"Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot."
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Quote collection
Shirley Geok-lin Lim quotes (page 1 of 7)
137 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"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."
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"As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write."
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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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"Working women went through a time when they believed that."
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"I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality."
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"At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen."
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"Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written."
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"With so many brothers, I could always find a pair of shorts to borrow and run around in."
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"Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that."
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"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."
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"Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks."
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"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."
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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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"I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays it's taken for granted that this is what girlfriends do - I would constantly wear their shorts, put on their shirts. That did not seem odd because we were desperately poor for quite a while. It wasn't as if pretty little girlie things were available to me."
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