Memories from 2001, KL + Verbal Deluxe

I was up til 4am last night looking over the master copies of the old Poetikas, reading the poems and looking at the pics... scanning the names... surprising myself at the dates (the first issue came out in June 2001, barely two months after I moved here and started my new job as a ghostwriter in an office somewhere in Ampang... it got a bit nostalgic, I have to admit... I was remembering all the people I had met through Poetika, and the whirlwind of activity that was happening around that time.

It was when Silvervfish was still new to Bangsar Baru--I met my flatmates Pang, Hari and Danny there; also good friends Sharanya and Zedeck; Amir (who introduced me to Raman) used to go there all the time (I think he still does) and was plotting world domination (I think he still does) with Dhojee, Amri and Irman; I was introduced by Raman to Antares, Alfian Sa'at, Sharaad K, Alex Yong, Sharon B, Faisal Tehrani (before he went all fundie). That was also the time when I went to Peter Hassan's Acoustic Jam gigs at Commonwealth Club and played my first open mic in KL, where I met many good muso friends whom I still keep in touch with today--Sei Hon, Aziz, Azmyl, Peter H, Markiza, Pete Teo, Aidil from Couple. All the time while sharing a little room in a terrace house in Setiawangsa with my eldest brother. (I slept on a foam mattress that I had to lay on the tiled floor every night). And then I started writing theatre reviews through which I made my first few enemies--but thankfully I made more good friends: Lorna T, the Five Arts guys, the Nyoba guys, the Gamelan club, etc. By the time I stopped putting out Poetika (last issue was dated August 2002), I had met so many people. Ah...

After reading the old Poetikas, I spent an hour in bed wide-eyed, my mind flooded with memories. Good ones. And also some not-so-good ones (those who have read "Love In The Post Nicotine Age" in Silverfish New Writing 1 would know what I mean).

Still, it all seems quite strange.

All these years, I've always considered myself as an outsider in KL that I never really realised how ensconced I really am in the local scene. I've been here pretty long, not as long as some others, but it's still three years shy of a decade. Ah... still feels strange though... can't help it.

I wish I'd been the type to take photos and blog more often. But I've never been able to do it (well, until now) because I was too busy running around trying to do as much as possible. I've always fancied myself a kind of nomad. One with a little burro. And a wide-brimmed hat. Travelling from village to village selling worn out folktales. LOL.

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Anyway, the collection of Poetika issues one to twelve (actually only eleven in total--issue seven never came out and the twelfth issue was accidentally numbered eleven) is coming along.

I'm typing it all out by hand, LOL, since I've lost the soft copies of all the original contributions, plus the old Poetika email account no longer works so I can no longer retrieve the original files off the Internet.

It's tiring work but it's nice too to get reacquainted with the writings. For such a little zine, there's actually a lot of stuff. I'm quite surprised by how much stuff got published in Poetika.

The quality of the writings is rather inconsistent, to be honest. But I've always maintained that Poetika is just a platform for publishing creative work. No matter how good or bad, Poetika embraces (albeit with a few edits every now and then--it's not 100% free of interference) the strata. It's no arbiter of standards. Let QLRS and all the other sites and university-funded journals do the critical evaluations of the literary merits of the cultural significance of the discursive relevance of the unparalleled emotionally-devastating and intellectually-skyscraping aesthetic achievements of such-and-such and so-and-so and thus-and-thus.

LOL.

Poetika had a lot of very personal, simple, heartfelt poems. Some funny. Some sad. But mostly wistful. And melancholy... that most conducive mood to writing poetry. LOL.

Five years later, collecting the new batch of contributions for issue thirteen of Poetika, I'm glad to say it's much the same. It's kind of reassuring to know that a lot of people reserve the most careful aspects of their language for poetry. It's still the hardest literary form to master. No wonder so many people love it so (un)erringly.

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Oh yes. One last thing for today--sorry for making this entry such a long-winded one. I'm in the middle of negotiations right now to organise a regular reading event, tentatively to be called "Verbal Deluxe" at The Attic KL, Jalan Bangkung, Bukit Bandaraya, Bangsar. It's a great opprtunity for the local scene. The thing is I don't have time to do it because I'm trying to focus more on bringing Poetika out (aside from dayjob, working on my album, novel, and Troubadours events--phew!).

So anyone who's interested to do it, please email me at: poetikamalaysia@gmail.com

It's really quite simple actually. Just need to be a bit rajin and have a gung ho attitude towards the whole thing. I can help out a bit in the beginning but that's about it.