Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes - Page 5

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

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.

Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

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

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.

Emerging into writership, I have plans to discover my other themes, of nation and country, love and conflict, the body and transcendence, mutilation and wholeness, starvation and wicked plenty, and more. That is, I am already thinking ahead to more writing.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

"Time" does not mean "occasion."

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.

In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer.

What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy.

I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.

In publishing books and winning awards, it's like you've enjoyed this meal, you know, two months ago. How long can you be nourished by thinking about it? You've already ingested it, and you've excreted it, and that was two months ago. You had this fabulous meal. It's not going to keep you satiated today. You have to go out and get your next meal. For me, that's writing. I have to go out and hunt my next meal.

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

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

I look at my young students, and I no longer have the sense that, oh, I'm the authority and they have to meet a certain standard. It's like, oh, look at these young ones. They've got such a hard road in front of them. I don't envy them having life ahead of them.

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.

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.

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.