"Buku Coretan Umar; A Poetry Zine" by Umar Aziz. This is a sizable 64 page bilingual chapbook written both in English and Malay. Umar is an accomplished poet who practices a few different styles, and the layout and composition of the book is very professional. It's got a classic black and white photograph cover, and really amazing modern typographical arrangement throughout. "The contents of this book are poems that I wrote from who knows when. I tore out 68 pages worth of poems from the first copy because I didn’t want to subject you to verbiage diarrheatics. I am also working with a group of poets to develope Baloh! A poetry debate format for spoken word poets, a reply to berbalas pantun, running parallels with Balagtasan. I prefer performing Chaos based spoken word and improvising with musicians, dancers and other Makhluk Seni and am now curating spoken word shows for various causes and organizations." is just some of the context surrounding his work and what he does. The point of this chapbook, I believe, is to show the progression of his poetic work over time.
Every poem is meant to be a conversation or about conversations. It makes sense to focus on communication in a medium and an art form that is based in the written word in its default state. This isn't a translation chapbook where each poem is presented fully in both languages, but it doesn't need to. It's the way the author speaks, and it makes sense that in a large collection from a poet who prefers rambling or spoken word formats that it's a fluid back and forth between the two. It doesn't need to be perfectly composed or calculated, because the way we talk to people rarely is so perfectly thought out all the time. This focuses a lot on his family, and his grandmother in particular. This book is interesting because it feels like a transcript of an entire spoken word set. That's a great thing, because people often want their books to come across as clean and organized and then the set that is spoken is a separate entity from the harvested texts. Why not make both the same? Why not have a book which is a spoken set? There aren't rules. Readers will feel like you're actually talking with them, and not just talking to them. It's not too casual at all. It's particularly human, in a way industry standards can never be.
He opens up even about the difficult and embarrassing, though he doesn't share everything. This is not a collection of many short poems, but a collaboration of varying long ones. They come with preface and context I don't need to give you, and tell many different stories of one man's life. And then for all the consistent rambling formatting it gets into messy visual playgrounds. Whether or not it's a pleasant kind of fun, it recognizes it isn't just a transcript. A lot of his poems are about his (now) fiancee, which is very wholesome, but he also doesn't pretend to be a flawless lover . . . no matter how much he loves her. It's ultimately just a very human collection about love, growth, performance, change, and time. I wish Umar luck in all his future projects!
"Tok Puan selalu tegur pantang hidangkan makanan yang sejuk kepada tetamu so instead I will serve you love and show you what you've been missing out on"