Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes

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.

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.

I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

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.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

The one difference I have noted is that it's made me more tender to my students and to young people particularly. It's made me mellower. I began to have a different perspective, because I may not be around much longer to be hassled by life's pressures.

In that way, I don't understand myself. It might have to do with my own conflicts, where to place my body as a child, which I have carried over to now. In this way I'm constantly dislocated.

I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.

As a female in a home with a whole bunch of brothers and being very close to my father, without a mother and later having a hostile relationship with my stepmother, there were all kinds of Freudian issues rising from possessing a female body that I had to negotiate with no guidance, and I did this negotiation almost instinctually.

In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

I had to do the academic writing. At a top research university, publishing of a certain kind is very important. So your friend is right. You can't do three things well.

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.

With so many brothers, I could always find a pair of shorts to borrow and run around in.

I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction in the world and turn that distraction into observations and then into poems.

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body.

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

When you're a female poet, would you, therefore, invoke a male muse? When nuns get consecrated into their vocations, they become brides of Christ. Christ is the bridegroom. In these symbolic actions, rather than in physical actions, where a male reaches sexuality or participates in intimate exchanges, if one uses a different term - there's often a heterosexual figuring that takes place. The male poet invokes a beautiful female muse. The virginal nun consecrated invokes the male bridegroom, Christ.

One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.

You need to be distracted.

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.

From 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.

In short, for me - I'm kind of projecting onto you - distraction has become a modus vivendi, a way of life. Rather than complaining, I am recognizing that I couldn't do what I wanted to do because I'm distracted.

If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act.

I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home.

One arrives at a recognition that one needs to be distracted.

Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

It is true that my characters have sex.

Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.

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.

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.

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.

I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman.

I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either. 

The 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.

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.

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.

I'm nomadic. Even when I'm a visiting professor here at the City University of Hong Kong, in this campus flat, I'm constantly getting up, sitting down, picking this or that up. You can't do that and be a writer. You need to be able to sit still.

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

"Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.

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.

Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.

I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.

Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.