Poet in motion (or why the world needs a Marc Nair)

LONDON — I had just attended my very first spoken word session somewhere in London’s Shoreditch district, and let’s just say I was badly in need of a coffee fix.

It was at the end of a particularly long day on the Costa Cultural Exchange Programme, a five-day literary expedition organised by Costa Coffee in the British capital, and I was feeling particularly pensive after an evening watching scores of poetry enthusiasts perform.

Someone talked about the atrocities of the war in Syria, another ranted about England, yet another just… rattled off things on his mind. While I admired their efforts, let’s just say this noob was not particularly impressed with her virgin encounter with the spoken word scene.

After the event, I had casually wondered aloud to my exchange programme travel companion, Singaporean poet Marc Nair, why it had been difficult for yours truly, a writer and a literature enthusiast, to be moved by the live poetry performance I had just seen.

He paused, stared straight at me, and said, “You studied Comparative Literature. You are in the top per cent of cynical.”

THE CYNIC’S VIEW

I laughed at the time, but I also couldn’t shake the feeling that he was right; that I’ve become a hardened cynic, when it comes to poetry, without even realising it.

How could I not be, when I was already surrounded by the voices of some of the brightest, most articulate and creative voices in literature — and the rest of the arts — of the last two millennia, which nowadays are only a click away on our mobile devices.

And even if you don’t have any interest in “art”, the world of pop culture has its own masterful wordsmiths and storytellers in their own right, whether it’s Adele or A-Mei Chang, or the writers of Jessica Jones, Downton Abbey, Empire, Spotlight and Room.

So I began to wonder, where do poets, of the sort I saw at Shoreditch, fit in?

Thankfully, I was hanging out with one for five days. Then and there, I christened my new poet buddy Nair my personal case study on poets.

The Costa Cultural Exchange Programme was heavily skewed towards the literary world — we had met the likes of superstar literary agent Simon Trewin and this year’s Costa Book Of The Year winner Frances Hardinge — yet some of my most memorable conversations with Nair weren’t remotely related to poetry, or even literature.

Over dinner and drinks, and long car rides, we talked about the challenges of beard hygiene, about his cat Chubs, who is really much slimmer than his name unfairly suggests, and about a particularly nasty incident that took place during one of his trips to India, that he’s made me swear not to repeat in a national newspaper. (It involved some food that had gone bad, and a very long bus ride.)

But this, after all, was a man who had quit his stable, well-paying career as a teacher at a junior college to pursue poetry full-time. It’s not every day you get to meet someone like him in Singapore and pose the question: Why do you do what you do?

“In some ways, I don’t think I can change what I do, it is who I am,” Nair shared. “I am at this stage where I am grateful for the chance to do what I love, and people always tell me that, like ‘you are so lucky’. They see the ability to do something that is not bound by (your profession). A poet has this connotation of freedom, of possibilities, of being almost hedonistic in your choice of career. That is who I am and what I know.”

POET AS BUSY BEE

I could see what he meant. Even when he was exhausted from a long day of activities, I could sense his energy and excitement as we discussed ideas for a novel, the problems plaguing Singapore’s literary scene, as well as his many literary, music and photography-related projects.

Nair is not one those writers who sits in his underwear chain-smoking and drinking whiskey — okay, maybe he does love his whiskeys — looking up words in the dictionary. He puts himself out in the world, crafting, building, thinking, pushing and collaborating, if only to see if he finds people who understand. Indeed, he always seems to be busy outside: Last year, he spoke about poetry at TEDxSingapore, he’s taking part at a few events at the Singapore Writers Festival’s Words Go Round programme for students and teachers, and you can even spot him playing Jesus in photographer Eugene Soh’s new exhibition Second Coming.

And after publishing five volumes of poetry — with plans to release Spomenik, his new collection of poetry and photographs from the Balkans, next month — Nair is no longer naive about the challenges that come with being a part of the literary industry.

“I understood this before coming on. I have known this for a few years already. I am no longer bright-eyed and completely innocent. But to see that poetry is no longer doing well in the UK, where it is supposed to be the bastion of Literature, is a bit depressing,” Nair mused (after we had met Trewin, who told us that even famous award-winning poets in the United Kingdom often don’t sell many more than one or two thousand books).

Still, there are people who do appreciate what Nair does. During our trip, we visited a secondary school in Greenwich, London, where he read his poetry to an auditorium filled with underprivileged 15-year-old schoolgirls. Sitting in the back of the auditorium, I was struck by his performance in a way the Shoreditch poets weren’t able to.

There was something in the manner of his delivery that made each word come alive as he spoke, dancing around the recesses of your mind, lingering long after each sound disappeared from the tip of his tongue.

LESSON LEARNT

Clearly, the students felt the same. To my surprise, and perhaps his own, the girls sat in rapt attention for 45 minutes as he performed pieces mocking the overuse of cliches, television for dogs and Britney Spears, applauding loudly when he finished his session. The next day, the girls’ teacher also sent Nair a text, telling him that she had found her students taking a stab at writing their own poetry in the school courtyard.

And there it was in a small part of London, halfway around the world from Singapore: Evidence that the world needed the likes of Nair

after all.

“The fact that you’re able to (have an) impact on people, maybe that is why I keep doing performance poetry,” Nair said later to me. “There is a visceral, immediate impact that you might not get with a novel. I think performance poetry has its own blessings of people coming up to you and going, ‘that is amazing’. It’s affirming to know that people from different countries and different contexts can understand what we are doing.”

And perhaps, as I discovered about myself, even the most cynical among us yearn to be moved.

“The world is so large. There are so many voices out there, so many stories, so many people with a variety of things to say and everything is valid,” he said. “Are my stories more important than yours, or are they just as important? Yes, they are just as important. It’s about the craft and the stories, putting in time to hone your work. That is very important,” he said. “I don’t want to take over the world. But I do want more people to read my works and hear me, because I believe I have something to say.”

Yes, my initial experience with poetry at Shoreditch may have not been a pleasant one, but perhaps it’s time to give it another go and get a proper poetry fix back in Singapore. But first, I’ll have to reach for a dictionary to find out what Nair’s book title Spomenik means.

Marc Nair will perform an excerpt from his upcoming book Spomenik, as well as share notes from his trip to London, at the Costa Coffee with Marc Nair session on Feb 20, 3pm to 5pm at Costa Coffee, Raffles City Shopping Centre. Admission is free, but pre-registration is required at http://facebook.com/costacoffeesingapore.