Quote

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.

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
Signs
Therefore
Poet
System
Values
Poetics
Doe
Praxis
Writing
Maddening
Something
Counting

More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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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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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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Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
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The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, no to that occasion, that poem is gone.
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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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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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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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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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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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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John Milton famously claimed, Fame is the spur for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
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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In a way, this kind of insight or recognition often permeates the way I think of character, how I plot action, and the way in which I use imagery, seeing binaries as false.
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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After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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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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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim