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I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Deliberately
Muse
Figure
Female
Figures
Except
Playing
Sure

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet.
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Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
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It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.
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Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.
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When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.
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Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
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I do want to do the entire alphabet. There's in [Walker's Alphabet] a poem called A Life in that grouping. I was going to change that title to A.
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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
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If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act.
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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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The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.
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I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.
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I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.
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I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and the poet, my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer.
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What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim