Infinity Diary

by Cyril Wong

This volume of poems by Cyril Wong, one of the leading figures of poetry in Singapore, reflects the many ways in which love between two men can unfold, balancing emotional outpourings with meditations on the nature of relationships. The poetry punctures the sometimes oppressive reality of life in a city that is hypermodern yet far from free and, through twists and turns, ultimately lifts the reader to a place beyond pleasure and pain. Sensual, anecdotal and, of course, confessional, Infinity Diary charts an evolution in the work of one of Asia’s most intimate English-language poets.
 

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2020

About the author

Cyril Wong is a two-time Singapore Literature Prize-winning poet and the recipient of the Singapore National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature. His books include poetry collections Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light (2007) and The Lover’s Inventory (2015), novels The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza (2013) and This Side of Heaven (2020), and fiction collection Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me (2014). He completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012. His works have been featured in the Norton anthology, Language for a New Century, in Chinese Erotic Poems by Everyman’s Library, and in magazines and journals around the world. His writings have been translated into Turkish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese and Japanese.

Reviews

[Andrew H · Rating 4 out of 5]

When will publishers realise that sending books out to social media influencers might do more damage than good? As Pope stated with typical precision in An Essay on Criticism, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” “An honest review” isn’t the point: any fool can have an honest opinion. A book deserves an intelligent response.

According to an Indian reviewer, who presumably received a copy of Infinity Diary from Seagull books (India), this latest work by Cyril Wong is “quite like someone’s diary.” I can only wonder at the diaries read by this reviewer, for Infinity Diary is unlike any common diary that I have read and is anything but a piece of writing “rough around the edges.” And a reader is not asked to become a voyeur of “Queer angst”. In making this judgement, a popular opinion has been read into the book: Cyril Wong is Singapore’s first Confessional poet, so this book must be a typical example of confessional writing – like “Rupi Kaur in places" – and shows “a surfeit of the confessional mode." Really? Infinity Diary is a light year away from the early Cyril Wong, but then, I doubt that the “honest reviewer” has read any Cyril Wong before 2021, let alone all of Cyril Wong!

Does this matter. Sadly, it does. Cyril Wong is a poet of quality, but he has never found the audience that he deserves. Why? Because his work, published as it is (by gutsy publishers) in Singapore, is hard to obtain – shipping it to the UK, for example, is expensive and prohibitive. Infinity Diary is the first work (of poetry) to be easily obtainable in the UK and USA (Waterstones, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble stock it). For many, this will be an introduction to Cyril Wong – a difficult introduction – and reviews in the wrong key do a disservice.

So, what is Infinity Diary? It is a collection of poems in the confessional mode, like the end of his orbit (2002). But Wong is not Confessional in the usual sense: Confessionalism is a political stance taken against state-dictated poetical norms in Singapore. Writing personally from the intimate self is an act of defiance not of personal indulgence – it is also a pointed response to a restrictive Catholic upbringing. (The term Confessional is used so freely these days that we have almost forgotten its roots: sitting in the gloom, in a coffin-like box, confessing sins with a sense of shame). Infinity Diary is a development beyond Satori Blues which explores time (2011) and Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light (2007) which explores personal history through mythology in a manner reminiscent of Louise Gluck. In fact, Infinity Diary strikes a chord with Louise Gluck in many ways, in its polished brevity, in its intensity, and in its focus on a narrative structural arc.

A diary records many masks, aspects of a person, and Infinity Diary offers many views of Cyril Wong, bad Buddhist, housewife-poet, nonformist citizen, melancholic gay, selves that refuse to add up. Like Marechera in Cemetery of Mind, Cyril Wong is acutely aware that individuals do not add up. At one point, he recounts being in Edinburgh with Sontag: she is displeased that her biography, in the literary programme, is wrong. How comical. Are our biographies ever correct? And should we expect them to be? The word diary has its roots in day, and deeper, in light, to shine daily. In a diary, a person seeks light and shadows, forms of themselves. Enlightenment, perhaps.

