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Quote by 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.”

Quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Author

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Shirley Geok-lin Lim is a Singaporean-born writer known for her profound insights into multiculturalism and her rich literary works. Her writings often focus on themes of race, gender, and identity, which have resonated with readers worldwide. more

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“According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."”

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.”

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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.”

Writing Firsts Conditions Poet Judging Conscious Irony Collections Prize Approval Impossibility Alarms Crossings Commonwealth Writing Poetry Peninsulas

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Writing Able Found Theme Alarms Obsessive

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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!”

Conditions Block Psychological Irony Syndromes Writer's Block

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“[Irony] has everything to do with what Tillie Olsen so powerfully imagined in her short story, "As I Stand Here Ironing" and elaborates on polemically in her 1978 book, Silences, in a chapter first delivered as a talk in 1967. As Olsen clearly saw it for women, my not being a writer was a material consequence of my being a woman - a wife, mother, housewife, and a certain kind of feminist teacher - attentive, one-on-one, face-to-face, nurturing, the kind who receives high ESCI evaluation scores from undergraduates and graduate students.”

“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.”

Ifs Years Matter States Facts Mother Teacher Wife Subjects Color Profound Categories Delicate Gestures Fabric Commonplace Stains Housewife Sturdy Indelible Opaque Wife Mother

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

Firsts Sometimes Yearning Complaints

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“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.”

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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.”

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Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim