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 Copy Share Image
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… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
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… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
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… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
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 Copy Share
Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
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… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share
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 Copy Share
