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View all search resultsFinding Singapore, with an app & some poems
Muse: At least 10 poems about the Merlion are featured on the Text in the City app
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Muse: At least 10 poems about the Merlion are featured on the Text in the City app.
The free Text in the City app uses poems to guide people through Singapore, offering nostalgic perspectives and forgotten histories of the city-state.
William Phuan, director of The Arts House, which promotes local literature, film, performing and visual arts, said that they made the app to turn more people on to the island's poets.
'I feel we really have to get [the poems] out there. You have to make it easier and accessible. The more people read, they will know that we have very good writers, very good poems, very good literary works. We should be reading them,' Phuan said during an interview at the Singapore Writers Festival in November.
The app, which divides the city into six sectors, features about 100 poems penned by 50 noted poets writing in Chinese, English, Malay or Tamil.
Works have been geotagged to Google Maps, allowing users to navigate Singapore's streets, beaches and parks to discover the places that inspired the works.
Select a poem within the app and you have several options. There are histories as well as then-and-now photos of the locations, courtesy of the Singapore National Archives. Also available is the full text of the poems in English and the original language, as appropriate.
Buried in the geotagged poems are three 'poetry walks' ' Bras Basah, Civic Center, and Chinatown ' although they're a little hard to find.
People can also write and geotag their own poems and upload them through the app or its companion website. There is a cash-prize context to encourage would-be writers.
'In terms of poetry, people still look at it as an elitist way of writing,' Phuan says. 'So we thought of using the theme of place [to] make it an accessible point of entry for people. They will realize that poetry is very relevant to their daily lives because it's talking about places that everyone in Singapore is familiar with.'
The curated works present Singapore as a palimpsest ' a text of modernity written over a subtext of a remembrance of things past.
'Some of the poems are quite bittersweet and quite poignant, because they talk about memories and loss and things that have gone through so much change that we don't recognize them anymore,' Phuan says.
As an example, he cites one of his favorite poems from the app, The Children of Robinson Road, written in Tamil by KTM Iqbal and translated into English.
The street, once 'pleasantly quiet', according to the app, used to bridge Collyer Quay and the Tanjong Pagar Docks. Now it's at the heart of Singapore's central business district.
Iqbal, who came to Singapore from India in 1951 at the age of 11, worked in banking and penned seven poetry collections. He writes poignantly, Phuan says. 'At the end he is just looking back at memories - at something that's long gone ' but he recognizes a friend. It taps into the whole sense of nostalgia and this sense of how far we've come.'
At least ten poems focus on Singapore's Merlion. 'It seems to be a certain kind of rite of passage to write about the Merlion if you're a Singaporean writer worth his or her salt,' says the always delightful and frequently provocative Alfian Sa'at, a Singaporean poet of Malay heritage, in the audio introduction to his own poem about the iconic statue.
While most of the poems explore central Singapore, notable works off the beaten track include Xi Ni Er's remarkable Henceforth This Would Be An Island Without Cockerel Crows, about the mass extermination of birds on Pulau Ubin, off the city's northeast coast.
An unexpected pleasure the app provides is audio recordings of the poets reading and sometimes commenting on their works. So plug in your buds, walk the streets and immerse yourself in Singapore as envisioned by the poets.
You might venture to Singapore's west coast and enjoy Heng Siok Tian's playful Coast (Labrador Park), written from the point of view of a hermit crab busy people-watching in the eponymous park:
'will I too,
one day,
be just a hermit crab
in a test tube or lab jar?
Will they clone me or the
hermit in me?'
_______________
The Text in the City Android and Apple apps are free. For more information, visit textinthecity.sg. The writer was a guest of the Singapore Writer's Festival.
