Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.
Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.
[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either.
As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.
At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.
I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.
The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.
The crows that are predatory are something you have to deal with. For me, they also become associated with cancer cells.
"Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.
Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that.
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.
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.
The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act.
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.
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.
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!
In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer.
I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.
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.
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.
Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't a good thing in some ways.
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."
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.
I'm much more comfortable in pants and shirts, running around. There was a typical construction about womanhood when I was growing up that I rejected.
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.
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.
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.
What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy.
I really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up a lot of oxygen from my time and my creative thinking.
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.
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.
I had to do the academic writing. At a top research university, publishing of a certain kind is very important. So your friend is right. You can't do three things well.
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.
My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak.
I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home.
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.
That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.
You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.
Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.
As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.
The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and incitement of specular curiosity and fascination.
In that way, I don't understand myself. It might have to do with my own conflicts, where to place my body as a child, which I have carried over to now. In this way I'm constantly dislocated.
When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.
When I was younger, yes, there was a part of me - and I wrote about that bit in Among the White Moon Faces - that wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be accepted by my brothers and to be their peers.
Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.
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.
If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act.
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.
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.