Terry Jaensch and Cyril Wong, two of Australasia’s foremost gay poets, have teamed up to produce a book of poetry Excess Baggage & Claim that tackles head on the complexities of contemporary identity and sexuality. Jaensch, an Australian who bases in Melbourne, and Wong, a Singaporean, collaborated on the project, taking three months in total to complete the 35 poems.
The poems are contained in two sections (though one poem ‘True Born Castrato’ occurs almost as an introduction) – ‘Excess Baggage’ and ‘Claim’. Playing off the imagery of an airport baggage claim, the poems as a whole (a word that seems almost paradoxical in this context) evoke a sense of disembodied moments that exist as isolated snapshots of a life. The imagery is lustfully intense and often (in the) raw in much of the work.
Wong brings a knack for evoking emotion to the project, which when combined with Jaensch’s ability to manipulate language and imagery, creates a collection of isolated pieces that form a collective sense of loneliness and searching.
Place is also important in the poems, which move from one geographical location to another, with a red-eyed weariness. In the first half of the collection, karaoke operates as a cultural symbol for the sexual encounters of cruising gay men in Australasia. In a poem entitled ‘Karaoke Booth 2′, the rapidly changing songs of an oddly intimate karaoke booth serve as a near perfect metaphor for the anonymous sexual encounters of cruising the back rooms of gay clubs:
‘To keep my cock limp I recite poetry. In / this heat endless, availability and relative / safety it pays to sharpens one’s mind, if
‘not to stiffen one’s resolve then to let it lie – / knowingly. When it comes to pop one lyric’s / as good as the next, interchangeable, so too
‘the shops and bars. This country is like one / endless mall, beat, I tell the thirty-something / pole as he goes down on an inconsistency’.
Like much of the work, neither the images nor the lines are easily self-contained or summarized. In the above poem, the sexual imagery and implication are obvious, but the metaphor of a hypersexual culture seem almost contradicted by the emphasis on impotency, rather than virility. Like much of Jaensch’s and Wong’s efforts, the meaning and power comes from the juxtaposition of pieces intentionally at odds, but nevertheless making up a uniform set.
Cyril Wong and Terry Jaensch will be guests at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, May 28 – June 3. To order, Excess Baggage & Claim, visit www.transitlounge.com.au.
