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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim More Quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim More Quotes From Shirley Geok-lin Lim 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim passionate realizing hate 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim plot character thinking The things that I dislike passionately, I have come to realize, are also part of me. Shirley Geok-lin Lim realizing dislike 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim priorities writing son 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim perspective differences people 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim envy students looks I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough. Shirley Geok-lin Lim tough students suffering No matter how sheltered [my students] are, no matter how their parents try to do right by them, every single one of them, you know, every single one of us, that's what we all face. And so it's made me - that's the one change I've marked in myself - it's made me change in the way I relate to my students. I've become a different teacher in that way. Shirley Geok-lin Lim parent trying teacher 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim winning writing book 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim reading kings rain 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim alarms able 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! Shirley Geok-lin Lim irony block psychological [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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim mother teacher book In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being. Shirley Geok-lin Lim able imagination writing 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim writing country thinking Poetics is a science for stammering poets. Shirley Geok-lin Lim stammering poet 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim poet doe writing 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim rain writing running Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks. Shirley Geok-lin Lim lines break links The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically. Shirley Geok-lin Lim addresses cities stones
