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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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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Language
Abandoned
Write
Poems
Nature
Theme
Able
Particularly
Writing
English
Even
Subject
Obsessive
Subjects
Formation
Imagination
Recent

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.
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I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.
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Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
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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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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 don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
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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 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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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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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.
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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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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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My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.
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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I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
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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Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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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When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.
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I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
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