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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.

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
Ready
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Weak

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Particularly in relationship to my father - there's something that daughters, girl children, do almost instinctually in their relationships with their father, so that physically, those boundaries must be respected and never crossed.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Rather, the collapsing between act and condition, I am with I do, feels like authenticity, an authenticity of being. The muse rewarded me for a few months, after April of 2012, by giving me poems, almost a poem each day, that I can claim as coming from my writer's status.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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
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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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Note, the reply will not be I write, an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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