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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
Writing
English
Even
Subject
Obsessive
Subjects
Formation
Imagination
Recent
Language
Abandoned
Write
Poems
Nature
Theme
Able
Particularly

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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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I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.
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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 you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.
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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.
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Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.
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I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
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Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.
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The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.
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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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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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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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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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I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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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I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
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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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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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The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
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