The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped. Shirley Geok-lin Lim More Quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim More Quotes From Shirley Geok-lin Lim I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her. Shirley Geok-lin Lim muse complaining men There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female. Shirley Geok-lin Lim muse female couple I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure. Shirley Geok-lin Lim muse female figures When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body. Shirley Geok-lin Lim body mean people Once you stop talking about the female body empowering itself vis-à-vis male forays or invasions or male demands or the necessity to respond to husband and son to bring the issue down to a more concrete level, the body is a different manifestation physically. Shirley Geok-lin Lim issues husband son The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge. Shirley Geok-lin Lim challenges writing book It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This is the world of writing. Shirley Geok-lin Lim husband writing son Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you. Shirley Geok-lin Lim sabbatical writing mean 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim lectures gone might I do want to do the entire alphabet. There's in [Walker's Alphabet] a poem called "A Life" in that grouping. I was going to change that title to "A." Shirley Geok-lin Lim alphabet titles want I only submit the poems I think are the strongest. Shirley Geok-lin Lim submit strongest thinking I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet. Shirley Geok-lin Lim not-ready ready weak I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction in the world and turn that distraction into observations and then into poems. Shirley Geok-lin Lim use writing world Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself. Shirley Geok-lin Lim writing wonderful way I had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing." Shirley Geok-lin Lim couple writing sex After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it? Shirley Geok-lin Lim fifty writing thinking In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're minimal. The sex is not graphic in the way that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has all these graphic passages. Shirley Geok-lin Lim swings two sex It is true that my characters have sex. Shirley Geok-lin Lim character sex I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere. Shirley Geok-lin Lim writing sex thinking 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. Shirley Geok-lin Lim morning reality art
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