In writing about Louise Gluck, Cyril Wong observes that the plot in her later (now middle) work “exists because of something at stake in the poet’s personal life.” That is a very apposite phrase for Infinity Diary for at the heart of the book is a relationship, its birth, its existence, its ending, and from that relationship thoughts, sensations, and the universe emerge. The book is wide ranging in its forms, from meditations to poetical essays, from ruminations to satirical attacks. The only decent reviews so far place Cyril Wong in relation to Baudelaire, Doty and Snyder. Such is little more than hype designed to re-orientate the book towards a European and American audience. Cyril Wong has little in common with any of these poets. His work has not grown out of Pound, like Snyder, nor Whitman, like Doty. Thom Gunn, though he liked Snyder’s work, mocked what he called the Snyder poem, a tone fixed, immediately recognisable. The same is true of Doty. Cyril Wong, as a poet, has never settled for one mode or another, for one voice, for the Wong poem. And that becomes the challenge of Infinity Diary -- its versatility, its restlessness, its many mirrors tilted towards light and imagery; a poetry that has roots proudly in Singapore and branches that thread into world poetics. Revising Descartes at one point, a phrase drifts into this diary: "I think and feel therefore I am." That makes a good entry point ...

[Ksitigarbha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brave, intimate, multifaceted and deeply spiritual look at same-sex love through a sharp and almost narcissistically confessional lens. More than the sum of its parts, this book will alter, shock, expand and even elevate the imagination, if one lets it. A searing and poignant reading experience.

[Julie Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A volume of poetry full of light and love in relation to the impermanence of even the most intimate of relationships and a call for reflection and meditative stillness in a world of sorrow and increasing division. Stretching across different styles or modes of poetic declaration, here is poetry that sings to the heart, urging the heart to sing in return with not only joy and love but also melancholy and a restless hope for spiritual transcendence.

[Henry Bones · Rating 5 out of 5]

A startling work of gay or queer confessional verse that is also about the ephemerality of relationships and the opportunities that time grants us to transcend not only our inward sufferings and the desirous self but also the passing of time.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I’m a poet of intangible things, so my audience doesn’t quite exist; their absence is the glare from the newly minted pavement under the unbearable sun where the playground was demolished."

RATING: 2.5/5

In a lot of ways, the title is perfectly suited to this collection. It does read quite like someone's diary, intimate and slightly rough around the edges. At times an uncut gem, requiring a bit of polish and sharpened lines. A reader runs the risk of appearing like a voyeur, a peeping tom into the private and the unsaid, without a screen or filter in place. There is ache here, deep longing. Queer angst is a running aesthetic. The pieces themselves are varied. From short, standard poems to prose poetry to what I would like to call verse essays. I was impressed by the ease with which Wong flits between these various kinds of writing. I have to say though, as the rating indicates, that this collection sadly did not meet my expectations; I was disappointed. The short poems left me cold, reminiscent of Rupi Kaur in places. They were not my cup of tea at all. The longer pieces were more up my lane. They had nice images coupled with great use of metaphors. I liked "Vakkali Refractions" for its experimentation. The piece is in two separate columns that run parallel to each other (reminiscent of Kandasamy). The titular piece, "Infinity Diary", also left a mark because of its expressiveness, its surfeit of the confessional mode. So in the end, one of those cases where it's not the book but me.



(I received a finished copy of the book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

[Lawrence Pettener · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toward the beginning of his most recent (and thirteenth) collection, Singaporean poet Cyril Wong writes: “I’m a poet of intangible things, so the audience doesn’t quite exist.” This latter assertion is belied by numerous awards, steady book sales and high output over the last twenty years.

The prospect of “infinity” in the collection’s title and that of its longest poem is one which might easily put the prospective reader off. However, there is no real danger of infinity being stretched too far by Wong, who turns instead to terse observations in the opening poem “Clementi”. On seeing a toddler being carried down some steps, he says:

You always exclaim how cute he
is—the child, not the man—but I can only see what he’ll look like
in his dotage.


The collection’s title, along with poems relating to infinity, reflect the death of the poet’s long-term male relationship partner.

With that in mind, the high point of the collection may well be “Between You and Infinity”, its short lines ratcheting up the tempo, with iambic blocks averaging thirteen lines, interspersed with formal, nautically themed haiku, which comply initially with the strict 5-7-5 syllable count before easing off toward the end of the piece. This is an interesting approach to poetic form. Its main stanzas loosely reflect sonnets, though one stanza seems to awkwardly dodge the form’s fourteen lines. Wong’s sudden intermittent placing of fully rhyming stanzas into non-rhyming free verse after the middle of the piece jars slightly.

Heightened romantic moods lead to delightful transpersonal moments, such as this perfect haiku:

When we love like this,
we’re all the broken boys and
our own religion.

The poem’s final stanzas view the transpersonal via the question of self and non-self:

… the mind is not a house now, but its own metaphor…

no palisades
of selfhood to fracture
vision.

Over a considerable period, Wong’s poetry has dealt with issues of self and non-selfhood through the lens of Buddhist practice. If self-absorption were present in this work, the poet’s celebratory love for his partner and the universe might begin to allay it. Instead, dissolution of self here results in connection, reaching bodhisattva territory with:

I think I cried because it wasn’t just
for me that I was sad, but for everyone
forgotten and alone.

The title poem comprises further assertions on relationships, in prose poetry, interspersed with shorter italicized domestic scenarios. Wong rails passionately against the sort of dualistic vision which Buddhist meditation practice aims to eradicate:

We are not separate from the movement of desire; no we distinct from want, which has never
been a door waiting to be opened but wheels within wheels.

The “wheels” imagery will trigger multiple associations for Buddhists, that religion’s forms comprising part of Wong’s inherited culture. This, however, is an emphatically post-religious sensibility echoing fifties’ and sixties’ American Beat poets Snyder, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg and the rest; Wong’s insights arise from meditation practice rather than religious trappings.

In this, Wong could be seen to be following in the footsteps of American TS Eliot prizewinner Mark Doty, whose collection Atlantis (1995) especially, also charts the death of the poet’s male partner and is similarly focused through the lens of Buddhist teachings and practice.

Both poets build their stanzas slowly; whereas Doty details colour and light, Wong conjectures as a secular Buddhist without any whiff of preachiness. Far from it; whereas he questions and asserts widely in prose form, “everything to do with the mind”, Doty is lyrical and ludic. Whereas both poets circle back repeatedly on the tenderness of their respective relationships, Wong weaves Buddhist emptiness teachings into these reflections to good effect, here from “False Labors”:

Our life together… hobbling free
of freedom, self, emotional fixities.

While many poets address life’s grand themes elliptically, Wong repeatedly focuses on love and death head-on, as here in “Between You and Infinity”:

you
telling me to discard your ashes
at Changi beach; I reply that I’d
eat them instead.

Not many poets can sustain that level of intensity, let alone over the hundred and fifty pages this book contains.

That said, the sheer length of this poetry collection might put some readers off. Some parts of the middle poems—”Vakkali Refractions”, “Plainspeak” even—could probably have been left out without incurring much if any damage to the whole.

“Dear Stupid Straight People” goes directly to the point, eviscerating its title’s ambiguous demographic, their unexamined prejudices and othering of gay people and experience:

Stupid straight people killing stupid straight people: you must admit, that’s poetry.

Wong’s work has divided opinions in Singapore, where gay sex is criminalised. In a similar vein, the poem “Plainspeak” is a collage of declaratory pronouncements, including:

When society tells you what you are is wrong, it does something to you.

Fifteen uninterrupted minutes or more with Wong’s work can bring the reader directly into its moment through heightened, concentrated feeling. This worked for me in reading the title poem and “Between You and Infinity” in particular. Wong stays true to his experience in these, to produce work which is by turns brittle and tender, resonant and compelling.

Unusual in contemporary published poetry, Cyril Wong’s exploration of the mind and notions of self are thoroughgoing and tireless. What is more, he is unafraid to withstand real emotion as a means of seeing clearly.