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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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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Vines
Asian
Poem
Apart
English
Sometimes
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More quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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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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I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
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I was not - even the notion of could not seems to suggest a moment of recognition, but it was such a repressed dimension - I was not able to NOT wear a shirt like my brothers could. My brothers would, in the heat, run around shirtless, and I wouldn't do that, obviously.
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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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Breath and brevity are sisters the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
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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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If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
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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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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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My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.
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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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It is true that my characters have sex.
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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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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'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.
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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Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
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Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.
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In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.
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