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Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems.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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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Figures
Crow
Walks
Symbolic
Take
Poems
Many
Differently
Life
Appear
Unpublished
Apart
Crows
Presence
Undeniable
Figure
Irritating

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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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.
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One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
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The Chinese traditionally have revered age and longevity - I have one and hope for the other! - so, in Taipei, a city-hub for global Chinese who dis-identify with the People's Republic of China's construction of a Communist nationalist Chineseness, I called on the Chinese muse of writing to witness my emergence out of the academic woods.
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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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I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
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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.
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I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.
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Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
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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.
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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.
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In the poem C, the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.
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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'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.
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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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Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
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In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.
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Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: I want, I want, I want!9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.
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In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim