Calling all Poets

Attention poetic factory workers of Malacca! You are invited to join the Malacca State Industry Workers Declamation Poetry Competition. Okay, it sounds more poetic in Bahasa: Sayembara Puisi Deklamasi Warga Industri Negeri Melaka. This is an effort of Dewan Bahasa & Pustaka Selatan together with Jabatan Kerja Tenaga Melaka and Pesatuan Penulis Melaka. Closing date is Sep 15, 2004. Call 07-2358522, 07-2365588, fax 07-2358686 or email: rar@dbp.gov.my. Nevermind that 99% of puisi deklamasi sounds like Squealer's odes to Napoleon, let’s hope that through this exercise some real blue collar poet, whose poem about beef patties might be rejected for not being declamatory enough, will not give up and will one day be heard. Meanwhile, up north, 50 poets from around the world have gathered to mumble their verses to one another around Malaysian sites in need of some soul: the Malaysian Tourism Centre, the Agricultural Park in Shah Alam and the Ministry of Finance. In their weekly declamation, preview the KL World Poetry Reading forum, as well as Thor Kah Hoong’s revisit to a bygone Brickfields, and a funky Japanese lighting gadget. This week is a veritable Literary Fest at Kakiseni. Zedeck Siew, who recently survived National Service, sat through four days of the Citigroup KL Lit Fest and found himself equally confused about his prescribed identity. Yes, more soul-searching from everybody’s favourite teenager. Jerome Kugan, who came back from a holiday in Jakarta, found himself smitten by the literary scene that could have been Malaysia’s, if only we had the hungry readership and feeding publishers. Speaking of which, allow us to offer you this delectable morsel. Leading Indonesian essayist, poet and writer Goenawan Mohamad has generously given a mystical tale of his for our humble little website. With this, we would like to launch Kakiseni Voices. Send in your poems and short stories; our favourite each month will be published on Kakiseni. The winner will receive fame and glory and a book prize. At the polls, 17% of you would rather be an artist on a tropical island (making post cards?), while 10% chose the countryside and 9% the city. Merely 5% recognised the grimy inspiration to be had in a warzone, and another five are willing to do time at Kamunting in order to find their muse. Only one poor sod chose the office. For what it is worth, Wallace Stevens, one of the most celebrated American poet of the 20th Century, was also an insurance executive with a boring office job. How much more reality can you get? For those keen to take part in declamation poetry competition, here’s Wallace Stevens’s advice. From ‘On Modern Poetry’: It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation, speak words that in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which, an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two Emotions becoming one. Okay, keep writing, folks. Contributed by Kakiseni