Kit Kelen on TDM Talk Show: Macau, a city of poets

Kit Kelen: A poet should give the reader ‘something to imagine, something to see, taste, feel, smell.’

Poet and scholar Kit Kelen argues that Macau Government and semi-government agencies should grasp Macau’s “great potential” as a city of poets and artists, and “wisely invest in the right ways and in the right places, in order to encourage a greater creative industry”.
Appearing on last weekend’s TDM Talk Show, the artist, originally from Australia, but based in Macau for 10 years, said he considered Macau “a city with a remarkable number of poets”. Kit Kelen is the author of the book “City of Poets”, a virtual “reader’s guide to contemporary Macau poetry”. He pointed to an anthology the Association of Stories in Macau (ASM) published two years ago as proof of the city’s vast creative talent. “I roll the dice” is the first English language anthology of Macau poetry and, according to Kelen, includes works of about 120 poets.
Kelen said that these poets were living and still writing, “mostly in Chinese, but a lot in Portuguese and a lot in English too,” he explained, adding later that he was surprised “there were this many good poets, producing interesting material in Macau”. Most of it, he said was “very firmly anchored in the reality of everyday life in Macau, more than anything else”.
Kit Kelen sees Macau as an ambiguous place in many ways: East or West; Chinese or Portuguese; colony or enclave; place of business or of pleasure; sin city or city of God; belonging to RPC or to Las Vegas. He said you can find in Macau all these kinds of contradictions - played out at a “safe scale”.
“I guess all sorts of serious things are happening here and there are things that we should be concerned about, but, on the other hand, there’s a playfulness implied in that line, which I think allows for interesting creative things, interesting imaginary things to happen. Because people don’t take them so seriously,” the fiction-writing teacher explained.
Kit Kelen explains that poems often deal with abstract ideas, but he argues that a poet should give the reader “something to imagine, something to see, taste, feel, smell”. Otherwise, he says, the reader “goes away with nothing”.
He says the Macau poets are typically “people who flourished in their undergraduate studies and got an interest in creative writing in one way or another. And they pursued that through master studies and then they’ve gone on and left university and they are continuing to write, continuing with those skills to develop their own art.”
Kelen detailed the recurrent themes of contemporary Macau’s poetry. The beginning of “Three”, a poem from Agnes Vong’s “Glitter on the Sketch” illustrates well one of the most recurrent themes of contemporary Macau poetry: memory. “There used to be only one bridge / It had a name / But people simply called it the bridge…”
Other themes include:  The pace of change – no one has lived in a place that is changing so quickly as Macau is; Environmental degradation – the air quality is pretty bad; Gambling and casino culture; Traditional religion, both from the West and the East.
Kit Kelen, who is also the author of the trilingual book “To the single man’s hut” – dedicated to the memory of famous Australian artist Arthur Boyd –, believes Macau has a cinematic potential yet to be realised. Poets are among the people who are starting to do it.

The poet-translator

The ASM is not only Kit Kelen’s baby, but also “a lot of people’s baby”, he said. It’s a community publisher, funded largely by the Macau Foundation and others. “Basically its function is to publish literature from and about Macau: fiction, increasingly poetry, and increasingly poetry and translation. So, parallel volumes with Chinese and English, or Portuguese and English, or in some cases in all three. That’s really a goal, that we can publish things in Chinese, Portuguese and English. I think that’s a great thing for Macau,” the poet who is also a professor at the University of Macau said.
ASM members translate classical and contemporary poetry. Sometimes, Kelen said, it’s difficult to tell whether they write in Chinese or in English first. “I’m encouraging them to write in both languages at the same time and create a bilingual text where it’s really impossible to say which is the original and which is the translation.”
“When you’re translating poets you expose yourself to good models for poetry. And even if you make a lot of mistakes, if you’re a good poet and you make a lot of mistakes in what you’re translating, then the bonus will be you’re actually producing a new poem, an original work,” the artist explained.
The task is not an easy one, though. “Translating a poem requires a poet.”
One of the ongoing ASM projects is the translation of the second volume of “Fires Rumoured about the City”, a book, published last year, of fourteen Australian poets. In order to help them understand the poets’ work better, Kelen is taking a group of translators to Australia, in July, to meet the Australian authors they will be translating. A great way to learn not only as translators, but also as poets, understanding poetry from other cultures, he said.