The "swaying sense of things": Boey Kim Cheng and the Poetics of Imagined Transnational Space, Travel, and Movement

Abstract

This article discusses the ways in which Singapore-born poet Boey Kim Cheng wrestles with the idea of travel as an inevitable part of poetic being, negotiating with the multiple meanings of place as geographical location, private memory, personal association, and past fragment. While the act of journeying provides Boey with an occasion for poetry, I argue that it is, more crucially, an ambulatory mode of signification that allows him to figure as well as to figure out the complexities of the craft of poetry-writing itself.