About the author-

The Planners by Bowie Kim Chang was published in his second poetry collection another
place in 1992. bowie was born and raised in the island city-state of Singapore but moved to
Sydney becoming an Australian citizen in 1997 aged 32.

Inspiration- having become disenchanted with the literary and cultural politics of his home
country although bowie does not explicitly place this poem in Singapore it is not too much of
a stretch of the imagination to infer that it was his inspiration. Singapore began an extensive
modernization project in the late 1960s that carried on throughout the 1970s comprising the
establishment of a manufacturing industry mass public housing and significant investment in
public education and Infrastructure by the 1990s which is when bowie wrote this poem
Singapore had become one of the world's most prosperous nations.

Introduction- The poem however explores the way in which the relentless drive to urbanize
and modernize which may seem benign (harmless, good) on the surface actually results in an
artificially perfect environment constantly striving to reinvent its present but effectively
dislocating its people from their history and their identity in the process. not only is this
environment culturally sterile he says arguing somewhat paradoxically that it no longer has
the capability to inspire poetic thought but it is also dangerous as a form of government-
induced collective cultural amnesia, bringing to mind George Orwell’s chilling declaration in
his dystopian novel 1984 “who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present
controls the past.”
Syntax- the poem comprises three stanzas of nine fourteen and four lines it's written in free
verse which means that it has no pre-established rhythmical pattern or meter and no rhyme
scheme. bowie instead employs techniques such as syntactic parallelism, Enjambment,
Repetition, Anaphora, Tricolon and internal rhyme to modulate the poem's rhythm and to
give it a sense of cohesion as well as to highlight his underlying themes, poet's diction is
generally quite simple. although he combines these plain words to create powerful metaphors,
Personification and oxymorons and skilfully uses sound patterning techniques such as
alliteration, Consonants and assonance particularly in words which are generally positive in
meaning but that have unpleasant, plosive, guttural and sibilant sounds to create a tension
between surface beauty and an underlying sense of unease. the poem is written largely in the
present and future tenses which give it not only a sense of immediacy but also convey his
sense of a predetermined world to come.
the poem contains more than one paradox and a number of oxymorons which perhaps reflect
the tensions between the past the present and the future and the psychological discomfort it
arouses in the speaker. in bowie's eyes inexorable construction is inevitable destruction and if
we take a look at the final stanza in a further paradox we can see that bowie is lamenting
through the poetic form that this does not promote the creation of poetry. it could be argued
that the poem is a very subtle form of concrete poetry as it is justified centrally on the page
this creates a symmetrical poem perhaps reflecting the visual perfection for which the
faceless planners strive. When turned on its side it can also be interpreted as a skyline of
skyscrapers symmetrically reflected in the water.

Title of the poem and about THE PLANNERS-

The title of the poem the planners is a simple one and refers to the group of people who are
responsible for planning out the built environment within cities such as zoning of residential,
industrial and commercial areas, transportation and street and road design. This (the title) is
the only instance of the planners being explicitly named in the entire poem as bowie prefers
instead to refer to them using the very impersonal plural third-person pronoun “they” which
serves to underline not only the way in which he dehumanizes them but also how he
distances himself from them.

First stanza-
The vocabulary Bowie chooses here is superficially positive i.e., “plan”, “possibilities” and
“desired” all of which suggest progress and a better future. There's a sense of order and
continuity where structures are “in alignment” and “linked”. note that he connects
“mathematics” with the seemingly positive word “grace” which suggests elegance and
beauty. There are however tensions between the poet's choice of vocabulary and how he
chooses to structure the poem. Bowie uses his first two sentences “they plan. they
build” ,which are the simplest form of a declarative sentence that you can get, to bluntly
convey that the planners have one simple purpose. the way in which the speaker only uses the
plural third-person pronoun “they” to refer to the planners throughout suggests they are
faceless by dehumanizing them in this way it makes their power seem even more sinister.
these two sentences are also an example of syntactic parallelism where the two sentences
have identical grammatical structures i.e., “they” + present tense verb, which enhances the
idea that the planners are like automata only able to operate in a fixed sequence of pre-
ordained actions which once they are complete will go back to the beginning and start again.
the rhythmical nature of the anaphora of the repeated “they” evokes this unrelenting cycle.
Alluding to the grid plan in city planning where streets run at right angles to one another he
continues “all spaces are gridded”. This however also evokes the idea of a piece of graph
paper being placed arbitrarily (on the basis of random choice) over a map with no regard for
natural features and the organic lines of the landscape itself. the fact that all spaces are
gridded suggests that the process is constricting in its uniformity as there is no room for
creativity or freedom of expression or nature. this is further enhanced by their being “filled
with permutations of Possibilities”. the noun “permutations” is terminology from the
discipline of mathematics to which Bowie explicitly refers in line Six and refers to the way in
which the arrangement of a pre-established set of items can be changed (definition of
permutations). in other words, these possibilities are not endless after all but are only
variations of a limited number of options. “Permutations of possibilities” shows a plosive
alliteration which suggests bowie's distaste.
Even though everything being “connected” would appear on the surface to be a positive
quality. bowie communicates this using a long sentence with no internal punctuation (“The
buildings are in alignment with---grace of mathematics”). this creates a dependent clause
“linked by bridges” which simultaneously belongs to two different sentences. while it may
reflect the superficial elegance of order created through mathematics it also leaves the reader
puzzled and uneasy as they are unsure how to read it. the way in which it also does not allow
a pause suggests the inexorability of growth an idea which is picked up in the next line (“they
build and will not stop”). we now see the phrase the “grace of mathematics” in a new light.
rather than the positive associations of the gracefulness of numbers and numerical patterns
we can argue that bowie means it more in its sense of the approval or kindness that is given
by God. in other words mathematics has taken on an almost godlike quality, a divine force
under whose rules and theories everything must bend.
bowie's tone becomes more overtly hostile at the end of the stanzas he asserts that “even the
sea draws back and the skies surrender”. as the city expands both outwards and upwards
bowie employs personification to argue that it is encroaching on nature to the point that
nature is defeated. note the use of words such as “draws back” to suggest retreat and
“surrender” to evoke the idea that humankind is waging war on the natural world.
Second Stanza- The planners strive for perfection as “They erase the flaws…. dental
dexterity.” bowie introduces the extended metaphor here which continues over the remainder
of the stanza of a personified country undergoing cosmetic dental work. the word “blocks”
could refer either to individual apartment and office buildings or perhaps even to city blocks
which are the spaces for multiple buildings within the street patterns of a city. the word
dexterity which means a skill in performing tasks particularly those that are manual in nature
usually has positive connotations but here combined with the adjective dental creates plosive
alliteration of the d sounds, absolute e sounds, plosive consonants of the t sounds with the
added hissing sibilants in dexterity to create an image the methodical nature of which is
extremely sinister.
he continues “all gaps are plugged with gleaming gold”. the image of ultra modern gold
tinted windows on skyscrapers conjures a vision of a person with false gold teeth. once more
bowie takes words which are superficially positive such as gleaming and gold. but when our
ears have already been primed to this phrase’s guttural alliteration with the guttural
consonants of gaps and plugged as well as the plosive consonants of the sound in these two
words and the liquid consonants of plugged, gleaming and gold, the effect is not one of
luxury but of gaudy vulgarity which the poet seems to find distasteful. this in turn has a
knock-on effect on how we perceive the image of the country wearing “perfect rows of
shining teeth”.
the next line “anaesthesia amnesia hypnosis” is a tricolon or triad. the internal rhyme of
anaesthesia and amnesia enhancing the phrases innate sense of rhythm. all three words build
up a picture of the collective brainwashing of the cultural memory of the country as it is
numbered and manipulated so that the past is painlessly forgotten under a shiny veneer. the
simple assertion they have the means is sinister in its suggestion that the planners and whom
they're working for are omnipotent as “they have it all so it will not hurt, so history is new
again. note the oxymoron here in that “history” by its very nature is not generally thought of
as having the capacity to be “new again” and draws our attention to the idea that the past and
history are actually not the same things. history is the interpretation of past events through
records such as documents and visual media as well as bowie argues through the city's fabric
such as its buildings, if the documentary evidence of the past is changed so is our
understanding of history.
the poem continues “the piling will not stop” the word piling comes from the world of
construction and refers to the pushing of columns made of wood metal or concrete into the
ground where they act as foundations for the buildings which are constructed on top of them
much like the roots that give teeth their stability. another way in which the word drilling
comes from terminology related to both dentistry and construction as bowie continues to
develop his extended metaphor. this drilling will go through or destroy the fossils of last
century. here bowie mixes the literal with the metaphorical as the digging down through the
earth will not destroy literal underground fossils of last century as fossils take millions of
years to form but those 19th century buildings on the surface which are deemed old-fashioned
or outdated.
3rd Stanza- the final stanza which is the shortest of the three shifts focus as the speaker brings
themselves into the poem. the phrase “my heart bleeds” is an idiom meaning that you feel
great sorrow and emotion. bowie subverts this however to suggest that the sterility he
perceives in his home country has numbed his ability to feel the emotions that are necessary
to write poetry. this sense of inspirational anaesthesia is reflected in the factual and
emotionless tone of the sentence itself. he emphasizes this in the final lines as he declares that
“not a single drop will fall to stain the blueprint of our pasts tomorrow”. the blueprint refers
to architectural or mechanical plans which were originally produced with white lines on a
blue background but the word can also be used metaphorically to refer to a detailed outline or
plan of action and suggest that bowie feels the future is mapped out as meticulously as a
technical drawing and the plan is to continue to destroy the past. the oxymoron our pasts
tomorrow finishes the poem on a bleak note suggesting that the country's past is embodied in
its historical buildings is doomed to oblivion.