Jee Leong Koh is a New York–based poet, teacher, editor, publisher, and social-justice activist. I first met him in Singapore in 2014. We shared a publisher, Math Paper Press, with his Payday Loans and my Today, Fish Only. A well-toned man donning a sleeveless shirt with the words gay but not yet equal, he was mobbed by enthusiastic readers, mostly young men and women, at his book launch in a downtown shopping mall. I saw him again in New York, a few months later, at Singapore Unbound’s inaugural literary event, and he was again surrounded by fans. I have kept up with his trailblazing literary work and social-justice issues for the past twelve years. I contacted Jee in anticipation of the publication of To the Tune (Bench Press, July 1, 2026). This new book of poems presents current social-justice issues around the world, set to various musical tunes, and his letters to Du Fu, China’s greatest poet.

The following conversation took place via email between May 18 and 28, 2026.

Miho Kinnas: Congratulations on the publication of To the Tune—such an intriguing book, as are all your other books. (I have read most of them.) What impresses me is that your lines are erudite and savvy at the same time, that you engineer an ingenious structure, and that you always pull it off by bringing so much energy and staying on target. Day to day, you accomplish so much! You not only have eleven books under your belt while publishing and promoting other writers, but you also travel around the world and return home to Singapore every year, you physically work out, you teach, and you are in a wonderful relationship. How do you balance everything?

Jee Leong Koh: I chalk it all up to community, privilege, and self-care. 

Singapore Unbound, the New York City–based transnational literary organization that I founded and head, is powered by passionate volunteers like me, who believe strongly in bringing original and underrepresented Asian voices to the United States and elsewhere. I would not have ventured to start our press Gaudy Boy if Kimberley Lim had not come on board with her editorial and industry experience as our managing editor. I would not have turned our blog into the full-fledged literary journal SUSPECT if Sharmini Aphrodite had not agreed to helm it as its editor in chief. It was Eunice Lau who suggested setting up an editorial board to publish our take on social issues of public concern and who recruited the board members. Our events, both the biennial festival and the monthly reading series, are supported by regulars who enjoy coming together to hear sterling authors and eat home-cooked food. 

Over the course of twelve years, a literary community has come into existence, a community that now spans Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Hong Kong, South Korea, and also Kazakhstan. It is a voluntary and inclusive community concerned with social justice, a blended family of sorts. I see it as a counterforce to global capitalism. Although we’re inevitably enmeshed in the system ourselves, we provide a glimpse of a better alternative: a borderless world of collaboration and solidarity.

Kinnas: I feel excited hearing about the growing inclusive, borderless literary community. And surely it is technology-enabled, and that reminds me of the agile governance model, for example, being attempted in Taiwan. We need more of grassroots organic entities to counterforce the world’s increasingly nationalistic tendency.

Nationalism, especially ethnonationalism, works against our common humanity.

Koh: I completely agree. Nationalism, especially ethnonationalism, works against our common humanity. As to how I can do so much, I am also fortunate to teach in a New York City private school, with eager students and plentiful resources. My stable job, with its clear work boundaries, gives me the time and money for my extracurricular endeavors. Further, my students teach me so much. Most recently, during a class on Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “Sexy,” my juniors debated whether a young white girl’s fear of the Hindu goddess Kali could be considered racist, and during another class on Hisaye Yamamoto’s story “Epithalamium,” they dug into the significance of a potted plant at a civic marriage ceremony. My courses on Homer’s The Odyssey, Dickens’s Great Expectations, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the poetry of W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Jericho Brown have certainly found their way into my writing and my books. 

In my personal life, too, I have a great advantage. I am partnered with a guy who had a well-paid professional career and, like me, does not want to have children. We have time and resources that couples with young children do not. All these mentions of money may sound crass, but I’m merely pointing out the economic and financial realities undergirding any show of literary accomplishments. Money buys time—time to write, edit, and publish. 

Kinnas: Yes, if only we could eat our poems and nourish and equip ourselves! 

