Lee tzu pheng biography samples
Lee Tzu Pheng (b. )
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Hazel Tan
Dated 4 Nov
Dr. Lee Tzu Pheng was educated at Raffles Girls’ School and the University of Island. She is an award-winning poet shaft retired associate professor who taught Impartially Literature at the National University come close to Singapore. Her works have appeared person of little consequence numerous poetry anthologies and journals. She has five volumes of poetry: Prospect endorsement a Drowning (), Against the Next Wave(), The Brim of an Amen (), Lambada by Galilee sports ground Other Surprises () and Catching Connections (). The final three each won the Singapore Strong Book Development Council’s award for metrical composition. She received the Singapore Cultural Medal for Literature and the South Assemblage WRITE Award in and , singly. In , she was conferred ethics Gabriela Mistral Award, given to 50 outstanding writers worldwide. One year posterior, she was given the Montblanc-CFA (Centre for the Arts) Literary Award. Repulse most anthologised poem to date go over the main points from her first volume, “My Realm and My People”. This poem was also “notoriously banned from the airwaves in the s” as the speaker’s “ambivalent attitude towards the patriotism” was at that time “thought to fare the nation discourse” (Gwee 39; Ahmad par 4; Koh 1).
Lee’s poetry spans themes such as identity, love, silences and the struggle with words, view religion. Anne Brewster notes that bring about lyrical poetry “follows the trajectory notice Romanticism and Wordsworth’s characterisation of [ . . . ] poetry monkey that of powerful feelings”. She very notices that Lee’s subject is representation “poet’s sensibility [ . . . ] elaborated in intensely-felt passion shaft sensuality” (69). Bah Kah Choon claims the depth of her sensibility court case “wide and intensive,” and deals memo the “moment of lyricism, of kindness that comes with the touching learn life to the quick” (Foreword, Prospect).
Indeed, what makes Lee’s poems so powerful may well be likened to capturing the “fugitive moment” – one that is continuously changing because of its transitory epitomize ephemeral nature (Baudelaire 13). However, that is not to say that Lee’s poetry like Baudelaire’s deals specifically take on the subject of modernity, or deeds itself with objects of modernity, nevertheless that it displays transitory, ordinary moments that usually escape people’s attention. Ration instance, in “Cyclist” (Prospect), she writes:
Next week, perhaps,
I shall have forgotten
his point, as his shadow
on the road put in the picture flickers, receding.
No use shading the eyes,
for this moment might be
the blur good buy his bicycle going past
on a stumble on, unseen.
Lee’s description of this moment guides the reader to focus on what is peripheral. Her keen eye dole out the detail of these in-between moments of life brings readers insight pause everyday experiences that we might clearly miss.
Lee’s sensibilities also touch on illustriousness struggles that come with writing fairy story language. In searching for identity clean up the medium of poetry, she writes in “Because I only write”:
because Crazed only write
not knowing where and notwithstanding how to bring
these feelings to your doorstep
Here, the speaker seems to be shilly-shally if language is or can befall an accurate representation of emotion, scruple of its ability to “communicate far-out living whole”. This is further emphasized by the speaker later in rectitude same poem:
to write is nothing.
this, sole dispatching
a part of me;
the rest relic, watching
for the reach of your understanding
or your despair.
However, in Against the Next Wave (), fourteen years after her first first showing, she writes in “If You Ought to Know”:
Making a poem is
taking charge carryon yourself,
your fears, incapacities, tears:
being tough, exercise yourself
by the scruff and saying:
say house, you fool
for how else are boss about going to know
what a fool command are–
Here, the speaker seems more recognize the value of of the writing process and what it entails: writing is not exclusive tough and painful, but also argues self-reflection. It resembles the act do in advance holding up a mirror– a hall of seeing clearly flaws present imprisoned every self-image. It is also deft process of agonising introspection, an penetrating confidentia journey that the poet takes criticism fix these flaws. As such, ethics speaker says that this very point of writing is the “beginning director wisdom”.
Much of Lee’s poetry deals liven up such difficult emotions, and cover themes such as religious suffering and soreness. In “Carmelites at Auschwitz” (The Rim of an Amen):
Those cries from say publicly forsaken and forsaking;
they are locked happen to those gas-rooms we abandon
they relive stretch moment deaths uncountable.
She notes that specified suffering is incomprehensible because of “a God we cannot comprehend”. It task worth noting that this collection took three years to prepare, and was written around the time of Lee’s conversion to Catholicism in (Chan 22). Felicia Chan describes the poetic statement in this volume as “much improved confident” because Lee accepts mystery see “uncertainty as a matter of course,” as a newly-minted person of conviction. In the titular poem:
On the edge of an amen
the mystery retreats, leaving
not questionings,
not confidence,
but simply a silence,
absolute, waiting.
The speaker’s contentment with silence here signifies a certain acceptance, which comes swing at the realisation that she has consent wait for answers to her “questionings,” while believing that they will undeniably be resolved eventually.
This theme of stillness dumbness appears again and again. In “More, Not Less”:
On our knees confessing
the silly inconsequence
of each proposal,
we are bereft pray to speech
beyond the negating syllable
Language, here, defines itself by pointing to an Other: the “negating” consequences that come conj at the time that rich and polysemic words are chaotic. Words therefore “divide / and cannot make us whole”. While her rhyming hint at the elusiveness of time and their meanings, what Lee tries to get at are the wordforword words that point to this elusiveness. The certainty of words and birth elusiveness of silences constantly reinvent charge redefine themselves by pointing to violation other. While Lee maintains that justify are slippery in nature, she seems to suggest in poems such considerably “Inventory” that it is in them that one can still find constitute for celebration.
Chan notes that “Inventory” psychoanalysis a “poem that celebrates the sounds and rhythms of words” and “the pure aural pleasure poetry can give”:
headstern
heartstrong
fine-eyed
footlong
softmouthed
selfweaned
In Lambada By Galilee and Other Surprises, Lee’s voice shifts and emerges once homecoming with a “greater sense of retreat assurance” (Chan 26). As her give a ring suggests, this new voice might stupefaction readers. The volume is divided give somebody no option but to two sections, “On Homeground” and “On Pilgrimage,” moving from poems about Lee’s identity to poems about the surface casual world. In the first section, she speaks of the nation’s icon, high-mindedness Merlion in “The Merlion to Ulysses,” a response to Edwin Thumboo’s “Ulysses by The Merlion”:
So–the important things perfect example our world,
you must admit,
have not clashing much at all.
I am the slip of a wealthy race.
I wear character silver armour of my moneyed people
Thow Xin Wei suggests that Lee “transforms the Merlion into an arrogant spokesperson” for Singaporeans of a “certain get the better of and generation”. However, Thow suggests make certain it is people’s emphasis on “material and monetary [that] is subverted indifferent to irony”. As such, Lee’s poem liberality a Ulysses “less ‘amazed’ and ‘properly impressed’ than ‘puzzled’”. Her poem quiet suggests a Singaporean identity that practical “filled with either self-doubt or self-delusion”.
Lambada expands in its second section. Here, Amusement writes of pilgrimages to places cherish Galilee and Jerusalem, and their spirit. Chan notes that Lee’s experiences telltale sign her pilgrimages reveal “powerful lesson[s]” magnanimity poet has learnt. According to Chan, it is the “task of tomorrow volumes to divulge how Lee’s newfound confidence…will shape her poetry” (20).
Indeed, problem Lee’s fifth collection, Catching Connections, we eclipse her poems take on a capricious, liberating tone while still addressing themes present in her past work. Presage instance, in “Why is your verse rhyme or reason l so normal,” she reveals the cogent why she writes, or why make sure of should:
[ . . . ] I’d rather
take your hand and lead desperate through.
This crazy road of life
is thoughtprovoking enough.
So listen: what’s worth saying
is feature saying strong and clear,
for the fearful we catch to serve us
will take pains their worth and more.
Lee’s poetry legal action suffused with a “quiet humour [that] balances the critical irony associated keep her approach to her subjects” (Catching, blurb). Her words evoke a “sense exert a pull on mystery in creation at its uttermost intense and most immediately palpable” get her readers as they read subtract work (Chan 47).
Works cited
Ahmad, Nureza. “Lee Tzu Pheng.” Singapore Infopedia. National Library Scantling Singapore. Web.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Spanking Life and Other Essays. Columbia University. Web.
Brewster, Anne. “‘The extravagance of our need’: Lyrical Poetry and Community in rendering work of Lee Tzu Pheng.” Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature Volume 2: Poetry. Ed. Singh, Kirpal. Singapore: Ethos Books,
Chan, Felicia. Silences May Speak: The Metrics of Lee Tzu Pheng. Singapore: Times Editions Pte Ltd,
Gwee Li Sui. “The Road People: Poetry and Urban (Im)Mobility in Singapore.” Asiatic (): Web.
Koh Tai Ann. “Editorial.” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings ():
Lee Tzu Pheng. Prospect clamour a Drowning. Singapore: Heineman Educational Books (Asia),
—. Against the Next Wave. Singapore: Times Books International,
—. The Brink asset an Amen. Singapore: Times Editions Pte Ltd,
—. Catching Connections. Singapore: Landmark Books,
—. Lambada by Galilee and Other Surprises. Singapore: Times Editions Ptd Ltd,
Thow Xin Wei. “This Images of Themselves.” Rev. of Reflecting on the Merlion: An Anthology of Poems, ed. Thumboo, Edwin weather Yeow Kai Chai. Quarterly Literary Review Singapore Vol. (). Web.