Jennifer Anne Champion (b. 1988)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Richard Angus Whitehead
Dated 11 Mar 2025
Jennifer Anne Champion, poet, educator, cat-lover, model, performer, archivist and embroiderer is the author of two poetry collections, A History of Clocks (2015) and Caterwaul (2016). Various uncollected poems have been published in anthologies and on social media. Champion is of mixed heritage with roots in Ceylon and Indonesia. She grew up in Serangoon Gardens, an area which predates and has been less quickly affected by postcolonial Singapore’s ubiquitous development post-1960. The area is explored retrospectively and contemporarily in Champion’s poems, with even a map, annotated by colour marker, prefacing Caterwaul. Champion’s artistic progression has thus far occurred in three stages: performance poetry (the stage) (2012-15); poems as read (the page) (2015-20); and intersections between word and fabric (2020-present).
Performance Poetry (The Stage) (2012-15)
In 2012, Champion, as she describes, “fell hard” for the Singapore performance poetry scene. From then onwards, she performed regularly at slams and open mic events. On both screen and page, Champion’s development as a writer and performer can be observed through her poems and performances from 2012 to 2015, by which she has cultivated a keen attention to sound and performance. Performed and printed versions of the same work are often markedly different; Champion is never content to perform the same poem in the same way twice.
Champion’s work explores a variety of personal and social issues, ranging from the rapid or imminent loss of personal historical spaces and personages in Singapore to recollections of a childhood marred by familial, educative, political, commercial, and even peer pressures, anxieties of the body and mind, and all-too-material manifestations of patriarchy. Her impassioned, eloquent, and charming manner lightens such heavy topics.
Memories of childhood (and adult) trauma are especially resonant in performance poetry, particularly in terms of race and gender. Take for example these lines from a live performance of “Ballet Class”, from Champion’s collection A History of Clocks:
You do know in the [PAP sanctioned] kindergarten across the block
you never learn to read or write or put up a fight
when they tell you to go play in the back.
Not because you’re tall.
No.
To build your own wall out of wooden blocks.
The only phrase you know:
wo bu zhi dao
In “Ballet Class”, the first poem in A History of Clocks, issues of unfairness arising from the politics of language and race rear their heads. As the state-supported kindergarten class is conducted exclusively in Chinese, it collides with the child speaker’s non-Chinese, English-speaking home. Even the Snakes and Ladders game the speaker has brought from home jars against the branded US manufactured Polly Pocket dolls that captivate her classmates. The poem’s dedication suggests that such a contrast reflects her and her sister’s childhood experiences. “Ballet Class” is visually spaced across the page. The choice to include such spaces might be seen as an attempt to evoke and preserve the aural bodily rhythms of Champion’s original physical performances, a way of transcribing performance to the page.
“Ballet Class” also reflects a doubled perspective: the little girl turned “grown ass woman” retrospectively imagines launching into a sworn outburst, “To FUCK! With these… meanies”. Such a rant is qualified and tempered by the “adorable” kindergarten girl’s endearing search for the right adjective in her untarnished vocabulary, and perception. The now adult speaker extends compassion to her childhood self, describing “your endless capacity to love / as little children do” despite her mistreatment. Kindergarten memories reemerge in “Nap Time”, the first poem of Champion’s follow-up collection Caterwaul. The speaker, a girl from a minority community, says “I want to be dead”, as each little girl is obliged to behave “like a lady”. This alludes to the production of gendered norms from a young age, and the ways Champion’s speakers continue to be haunted by the imposed norms of early childhood. From the innocence of childhood to the disillusionment of adulthood, Champion alludes to the tensions between a relative naivete and a new, exciting, but also painful and deadening world.
A History of Clocks also contains two of Champion’s best-known poems: “Paradise City” and “Volcano”. “Paradise City” is probably Champion’s most enduring and well-known work, chosen for instance to be performed by primary school student Sai Ashwika Hari from St. Margaret’s School when competing at Singapore’s first National Poetry Recitation competition in July 2023. The poem is also regularly taught in local secondary schools. Such evidence suggests Champion’s work’s presence in Singapore’s cultural mainstream.
When performing “Paradise City”, Champion begins by singing and clapping along to the refrain from the 1987 Guns N’ Roses song of the same title. In print, this acts as the poem’s epigraph,
Take me down to the paradise city
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.
Oh won’t you please take me home?
This rock chorus enhances the plain understatement of the first lines, as Champion generalises about the humble Singaporean kopitiam:
Someone will swear it has:
The best yong tau foo. The eggiest telur prata.
The gingeriest teh halia. The quietest... air-conditioner.
These lines connote a deep local pride in these dishes, retaining an intensity of an organic, authentic, and natural flavour. The reference to the air conditioner – featuring a subtly delivered stand-up gag pause from Champion – adds a sobering modern mundanity to these superlatives, gesturing towards Singapore’s proudly constant state of change. The pervasive sense of competitiveness and survivalism in Singapore is captured succinctly in the lines that follow:
Because no place survives here without being the best
At something.
Champion’s poem continues to riff off its epigraph, as “pretty girls [stream] out of the bottom of the skyline / On lunch break.” However, all personal identity seems lost in the critical mass heading again for food – highly regulated, constricted in behaviour and dress, “like an ant farm”, with an anonymised appearance of “pencil skirts and reasonable heels”. She continues,
Take me to the wheels of our best minds churning.
Take me to the book-loving gangster. The millionaire cab-driver.
The flat-dwelling cat feeder who knows that a dream
Is the most expensive asset to own
In this city.(But Oh how lovely! to own something non-taxable)
Champion’s reference here to “best minds” seems a rare explicit allusion in her work to the opening of Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl”: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. Her use of the verb “churning” suggests something being agitated, perhaps while being processed into something new. Champion identifies these “best minds” in book-loving gangsters and millionaire cab drivers, far removed from conventional conceptions. Even the humble “flat-dwelling cat feeder” holds the most precious, scarce item of all: a dream. Yet, the fact that in Singapore a dream can be deemed the city’s most expensive asset, even more than say a Lamborghini or landed property, alludes to the dangers of the liberation implied by dreaming, and going against the flow in socially engineered Singapore. The poem’s conclusion brings the most sustained reference to the Guns N’ Roses song:
Take me to paradise city
Where the grass is green and the people
So shiny and new and always knowing where to go
—where do we go—how do we move forward—always
moving forward—MAJULAH!Take me
Home.
The suggestion that “the people […] always know […] where to go” is troubled by the interjection, “where do we go”, taken from another Guns N’ Roses song, “Sweet Child of Mine”. The speaker troubles the notion that Singapore, in its anxious procession toward some imagined ideal, is a “paradise city”, a “home” laden with slippery connotations. Drawing to mind Kit Chan’s 1998 song “Home”, these chimes and allusive echoes build up to the poem’s climax, ending with the final, simple plea, “Take me / Home”. While Guns N’ Roses’ original contains social critiques of the United States, especially the negative effects of rapid urbanisation, Champion’s poem is an affectionate, deadpan interrogation of mainstream Singaporean outlooks.
Alongside “Paradise City”, the collection’s “Volcano” is also amongst Champion’s most known pieces, with the eponymous volcano presented in contrast to a friend with a quiet disposition, like a familiar pair of shoes. The poem begins,
You do not shout. Do not scream for attention
like volcanoes do. You console like old but
well-loved shoes. I can walk with you to the edge
of anywhere and it will always be comfortable.
Unlike the cacophony and conspicuousness of the volcano, the friend is like a pair of “well-loved shoes” that consoles and comforts. This metaphor continues as the speaker describes, “And maybe at a party somewhere I might remark / to someone else, “What nice friends you have.” In her 2014 performance of “Volcano”, Champion looks down at her shoes, strengthening this image. Yet, the speaker articulates that “not every occasion is one where I want my shoes / to wear me out.” However, “Shiny” or “New”, even a loved friend can “wear [the speaker] out”, though with some distance the speaker and her friends can “get to tie-up phone lines and laugh”. The poem continues with a declaration:
It is you I want, laced up at my wedding.
Converse high-tops scaling the aisle under a white dress.
“Converse high-tops” are presented in contrast to the formality of a “white dress”, presenting a continuous thread between casual friendship and formal social occasions. Such a juxtaposition connotes a rebelliousness beneath the pretence. This sense of presence amidst romantic misadventures continues as the speaker likens her friend to “rollerblades”, feeling “each scraped knee / Every bee-stung first kiss with every boy”.
The crux of the poem returns to the central image of the volcano:
Because if you are my shoe and I am your shoe,
then we’ve burnt holes in our soles climbing the
volcanoes of our roughest relationships.
From the introduction of both images in the poem’s beginning, the speaker brings the shoes and volcanoes together again, suggesting the ways that the comfort of friendship endures and triumphs, as with a comfortable pair of shoes, over the dangers of erupting volcanoes, a metaphor for turbulent romance. This insistence on the enduring power of friendship is such that the speaker articulates that “Outgrowing [shoes] doesn’t change their purpose”. The poem expands into further geological metaphor, concluding:
Geographers know that this is how small the world is.
Every body you dodge means a body you will bump into.
And sure I could make new friends.But should the continents we occupy finally collide one day,
I will be waiting on the beach barefoot.
These poems from A History of Clocks reflect Champion’s keen attention to sound and performance, an attention to the aural that imbues recollections of a fractious childhood, disillusionments toward contemporary Singapore, and the affection of friendship with warmth and dynamism.
Poems as Read (The Page) (2015-20)
While Champion has described A History of Clocks as a “Greatest Hits CD” of her performance poetry, Caterwaul arrived 12 months later as part of the Ten Year Series, an editorial imprint by Math Paper Press. The imprint primarily selected work workshopped in Sing Lit Station’s Manuscript Bootcamp, an intensive editorial programme that may have eased Champion’s transition into a more unabashed presence on the page.
The connotations of “caterwaul”, suggesting feline voices fighting or making love seem telling, reflecting Champion’s love for cats, but also the clashing dissonance between past and present, as well as Champion’s ongoing preoccupations with sound and performance. Cats are a recurring presence throughout the book, a play on the pun present in Caterwaul. For example, the poem ‘Cats of Sister Hill’ and a photograph of Champion’s cat are both present in Caterwaul.
Elsewhere, the caterwaul is referred to as “a wall of sound”, referencing both Champion’s verbal performances of her poems, as well as the sounds of her neighbourhood. Champion has described herself as aspiring to map “pain and desire across middle-class suburbia, in a contest to be heard against the poetry of the heartlands” in Caterwaul. As Ow Yeong Wai Kit has astutely observed, Caterwaul is:
steeped in nostalgia and longing but also suffused with anxieties about ruptured relationships and the pressures faced by the individual.
(‘She walks like a Free Country: review of Caterwaul and Amanda Chong’s Professions’, Cha, 2018)
Caterwaul is concerned with the rapid loss of personal-historical spaces in Singapore such as Serangoon Gardens, Champion’s neighbourhood that has been evermore vulnerable to the pragmatic whims of “en bloc assholes”, Serangoon Gardens’ community centre, requisitioned as a woman and child shelter, as well as past performance spaces for poetry. Champion’s elegies are intimate: in Caterwaul she uses a red felt tip to mark out her Serangoon Gardens neighbourhood in a map that opens the collection, edges seemingly corresponding to where names have given way to numbers, gesturing to and demarcating a generational area she was born into and grew up in. Champion’s Serangoon Gardens milieu recalls the small but profoundly resonant social community origins of earlier Anglophone poets, such as Ted Hughes’ Mytholmroyd, Seamus Heaney’s Mossbawn and Paul Muldoon’s Moy.
Champion, therefore, is one of few Singaporean poets of her generation in a position to explore such an organically rooted phenomenon. Images of Champion’s family home, garden, and neighbourhood evoke an ever rarer, more distant, quotidian Singapore from before, a Singapore preceding full-on state engineering. For example, dialogue from Radio 4 serves as the source for the epigraph for her poem “Orchid Hunting”, and there is also positive reference made to an older lifestyle in “Personal Sewage”. Champion thus acts as a generational archivist and elegist for a quickly disappearing old Singapore, displaying a poignant awareness of a treasured Singaporean past. Amidst profound urban and social change, Champion’s Caterwaul contends against the forces that have ended beloved elements in her neighbourhood, as described in “Serangoon Gardeners (an EP)”.
In Caterwaul, Champion pulls from the kennels of her quotidian domestic neighbourhood present, not unlike Paul Muldoon. For instance, in “Confessions of an English-Speaking Opium Eater”, the speaker’s “father bows and makes salat five times a day in the direction of mechanist ideals”. An allusion to Thomas De Quincey’s autobiography Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), the speaker activates the imagery of Muslim prayers in devotion to “mechanist ideals”, perhaps referring to the mechanisation or automation of modernising Singapore. The onslaught of change comes not just in terms of urban layouts, but the values and ideals that pervade the speaker’s home, as addictive as eating opium.
Aspects of Champion’s family heritage seem early and deeply woven into Singapore’s social history: for instance, her great-grandfather George Champion was headmaster of a mission school. A more recently discovered historical familial connection is celebrated and explored in the poem “Let It Shine” - a fusion of familial and national history centring upon events during the period of the Japanese Occupation. In this poem, as Champion imagines the birth of a child in a civilian shelter during the Japanese Occupation, the poet trains her ever empathetic and curious eye on minute personal particulars as she recovers hitherto neglected geographical, personal, and social national histories. Here we witness an arresting fusion and surreal approach in its retelling:
The search lights in 1942.
Seeking out the tiny girl
In the belly of her mother.
The civilian shelter location of the poem is a womb of sorts. Almost simultaneously, the blood of the child’s birth and death of the father gleam on concrete floors in Japanese-occupied Singapore. The refrain of the poem seems a sampling of both a traditional Christian chorus and a historic mission school motto, “Let your light shine”. Allusions and arresting polysemous wordplay jar: as in “no crib for a bed” with “light of the south”.
Champion’s poems are also attuned to various injustices of a gendered valency, engaging with issues of sexuality through surrealism, mythology, and more imminent daily occurrence. “Orchid Hunting”—a dramatic monologue of sorts, satirises the ways that ‘progress’ is given a masculine shape. In the poem, ‘uber-men’ turn into ‘seahorse-like sacrificial mothers’, an imagined genderfluidity amidst an institutional patriarchal mainstream. In “The God of Love and Fabulous,” there is a simultaneous engagement with an early twentieth-century Scottish painting, a Scottish gallery and Celtic mythology via which the nature of the poet’s art and sexuality are explored. Champion is also sensitive to the intersections between race, gender and nationality: she responds to Tse Hao Guang’s poem, “Joy”, which imagines the voice of an eponymous Filipina domestic helper, with her own poem, “Emergency Room, 2010”. In this reimagining, health issues precipitate a reflexive, unaffected breakdown of social and national boundaries between two ailing women, the speaker and Joy:
We wish we weren’t the people who break too easily, both Joy and I.
As it turns out, inconvenience has the same remedy.
Here’s a wheelchair for you and a wheelchair for you.
These lines are both sharp and ambiguous even as they indirectly gesture to social injustice: do we celebrate a human connection made across identity lines, or wince at Singapore’s characteristically impoverished one-size-fits-all solution in response to a spectrum of issues?
As observed above, through a comparison of poems as published on the page with their recorded performances available through YouTube, a reader or viewer can observe Champion’s reworking, tightening and shortening the minute particulars of her performance poems for the pages of A History of Clocks. In contrast, Caterwaul reveals perhaps equally pyrotechnic poetic experiments confidently in a more, but not exclusively, page-oriented, “literary” context.
Intersections between Word and Fabric (2020-present).
Champion’s constant, idiosyncratic reinvention has persisted as she has moved from stage to page to textiles. In the first half of 2021, Champion created an Instagram channel featuring her first experiments in silk shading embroidery. While these early pieces were entirely visual art, as Champion grew familiar with the medium, text became increasingly featured. Champion’s channel featured images and short videos of experiments informed by research exploring Southeast Asian embroidery culture.
In mid-2021, Champion was awarded a virtual fellowship as part of the National Centre for Writing (NCW) – Singapore Residency Programme, during which she explored the role of embroidery as a potentially rich medium for narrative enriched by image. During the fellowship Champion encountered the work of Lorina Bulwer, an artist who in the latter half of the nineteenth century embroidered large, lengthy, and elaborate embroidered letter-image works. These featured strong accusations against the powerful despite her being institutionalised at the Great Yarmouth Workhouse, in an asylum for those with mental illnesses. Champion found in Bulwer a “shaper of stories” and possible model for her own work; One of Champion’s first responses to Bulwer’s work uses Bulwer’s work as the base for blackout poetry.
That same year, Champion began several series of works. Champion’s early textile work was included in the Art Reach exhibition ‘softer worlds’, selected by the curator Natalia Tan. The works chosen included mainly pictorial but sometimes verbal uses of pun recalling the wordplay and influences of Salvador Dali and other Surrealists. One series was of a succession of cryptids entitled “Handsome Bois” and featuring poems of Champion’s yet unpublished. These four sizeable works embroidered upon oval samplers depicted males allegorically morphed with fish and bird, oyster, and swan. Another series was her textile take on William Blake’s watercolour painting, ‘Jacob’s Dream’ (c. 1805), where a female figure, perhaps Champion, replaces the sleeping visionary, Jacob. By 2022, Champion was embroidering as a kind of memorialising, with images of her maternal grandmother, whom she never met, based on photographs from the 1950s. A further series from 2023 to 2024 depicts martyred poets across the globe, including the Gazan poet Refaat Alareer who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza in 2023. Champion has also created a 0.7 metre embroidery work entitled “to the idealists”, which explores colour discrimination in Singapore. This was an outgrowth of her graduate work in creative writing at Nanyang Technological University, where she combined her interests in text and textiles.
Champion has also taken to songwriting, writing songs such as “Dear Mr. Accordion Man at Bishan MRT”. In the song we find echoes of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles” (1968) or James Taylor and Joni Mitchell’s “(He Played Real Good) For Free” (1974), as Champion turns her attention to the often-unnoticed accordion-playing busker at the MRT station. This song is part of Champion’s ongoing “Aunties and Uncles of Singapore” series of poems, such as an uncle in the song “Raffles Link” described as reminiscent “of the bird woman in Mary Poppins”. This reflects Champion’s concerns regarding nature, local places and ordinary people within the city-state, as well as her affection for the momentary wonder they bring amidst a daily drudgery.
Even the most apparently page-bound of Champion’s poems gesture to performance and to song. Champion’s is poetry not just performed but also “composed with [the] body”. In performance, Champion sings the refrain of her poem “A History of Clocks” to the most recognised of Strauss waltzes, the “Blue Danube”. In performances of “An Alien Love Song”, Champion’s impressive singing voice, often accompanied by self-taught guitar, recalls Feist, or especially the Space Lady Susan Dietrich when voice synthesised, as in one of Champion’s recorded live performances. In other recorded performances, Champion has her audience clapping and singing along to the chorus of Guns N’ Roses’ song “Paradise City” in her poem of the same name.
Champion is currently working toward, after a hiatus of almost a decade, her third book and one wonders what form this work might take. While her first book included a quirky letter to a prospective reader, and her second included maps, photos, and handwritten insertions, her third is sure to include her more recent multimedia experiments with textiles and musical lyrics.
Conclusion
For some years, Champion’s poetry has been included in the local English curriculum in Singapore. One envisages at last authentic, deeper discussions and interrogations generated as students chew and spiritedly argue over Champion’s increasingly warm and rich, ambiguous-mysterious, satisfyingly problematic poems. While Champion is sometimes lyrical and at other times obscure, there seems a more avowed intent to convey a message of social justice through her poems.
Champion continues to upload a steady stream of posts and performances almost daily on social media, especially on Instagram. Overall, there is a sense of Champion having come through the system – a Singapore childhood, adolescence, twenties, scathed but still singing sweetly, still glowingly human. There is a sense of gradual and enriching accretion as Champion finds her way and passes through each station, from stage, to page, to textiles – thereby remaining a distinctive, refreshingly colourful, and serious fixture in Singapore’s poetic stratosphere.
Works cited
Champion, Jennifer Anne. Caterwaul. Singapore: Math Paper Press. 2016.
Champion, Jennifer Anne. “'A History of Clocks' (Live at SPORE Arts Salon)”. YouTube. 12 March 2014. Web.
Champion, Jennifer Anne. A History of Clocks. Singapore: Red Wheelbarrow Books. 2015.
Etiquette SG - Channel operated by Tania De Rozario. “OFF WOMEN FOR THE RECORD #3 // "Ballet Class" by Jennifer Anne Champion”. YouTube. 26 January 2015. Web.
My Conservation Portal. “‘Let It Shine’ by Jennier Anne Champion”. SoundCloud. 2015. Web.
poetry.sg. “Jennifer Anne Champion - An Alien Love Song”. YouTube. 3 November 2015. Web.
sploosh! “[sploosh! session #3] Jennifer Anne Champion - 'Raffles Link'”. YouTube. 1 November 2023. Web.
