“In the early '80s, I spent a year working on a verse-play -- based on the life of Anne Maguire (whose sister, Mairead, founded the Peace People movement after Anne took her own life). Anne's three children were killed on the pavement as she was wheeling the pram one day in 1976 by an IRA fugitive's getaway car -- the driver fatally shot by a British soldier; this singular incident crystallized for me so much of the terror then in the air. Writing was a way of keeping clear -- in the sense of fixing it, restoring it facet by facet, to clarity. Catching a moment of history like a fly in amber with the chorus of witnesses alive, outside. After all, poetry affords this license and extreme economy. I have no business, of course, to write about such matters, being a complete foreigner in Ireland. But you do it because it is nobody's business. What you write is nobody's business. Isn't that poetry? - "What You Write Is Nobody's Business": An Interview With Wong May (The Believer, May 2014)” PoetrySingapore Author:Wong May
“My relationship with my mother has a great deal to do with my relationship with my mother tongue. My mother always held me in her mouth, like a fiercely maternal animal -- but just so that she won't, can't, swallow me entirely, nor let me go. - "What You Write Is Nobody's Business": An Interview With Wong May (The Believer, May 2014)” PoetrySingapore Author:Wong May
“The poems are processional, station after station, a writing life. You write what's been handed out to you by life. You do not choose the itinerary. - "What You Write Is Nobody's Business": An Interview With Wong May (The Believer, May 2014)” PoetrySingapore Author:Wong May
“By changing our habitual way of reading poetry, we change our way of reading the world, and vice versa. - "What You Write Is Nobody's Business": An Interview With Wong May (The Believer, May 2014)” PoetrySingapore Author:Wong May
“I am very chary -- and weary of the poetry of men and women of letters who "dig" -- with a "Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun." I read poetry to forget that I am reading. I write poetry to forget that I am writing. - "What You Write Is Nobody's Business": An Interview With Wong May (The Believer, May 2014)” PoetrySingapore Author:Wong May
“Looking back on my life, I’d say I am grateful to my two sons for having brought me up. It could not have been easy—for them or for their father. For me it was a “Poetry Workshop,” a way of doing poetry by another means (in no sense a continuation of Iowa)—as well as the sort of upbringing I never got from my mother. As luck would have it, I had a poet, a classical poet, for a mother. She didn’t write free verse; she wrote poetry until the last years of her life in the classical Chinese style. So a lot of work was done for me—when you imbibe Tang and Sung poets with a mother who chanted verses on the balcony in the moonlight.” PoetrySingapore Author:Wong May