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No one, evidently, except me has found No Alarms poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write.

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
Writing
Obsessive
Continued
Poem
Theme
Except
Write
Ironical
Found
Evidently
Able
Alarms

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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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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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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It is true that my characters have sex.
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[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.
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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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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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New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.
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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Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or triflingly, God of War, but I did not have such a gendered muse in mind then.
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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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My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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
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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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One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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
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Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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.
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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I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim