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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.

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
Desire
Asia
Also
Ended
Back
California
Reach
Toward
Perhaps
Ironically
Written
Pacific
Looking
Memoir

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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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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Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
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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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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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I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
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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.
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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.
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I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem C. I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.
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As a first-generation Asian American woman, for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an Asian American woman. Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.
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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.
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After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?
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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Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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It is true that my characters have sex.
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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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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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
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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
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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