Koh: If only! One thing that bothers me is that we don’t have many writers who are genuinely from the working class. I don’t mean writers who have become tenured college professors of creative writing programs. I mean writers who are still doing the menial jobs that the rest of us depend on. We are missing crucial voices that can speak complexly and artistically about a whole swath of human experience. 

One thing that bothers me is that we don’t have many writers who are genuinely from the working class.

Kinnas: Indeed, they are rare in literature everywhere. The writer Michiko Ishimure (1927–2018), whose poems I am translating, was said to be the first truly gifted writer in Japan who could write about life in a very poor village, regarded as the lowest strata of society, from the inside. After all, there are things we can know only through experience.

Koh: That’s so true. We are also biological beings, of course, not just economic ones. I started working out at the gym out of vanity and insecurity, but now that I’m in my fifties, I’m glad that I have established a workout routine that is keeping me healthy and alert. In his book What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, Haruki Murakami writes about running long distances in order to stay fit for the marathon of novel writing. Working with weights has not only given me the strength to keep writing but also built in me the feeling, the need, for muscular music in my verse. I am very conscious of the formal dimension of verse, and I experiment with it all the time. Finding the form for what I am trying to say is biological, even sexual. The poet Donald Hall wrote in his notebook, “The pleasure of writing is that the mind does not wander, any more than it does in orgasm,—and writing takes longer than orgasm.” Concentration, exploration, and pleasure are key words for me.

Working with weights has not only given me the strength to keep writing but also built in me the feeling, the need, for muscular music in my verse.

Kinnas: How do your key words, concentration, exploration and pleasure, shape your daily routine? 

Koh: I usually wake up at 4 am, when it’s dark outside and quiet in the apartment. During National Poetry Writing Month, in April, I wake up at 3 am to get an extra hour of writing in. From 4 to 6 am, I write and work on Singapore Unbound matters, organizing events and overseeing our publications. I take about an hour to get ready for school. I’m in school from 7:45 am to 4:30 pm. When I’m in school, I’m wholly present in school. My mind compartmentalizes all my work quite easily. After school and dinner, my brain is fried, and all I can do is watch TV with my boyfriend on the couch. I go to bed at about 9 pm. During weekends, I catch up with my work as poetry editor of the Evergreen Review. If we are not out seeing friends and visiting art shows, I rediscover the pleasure of reading for a whole afternoon.

Kinnas: We are fortunate when we can immerse ourselves in the pleasure of reading, especially as we age. Let’s go back to your earlier writing career. The Pillow Book (2012) is your autobiography done in a poetic essay style after Makura-no-Soshi (The pillow book), by Sei Shōnagon (966–1017 or 1025), which is said to be the first work of zuihitsu or essay in the world, and you gave your collection of essays the same title. I also own an Awai Books bilingual edition of your Pillow Book. The translator, Keisuke Tsubono, chose a young colloquial voice, one of the tricky hurdles in translation into Japanese, that was welcoming.

The third and fourth entries in your Pillow Book, Well Organized Things and Disorganized Things, closely follow the listlike style of many chapters of Sei Shōnagon’s original. (I also love Things Out of Place.) Sei Shōnagon focused on aesthetics, aiming to show how sophisticated the Empress Teishi’s salon was, but you show us scenes from your life with an underlying ambivalence. At the same time, compared to many American zuihitsu written by many poets, the effect of your book is a lot closer to the reading experience of the original. How did you come to choose to write your origin story in this form? 

Koh: I studied the zuihitsu and other Japanese poetic forms in a workshop with the poet Kimiko Hahn. The first pieces in my Pillow Book were written for that workshop. I love the individuality of Sei Shōnagon’s voice. She really doesn’t give a shit whether you think she is a snob or a whore. She is after delicacy, refinement, and spontaneity in her writing. 

Kinnas: Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book has been misunderstood for a long time. It is often characterized as whimsical—but it was her deliberate style to represent, as you say, delicacy, refinement, and spontaneity. She wrote it out of her loyalty to the tragic Empress Teishi, her mistress. Her mission was to leave a record of how sophisticated and cultured the empress’s salon was. She didn’t care what others thought of her, because her writing was as serious as a Samurai’s seppuku in later days. 

Koh: That’s so interesting. I did not know that she wrote it for her empress. I think it is a mistake to think of the zuihitsu as a literary form. It is, rather, a manifestation of one’s spirit. Whether it is worth reading depends on the fineness of the spirit, where it has been, what it has done, and how it has cultivated itself. As Nietzsche wrote, “Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life.” The German makes it sound like self-harm, but it’s the same idea, really. It’s an idea that appeals to me immensely, that whatever we write at this moment comes from all we are. The ideal is self-cultivation. It overrides the fractures of discrimination, migration, and just time itself.

Kinnas: Your quote from Nietzsche and your ideal of self-cultivation remind me of Bashō. His life was that of self-cultivation—he embraced what surrounded him, good and bad, and cultivated his art through everything. 

Koh: Bashō was a constant inspiration for my hybrid novel Snow at 5 PM. He was so attuned to both nature and society.

Kinnas: Your haiku in Snow at 5 PM are also wonderful examples of what Ginsberg called “American Sentences”: attuned to nature and the society of contemporary New York. Speaking of life experiences, learning about your life from The Pillow Book, we see that your original destination after National Service was the UK, Oxford University, but New York or the US became your (final?) destination. Your life decisions are very deliberate, not only the places to go but also how to live as a gay person, how to make a living as a writer and approach your social-justice activism goals. So, twenty-three years later, now, if you were to write another biographical book, what chapter titles, topics, and themes come to your mind? 

Koh: National Service was not my decision at all! But you’re certainly right that I deliberately chose to study at Oxford in the UK and, after teaching for eight years in Singapore, to move to New York City. When I was organizing the poems in my first full-length poetry collection, Equal to the Earth, I thought of using those places as section titles but finally rejected the idea for being too literal. If I use section titles at all, I prefer those that arise from the overarching form of the book, so Seven Studies for a Self Portrait has seven sections with titles that speak to the literary or artistic model for that section (e.g., “Bull Eclogues” and “A Lover’s Recourse”), and Connor & Seal has two sections with the names of two protagonists. The answer to your question is that, if I am to write my autobiography in verse now, I won’t know what my chapter titles are until I find the literary form for the book. Somewhat counterintuitively, the book comes before the chapters. 

Kinnas: It is always interesting to learn how the author decides on sectioning and chaptering. Steep Tea (2012), which is subtlety organized into two sections without headers, is one of my very favorite books. Each poem is exquisite—delicate and erotic yet thought-provoking. Literary epigraphs from Sara Teasdale, Elizabeth Bishop, Eavan Boland, and Lee Tzu Pheng add intrigue. The renga is beautifully executed. It is a perfect book of poems. Will you talk about writing this book?

Koh: Thank you for your kind words. Steep Tea started with my reading of Eavan Boland’s poetry. As I read this Irish poet tussling with colonialism and patriarchy, I found myself responding to her work by writing my own poems. Here was a moral seriousness that I could admire and imitate. Then I realized how few women poets I really knew. That set me off on a journey to read women poets from across the world, most in translation, and it was an unforgettable time of discovery and invention. The English poet Anna Wickham, who was imprisoned in an asylum by her husband for writing poetry. The Jewish-German poet Nelly Sachs, who lost her ability to speak when the Nazis came to power. The Chinese poet Li Qingzhao, who lost her home to war and then her husband to typhoid fever. So many tragedies, and yet so many great poems written against imprisonment, fascism, and war. 

Then I realized how few women poets I really knew. That set me off on a journey to read women poets from across the world.

Kinnas: Did you notice anything in women’s poetry that is different from men’s? The treatment of subject matter or language, for example?

Koh: Many of the women poets I read brought their female experience into poetry, such as menstruation, pregnancy, and childcare. Boland’s book Night Feed (1982) made writing about motherhood intensely significant and poetic. Along with the new subject matter, they brought new words that had never been seen in poetry before. Many women poets also strove to recover the lives and voices of women lost to hardship, fire, disease, and time, which still ravage our current moment and impact men and women unequally.

Kinnas: Unfortunately, we really don’t have to look hard for tragedies. And Du Fu seems to be almost a predestined writer for you to face squarely. To the Tune, which includes epistolary poems addressed to Du Fu, along with music, beautifully follows and elevates the game after Payday Loans (2014), Connor & Seal (2019), and Snow at 5 PM (2020). One trait to follow is the form you used, beginning with sonnet (Payday Loans), after Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (Connor & Seal), haibun (Snow at 5 PM, which I always call past or super haibun). What are your thoughts on “Book-Scale Forms”?

To the Tune, my new book, juxtaposes epistolary and protest poems, and the book’s trajectory is meant to be more organic than systematic.

Koh: Payday Loans was my first book publication. Thirty sonnets about love and work, organized according to the month of April. I’ve always liked to write poems in sequences. My next book, Equal to the Earth, opens with “Hungry Ghosts,” a sequence of poems in the voices of historical queer Chinese personages, and ends with “Fire Island,” a sequence of poems about a queer colony located on a barrier island just off Long Island. The poetic sequence gives me the freedom and impetus to research and write on a topic for a time, to look at the topic from different angles, and not to end anything prematurely.

More and more, I see my life as so much of a whole—the past flowing into the present, the present springing from the past—and so even the poetic sequence has begun to feel restrictive to me. I think a significant change happened with my hybrid novel Snow at 5 PM, when I wove haiku and prose commentary into a (dis)continuous narrative over 374 pages. I was turning the poetic sequence into a whole book. My next book, Inspector Inspector, weaves thirteen palinodes in and out of other poetic sequences, and the palinodes provide the unifying element to the whole book. To the Tune, my new book, juxtaposes epistolary and protest poems, and the book’s trajectory is meant to be more organic than systematic. 

The poet and psychologist Paul Goodman wrote insightfully, “Poets who cope with everyday vicissitudes by saying them do not tend to produce fully formed, self-standing ‘poems.’ . . . Rather it is each one’s persistent attitude that is his poem; the whole book is a more objective poem than any of the poems.” To the Tune is certainly trying to cope with the horrific vicissitudes of our increasingly violent, authoritarian, and unequal world, as the news epigraphs indicate, and the meaning of the book does not lie in one or another of the poems, but in the whole book. 

Kinnas: Your statements “not to end anything prematurely” and “the meaning of the book does not lie in one or another of the poems but in the whole book” are so well put, and every poet should keep them in mind. No wonder reading To the Tune is laborious (!) but lovingly so. I cherish the experience of reading this book; I looked up every music video and searched the internet to learn about the various incidents you refer to. I thought, Why did I not know about many of the incidents happening in the world? 

And there’s Du Fu, the poet from the seventh century, the greatest poet among all the Chinese giants, whom Bashō also revered. Although I have known a few of his poems since my high school days, and your choice of Du Fu over Li Po is very understandable because of Du Fu’s immediate and strong social awareness and concerns, still, it is another cultural icon to familiarize ourselves with. You are never linear in anything you write, and the associations between/among the elements of your choices are wonderfully oblique, surprising, bittersweet, humorous, and powerful. 

Koh: For To the Tune, I started with a question: How can I respond as a poet to the turmoil around us? How can I write poems that are explicitly political but are still poetic? I know that is such a nonquestion to the two opposite sides on this question. One side would assert, All literature is fundamentally political, because it influences our sympathies and antipathies. The other side would argue, All literature is essentially apolitical because literature is not propaganda. But it is a question for me because I have the two opposing sides in me. I represent this self-division formally in my book in the juxtaposition, not amalgamation, of the letter-poems and the protest-poems. It is also represented formally in the misleading titles of the protest-poems, since the poems cannot be put to the tunes of the songs in the titles. 

Kinnas: I know. I tried and quickly realized. I tried again without success, when the tune was “Wheels on the Bus”! Juxtaposition indeed added a dimension and layers to each poem and the book as a whole. Poetry can be constructed and formalized in so many creative ways.

Koh: Yes, and juxtaposition is a key principle of classical Chinese poetry. My misleading titles are supposed to show up the protest-poems as failures. How can they not fail in trying to respond to current atrocities? To refer to Paul Goodman again, he thinks that the category of avant-garde is useless because all true writers write at the frontier of what they know, in other words, all writers are avant-garde to and for themselves. I too must write at the frontier of what I know and try to go beyond it to find new answers that can satisfy me. 

I too must write at the frontier of what I know and try to go beyond it to find new answers that can satisfy me.

At the end of To the Tune, the tentative and personal answer I find is threefold: Du Fu, the philosophy of pragmatism, and songs. Stated so baldly, they are just ideas and not poetry. You have to read the poems to find the poetry of these ideas. 

Kinnas: Your thirty-two poems that begin with “Dear Du Fu” sent me back to reading Du Fu’s poems. I think it was because your language and the questions lie close to Du Fu’s philosophy and struggle. I read them in Japanese, which allows me to experience his amazing craft alongside the content. His skillfulness is overwhelming, even among all those Tang dynasty giants. 

Koh: I hope my poems will send others back to Du Fu too! I encountered classical Chinese poetry in school in Singapore, but the only poem I can remember from that time is not by Du Fu. It is Li Bai’s “Quiet Night Thought” (靜夜思). Yet the poem is, perhaps, closer to Du Fu’s work than to its own author’s. I was primed by it to appreciate the depiction of nature and homesickness in Chinese verse. Its concision set it apart from English poetry, and for the longest time I thought it was impossible to translate Chinese verse into English.

Then I picked up Du Fu: A Life in Poetry, by David Young, and I was immediately impressed by how well Young rendered the balance and juxtaposition of Chinese verse through his short couplets. The seven lines of Du Fu’s youthful poem “Gazing at Mount Tai” (望嶽) were translated into seven succinct yet lyrical couplets. 

Kinnas: When Ezra Pound translated Chinese texts, he ingeniously used a single English word for a single Chinese character. Although that was an amazing feat, a couplet for a line in Chinese seems to be the best approach. Couplets force the lines to be compact yet afford the English sentences the opportunity to flow. Young’s approach is closer to Pound’s approach, come to think of it. But the reader doesn’t necessarily need to know Du Fu’s poems intimately to understand your poems.

Koh: No, they don’t. One of my hopes with this book is that it will inspire readers to look up Du Fu’s poetry if they don’t know it. David Young’s book sat on my poetry shelf for years. When I cast around for an answer to my question—how to respond as a poet to our current turmoil—I remembered Du Fu. I read Young again and marveled at how Du Fu ventriloquized an army conscript forced to fight the emperor’s border wars (“Song of the War Carts”), how he castigated the political elite for self-indulgence while the country starved (“Gorgeous Women”), how he lamented the fall of the state in the midst of springtime (“Spring Scene”). But Du Fu was also a poet of friendships, not only with Li Bai but with so many other lovers of poetry, art, and wine. He wrote genuinely, too, of the joys of a simple life, a needful message for our overconsumption at the expense of the Earth.

From Young, I went on to consult Tu Fu: China’s Greatest Poet, a biography by William Hung, and A Little Primer of Tu Fu, by David Hawkes, with its Chinese originals, transliterations, explanations of form and meaning, and prose translations. Right now I am using Stephen Owen’s translations of Du Fu’s extant 1,400 poems in his The Poetry of Du Fu to write my own modernized and personalized imitations. It is another way to tell my own story through Du Fu. 

Kinnas: That’s a very ambitious project, but I often wondered how the great Chinese poetic tradition, not only the rhyming or sound count but also its spirits and wide and long-ranging allusions that continued for several millennia, might live on today. Just as poets around the world write haiku and tanka, widening the subject matters and techniques within and pushing the literary form, Chinese poetry could be updated on an even greater scale. Your story through Du Fu is something I will absolutely be looking forward to reading, and I look forward to having another conversation.