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In the poem C, the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.

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
Suffered
Scare
Poem
Cancer
Crows
Crow
Associated

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Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
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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.
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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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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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Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
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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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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.
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After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?
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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
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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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From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant.
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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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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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Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
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When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim