Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems.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 Copy Share Image
In short, for me - I'm kind of projecting onto you - distraction has become a modus vivendi, a way of life.… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
The one difference I have noted is that it's made me more tender to my students and to young people particularly. It's… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I look at my young students, and I no longer have the sense that, oh, I'm the authority and they have to… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I do want to do the entire alphabet. There's in [Walker's Alphabet] a poem called "A Life" in that grouping. I was… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life. — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
"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 Image
I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image