An Interview with Esther Vincent Xueming
The author of the poetry collection Red Earth (Blue Cactus Press 2021), and the editor-in-chief and founder of The Tiger Moth Review, an eco journal of art and literature, Esther Vincent Xueming’s work weaves personal narrative, environmental consciousness, and meditations on home and the places we inhabit.
Esther Vincent sat down with Interviews Editor Esteban Rodrgiuez to discuss Red Earth, as well as the influences of music on her work, the subconscious, and how the writing process can guide us toward a greater truth.
Esteban Rodrgiuez: Esther, I really appreciate your time. Thank you . So, I usually like starting off by asking a writer about the genesis of their work, but the title of one poem in your collection Red Earth drew my attention the most. The poem “And at once I knew, I was not magnificent” is titled after the lyrics from Bon Iver’s song “Holocene,” which details the acceptance of a challenging past. In the first line in your poem, the speaker says, “How do I write a poem about memory?”
First, can you speak about musical influences in your work? And how do you approach memory in poetry? How should others approach it as well?
Esther Vincent Xueming: I’m glad you noticed that! Music influences my work quite a bit as I am a lover of music and song. In fact, to me, songs and poems share similarities, especially if we remember the oral roots of poetry. Other poems influenced by song lyrics include “Throw me in the landfill” (“Landfill” by Daughter), “Everything is perfect from far away” (“Such great heights” by The Postal Service) and “We wanted to hold on to the feeling” (“Lille” by Lisa Hannigan). These songs all hold personal resonance for me and as poem titles, they draw on the mood and themes of the original songs and are manifested-interpreted-transposed onto my poems, serving as the starting point from which my poems depart.
For instance, “We wanted to hold on to the feeling” which alludes to “Lille” by Irish singer-songwriter Lisa Hannigan, is set in Ireland, and explores themes of memory, history, place and nostalgia. The singer’s desire to “hold on” in “Lille” is reflected in my poem’s desire to remember a place (Ireland) in its entirety and through history, pre-Christianisation and pre-colonisation. At one level, there is personal memory which is the speaker’s memory of the places in Ireland that she refers to, giving readers a sense of the geographical landscape and beauty of the place. There is the land that is remembered and that remembers, the “Normandy ruins”, “Clonmacnoise” and perhaps more poignantly, the Great Hunger in the “famine walls, separating / nothing, leading nowhere.” The speaker travels in time and place and Ireland is the body that is mapped in this poem, which presents the country as a remembrancer in some ways. On top of personal memory, “We wanted to hold on to the feeling” conjures memory as historical and cultural, alluding to Gaelic Ireland, folk “superstitions”, “megalithic awe” and an “old religion” of lost languages, cultures, rites and rituals that are “so faint, almost imagined”.
ER: I undoubtedly agree about the way music can serve as an influence. I myself am always listening to a playlist or album. I’m curious, what other art forms, if any, provide inspiration for your writing (film, art, etc.), and more specifically Red Earth?
EVX: Well, the titular poem “Red Earth” is in fact inspired by a Raden Saleh painting of an old Javanese landscape, which I saw at a Raden Saleh exhibition a few years back at the National Gallery. The colours of the landscape, its grandness and vastness, the mood of the painting, the juxtaposition of the landscape with the smallness of the human subjects in the scene, all these left an impression on me. It conjured fantasies in my mind of an old, lost and forgotten world, and I kept returning to the scene as depicted by Saleh. The poem was only ready to be written after a few other experiences and moments, like a trip I made to Batam, Indonesia (even though Batam is part of the Riau Archipelago), where I witnessed an orange sunset, as well as drove past some unearthed soil on the ground, reminding me of the Saleh painting. The poem “Red Earth” also is presented in two lyrics, one titled Awake and the other Asleep. In Awake, I begin with a reference to the red earth, and the poem moves across geographical landscapes, memory and time, whereas in Asleep, I begin with the same reference to the red earth but the poem moves quite differently into the landscape of dreams and the subconscious.
Some poems, as you might have noticed, are written after other poems. This might be more obvious if you refer to their epigraphs (“A different time”, “About love, or a beautiful tree”, “Lost tongue”, “Le Morne beach”), but more subtle in their use of symbolism or form within the poem (“Sungei Buloh sonnets” after Heaney’s “Glanmore sonnets”, “Albatross” after Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”). “Yogyakarta triptych” is written after the visual art form of the triptych, which originates from early Christian art, and in the case of my poem, I present three lyrics meant to be read side by side (in my original layout, I placed them in three panels on one page, mimicking the triptych). The poem paints three related but singular narrative and poetic scenes of ancient sacred sites like Candi Sewu, Prambanan and Candi Borobodur, culminating in the speaker’s search for divinity. “Falcon”, the last poem to join the collection, was written after the Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher (2020), as I was moved and inspired by Craig Foster’s relationship with a common wild octopus and similarly wanted to find my own wild teacher, which came in the form of a migrating peregrine falcon.
As the poems in Red Earth are autobiographical in nature, on top of personal experiences, many of them also refer / respond to memorabilia like family photographs, stones collected from my travels, concrete objects that serve as the loci of memory from which my poems are grounded and from which memories and places are re-membered and re-imagined. Other times, these objects of memory are more symbolic, like the tiger moth, hands and feet, roots, water, the moon. Many of my poems, especially those in Dream fruit, are also drawn from my dreams, meditation practice, astral travel experiences and the subconscious.
ER: I’m glad you mentioned the section Dream fruit, which is so beautifully rendered with symbolism and images. I came from an MFA program where it was somewhat frowned upon if we mentioned dreams or dream-like sequences, and I think in the literary community there might be some hesitation on the part of writers to bring forth dreams on the page. However, Dream fruit doesn’t shy away from highlighting the subconscious. Can you speak more about your decision to write these poems (like “Whale dream” or “In this dream, we drove into the sea”). Also, the dreams here appear to have a close association with water. What do you think this association means?
EVX: Thank you for this question! My poems are very much inspired by both the conscious and subconscious, waking and dream states. In fact, the poems in Dream fruit would not have been possible had I not tapped into that subconscious state of my being, which some might argue hold more truths than our waking moments which are often clouded by our ego.
Dreams for me are an important well from which I draw; I’m fascinated by their symbolism and vividness, which makes real life pale in comparison sometimes. Dreams are also connected to our intuition, which has been devalued for a long time by Western knowledge systems, which might explain why they are frowned upon in certain programmes and communities. Poems and dreams hold similarities in that there is the poet and there is the dreamer, both seeing visions which are conveyed through the medium of poem or dream (or poem as dream). Both poems and dreams offer alternate states of being, serving as visions and habitations in themselves. You’ll see from Dream fruit that my dream poems blur the boundaries between the real and surreal, the concrete and intangible, language, symbol and meaning.
For me, my spiritual practice, dreams and poetry were all interconnected. Through my spiritual practice, I was able to embark on a journey of healing, which has largely involved and continues to involve dreamwork. The more I meditated on my dreams and out-of-body experiences, the more I saw that they were the material for my poetry (which is also a healing art), which articulates and attempts to make sense and meaning out of the abstract and symbolic.
I dare say I have lived more vicariously in some of my dreams than I have in real life: in “Whale dream” for instance, I refer to a dream I had where I found myself in the middle of the open ocean. I distinctly recall my awareness of place and consciousness, and the lack of a physical body (I was dry in the water; how was that possible?). I recall knowing I was in the deep sea, the waters were shades of dark blue and there was some light streaming in from the surface, and I felt calm and curious at the same time. A humpback whale then swam into my vision in the most natural manner. She swam slowly, and it was a deeply sacred moment for me as I watched her in awe and wonder from such a close distance. Throughout the dream encounter, I was conscious and aware of my place as an observer given the privilege of looking into another world. Yet, that world was also mine (since we inhabit the One Earth), and I have tried to recreate the intimacy of the moment in my poem.
“Whale dream” would not be complete without other experiences and moments I had outside of the dream, which include reading up about whale goddess myths and relating particularly to the Inuit mother goddess Sedna, a full moon heartbeat meditation where I came to a realisation that the whale and I were one and the same, and a reference to the Bruges whale exhibited outside the ArtScience museum which I saw a number of years back. These elements fell into place as I was writing the poem, which I have come to read as my desire for spiritual communion with the self and nature (whale), and self as nature (whale-goddess-mother-woman-self).
I also like that you noticed the element of water. Again, water is associated with intuition and emotions, as well as the feminine parts of ourselves. As a sun in Cancer (water element), I am ruled by the Moon (associated with yin energy and intuition), who herself rules the tides. I don’t think these are coincidences. Many of my dreams are associated with water, as I’ve noticed as well; human beings are also 60% water. Water is a part of us, we are water. I also live in Singapore, which is an island city, and perhaps that’s why water and the land feature prominently in my dreams and poems.
ER: How do you know when a poem is complete? How did you know when Red Earth was complete?
EVX: Before I began my Graduate studies, I always thought that the poet was the one who controlled or decided when a poem was complete. Of course the poet plays a crucial role in terms of creating something out of nothing in terms of craft and language, but during the two years of my Graduate studies, I also learnt something else more crucial. That much of creative writing, and poetry especially, involved letting go and allowing the poem to speak through you.
What this means is that I found a need to let go and tap on my intuition. This meant that I started to learn to recognise when a poem was still hiding behind its real theme (with vague / abstract references and lack of details for instance), or when a poem was still too emotionally raw (too much anger or negativity clouding the poem, without clarity to see beyond the immediacy of the moment for instance) such that it needed more time and distance from its subject matter to transcend the pain of the immediate moment. I have to credit my MA supervisor Boey Kim Cheng for teaching me these skills.
It came to a point where I was able to read my poem and know whether or not it was complete. My first few drafts are always quite messy, raw, unrefined and different from the final poem, and I think that’s a necessary kind of purging that takes place with those first few drafts. You could liken it to a metaphorical or subconscious decluttering or cleansing. After that initial stage of purging, the poem starts to attain clarity with each revision.
I’d like to refer to “Nocturne” to illustrate my point. I’ve always loved Chopin’s nocturnes, and during the two years of my Graduate study, I found myself staying up late into the night, when sudden creative bursts would come to me. I decided to write a poem as a song to the night and night song, but somehow the poem did not seem finished to me. Then, one night, as I was closing my bedroom windows, I saw a body of a bird fly overhead in the night sky. Its wings were silent, its body far larger than any bird I’d seen in the day. I put the two and two together and realised I had for the first time in my life seen an owl fly across the night sky. In that instant, I knew this was the image for the end of my poem and that with this moment, my poem was complete. So the long and short of it is that sometimes, certain things need to happen before a poem can be complete. And you won’t know either until they happen.
I know some poets adopt the school of thought that a poem is never complete, and in some ways, maybe there is some truth to that statement since we are also always in a state of revision. In the case of Red Earth, since I had a working deadline for the submission of my thesis, I had a definite timeline to work with, which made me very disciplined with my editing process.
Red Earth was more or less complete upon submission, after I curated the poems into three sequences and arranged them within each sequence. Even then, I still made some minor but significant edits to individual poems up till the point when the manuscript was in layout. I think by then, I knew I was truly satisfied with the manuscript and ready to send it for print.
ER: What direction is your writing headed at the moment? How do you think your future work will speak/interact with your current work?
EVX: At the moment, I’m working on some personal essays on the environment, ecofeminism and ecospirituality, which I hope to be able to put together into a collection in the near future. I am drawn to the personal essay form for a few reasons.
Practically, it will allow me to write even while I return to full-time teaching, since working on one essay at a time is relatively manageable. In Singapore, I think the personal essay has yet to gain traction, much less eco-themed personal essays, so this will be a gap I hope to fill. I also am fascinated by my personal journey of spirituality, which is closely tied to nature, the environment and earth, so it makes sense for me to seek connections through the personal essay form, which can adequately hold my meanderings and musings.
Thematically, these personal essays draw out and return to the themes raised in Red Earth. “Candy” (Quarterly Literary Review Singapore) for instance ruminates on kinships with more-than-human and human kin, whilst contemplating the themes of home, place, familial relations and belonging. These themes are especially prominent in the sequence About love, though the personal essay has allowed me to delve into my personal history in greater detail. “The Field” (Sinking City, University of Miami) similarly enters my dreams and memories to dwell on themes of place, urban land use policies, maternal relations, migration, identity and the healing potential (of self, of earth) of narratives. I’m proud to share that I co-edited Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore (Ethos Books, 2021) as I was working on Red Earth, and I hope to publish my debut collection of eco-themed personal essays next, though I’d like to take my time with this.
