For A Self Portrait is by far his best so far. I have always admired Jee for his form and attention to language.
Section One: Seven Studies imagines seven artists' lives. Each portrait is an intimate and surreal still life in verse. My favorites are portraits of Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, and Egon Shiele.
Section Two are more intimate still lifes about an anonymous "He"
In Section Three "I Am My Names" the speaker of these series of poems is trying to understand his place in the world, while confirming his identity.
"My name is Mystery. I am a homosexual."
"What burden does a birthplace lay on the shoulders of maturity?" asks the speaker in S.
A question we may ask ourselves more and more as we grow further away from our youth.
In What We Call Vegetables these sparse, eloquent lines, are nearly biblical. “We stem from hunger…” “We sample Adam and so his sons name us yams…” “We boat sperm, barreledcheeked, and blow blood.”
Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet & Bull Eclogues speak of the uncertainty and often desperation that populates our lives. These sonnets, from the meditative “Marriage” to the outrage of “Oracle,” are fantastic.
The final section, A Lover’s Recourse, is composed of a series of ghazals, that takes the reader on a journey through the every day events of the heart. Romantic, erotic, full of humor, pain and irony, was for me the most challenging section.
If I were to pick one line from the book that to me, summed up the complexity of Koh’s writing it would be from this last section:
“The world holding so many things, so many nothings,
is best represented by the body and its wounds.”
A wonderful collection from a writer that is always contemplating his world.
Section One: Seven Studies imagines seven artists' lives. Each portrait is an intimate and surreal still life in verse. My favorites are portraits of Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, and Egon Shiele.
Section Two are more intimate still lifes about an anonymous "He"
In Section Three "I Am My Names" the speaker of these series of poems is trying to understand his place in the world, while confirming his identity.
"My name is Mystery. I am a homosexual."
"What burden does a birthplace lay on the shoulders of maturity?" asks the speaker in S.
A question we may ask ourselves more and more as we grow further away from our youth.
In What We Call Vegetables these sparse, eloquent lines, are nearly biblical. “We stem from hunger…” “We sample Adam and so his sons name us yams…” “We boat sperm, barreledcheeked, and blow blood.”
Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet & Bull Eclogues speak of the uncertainty and often desperation that populates our lives. These sonnets, from the meditative “Marriage” to the outrage of “Oracle,” are fantastic.
The final section, A Lover’s Recourse, is composed of a series of ghazals, that takes the reader on a journey through the every day events of the heart. Romantic, erotic, full of humor, pain and irony, was for me the most challenging section.
If I were to pick one line from the book that to me, summed up the complexity of Koh’s writing it would be from this last section:
“The world holding so many things, so many nothings,
is best represented by the body and its wounds.”
A wonderful collection from a writer that is always contemplating his world.
April 3, 2011
This is an expertly written book. Its vision is shaped by 7 very different sequences, which add different dimensions to the search for identity. The opening artistic sequence is beautifully crafted, with words (sound and vision) painting images in touch with the chosen pictures. The poems on Kahlo and Schiele are graphic and emotional. The author also does vitriol well, dissecting false identities with a surgeon's knife. (Swift or Pope would have relished such moments).
The ghazals, which close the volume, bring a continual sense of openness: images work like refractions of light from a key source (image/word) or point of identity. "Seven Studies" is a de-light, technically accomplished, yet modest in its portrait of its subject,
such a wonderful departure from the bland and self-fulfilling free-verse that too often defines contemporary poetry. This is a volume by a poet with a soul, not an ego, who understands that a fluid universe is best shaped and experienced by well formed poems.
The ghazals, which close the volume, bring a continual sense of openness: images work like refractions of light from a key source (image/word) or point of identity. "Seven Studies" is a de-light, technically accomplished, yet modest in its portrait of its subject,
such a wonderful departure from the bland and self-fulfilling free-verse that too often defines contemporary poetry. This is a volume by a poet with a soul, not an ego, who understands that a fluid universe is best shaped and experienced by well formed poems.
January 3, 2014
Jee treads a fine line between circumspection and imprudence in this collection. He wisely avoids the confessional route, but sometimes says the same things too often. This double tendency becomes clear in the extended ghazal epic -- each poem strains against a desire to remain autonomous and a countervailing desire to be read in the light of all the others. The effect is a curious feeling: I emerged from reading these poems startled by the diversity of words that Jee coaxes on to the page, but still, ultimately, unmoved.
July 7, 2011
I did not enjoy this poetry collection at all. I found it boring and wandering. Of course, enjoyment of poetry is subjective, so that doesn't mean you shouldn't try it.
December 16, 2015
A slight, but enjoyably painful and playful collection. The best is saved for last.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews