Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes
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The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.
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Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.
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I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
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John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.
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In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.
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My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.
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The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.
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When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.
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For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women's appropriation of male costume, work costume. For me, it wasn't Western feminism or the Western workspace. It was my growing up in a house with a bunch of boys, so that male costuming just became my mode of appropriation way before, you know, Betty Friedan came along.
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"Time" does not mean "occasion."
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In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're minimal. The sex is not graphic in the way that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has all these graphic passages.
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Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
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The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.
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"Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.
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"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.
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The crows that are predatory are something you have to deal with. For me, they also become associated with cancer cells.
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According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."
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That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.
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I was not - even the notion of "could not" seems to suggest a moment of recognition, but it was such a repressed dimension - I was not able to NOT wear a shirt like my brothers could. My brothers would, in the heat, run around shirtless, and I wouldn't do that, obviously.
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In a way, this kind of insight or recognition often permeates the way I think of character, how I plot action, and the way in which I use imagery, seeing binaries as false.
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Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
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Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics.
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I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.
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If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.
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You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.
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Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.
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These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that animate, absorb and saturate the subject, like indelible dyes spilled repeatedly over a plain fabric. No matter if the fabric is sturdy or delicate, translucent or opaque, those dyes will stain. They will color the days and years and life.
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I don't like crows. In the poem "C," crows are predatory, killing other birds and so forth. But in my morning walks, there were always crows, particularly at certain times of the year. And they're very aggressive, very visible and loud. They're not at all likable, but they have to be dealt with. They are part of the picture, the art in the morning. You cannot deny their reality.
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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
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Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.
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