The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act.
Shirley Geok-lin LimSometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
Shirley Geok-lin LimI have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet.
Shirley Geok-lin LimFrom the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant.
Shirley Geok-lin LimThe judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim