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The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, no to that occasion, that poem is gone.
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
Might
Lecture
Come
Lectures
Right
Occasion
Preparing
Poem
Occasions
Teach
Gone
More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
It is true that my characters have sex.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
When I was younger, yes, there was a part of me - and I wrote about that bit in Among the White Moon Faces - that wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be accepted by my brothers and to be their peers.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even later when I grew up, I was constantly wearing dungarees, wearing guy shirts.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
