“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.” IfsDifferentUseActionBeautifulTermChristPoetFemaleMalesSexualityIntimateMuseVocationSymbolicBridesNunInvokeBridegroom Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim
“I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.” StillsPowerfulPoetHopelessMuseVery Powerful Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim
“I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet.” FirstsWantedParticularPoetNine Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim
“The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and "the poet," my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer.” BookConditionsPoetTransformationImpulseTitlesProseDistinctionContrastIncline Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim
“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.” WritingFirstsConditionsPoetJudgingConsciousIronyCollectionsPrizeApprovalImpossibilityAlarmsCrossingsCommonwealthWriting PoetryPeninsulas Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim
“John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.” WritingYearsMayLostPoetFameSixParadiseSpursMiltonRevising Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim
“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.” OrderSpeakImaginationPoetFlight Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim
“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.” KnowsWritingDoeValuesPoetCountingPraxis Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim
