Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction…

— 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…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing,…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion,…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

No matter how sheltered [my students] are, no matter how their parents try to do right by them, every single one of…

— 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…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

As a female in a home with a whole bunch of brothers and being very close to my father, without a mother…

— 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…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women's appropriation of male costume, work…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Once you stop talking about the female body empowering itself vis-à-vis male forays or invasions or male demands or the necessity to…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that…

— 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…

— 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…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The crows that are predatory are something you have to deal with. For me, they also become associated with cancer cells.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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

In a way, this kind of insight or recognition often permeates the way I think of character, how I plot action, and…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating,…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim