Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.Collection: Writing
Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.Collection: Cutting
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.Collection: Order
The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.Collection: Feet
As a first-generation "Asian American woman," for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an "Asian American woman." Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.Collection: America
If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.Collection: Writing
Working women went through a time when they believed that.Collection: Working Women
In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.Collection: People
As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.Collection: Grew
Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.Collection: Important
Once you stop talking about the female body empowering itself vis-à-vis male forays or invasions or male demands or the necessity to respond to husband and son to bring the issue down to a more concrete level, the body is a different manifestation physically.Collection: Husband
The things that I dislike passionately, I have come to realize, are also part of me.Collection: Realizing
At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Agency
I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.Collection: Cancer
I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.Collection: Home
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.Collection: People
These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that animate, absorb and saturate the subject, like indelible dyes spilled repeatedly over a plain fabric. No matter if the fabric is sturdy or delicate, translucent or opaque, those dyes will stain. They will color the days and years and life.Collection: Mother
[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.Collection: Writing
Poetics is a science for stammering poets.Collection: Poet
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.Collection: Body
The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Giving
I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.Collection: Problem
I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.Collection: Powerful
I was walking every morning, and I'd take my iPod and paper and pen. As I walked, I wrote a poem, and then I'd come home - and sometimes it's legible, sometimes not - I typed the poem up. So I have a new, yet to be published, collection of poems now. It's called Walker's Alphabet, and among other things, it is about walking. My most recent collection of poems in 2010, incidentally, was titled WALKING backwards.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Book
Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Beautiful
I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when you say, "no" or you have to say, "no" so often to the writing occasion, those occasions don't really come back.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Gone
Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't a good thing in some ways.Collection: Teaching
One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.Collection: Feel Good
I really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up a lot of oxygen from my time and my creative thinking.Collection: Thinking
I do want to do the entire alphabet. There's in [Walker's Alphabet] a poem called "A Life" in that grouping. I was going to change that title to "A."Collection: Titles
I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.Collection: Thinking
I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet.Collection: Weak
[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Hate
The crows live in the world like you do. They are part of nature.Collection: Crow
The crows that are predatory are something you have to deal with. For me, they also become associated with cancer cells.Collection: Cancer
In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.Collection: Cancer
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.Collection: Crow
I don't like crows. In the poem "C," crows are predatory, killing other birds and so forth. But in my morning walks, there were always crows, particularly at certain times of the year. And they're very aggressive, very visible and loud. They're not at all likable, but they have to be dealt with. They are part of the picture, the art in the morning. You cannot deny their reality.Collection: Morning
I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Writing
This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not diagnosed for myself!Collection: Block