Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Singing has nothing to do with poetry, except as twins separated at birth. — 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
Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
"Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed… — 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
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 Copy Share Image
Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare. — 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,… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image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… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Rather, the collapsing between act and condition, "I am" with "I do," feels like authenticity, an authenticity of being. The muse rewarded… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
When you're a female poet, would you, therefore, invoke a male muse? When nuns get consecrated into their vocations, they become brides… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I was walking every morning, and I'd take my iPod and paper and pen. As I walked, I wrote a poem, and then… — 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… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I don't like crows. In the poem "C," crows are predatory, killing other birds and so forth. But in my morning walks,… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 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
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 Image
The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically. — 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,… — 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
![“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."” quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/ed8/shirley-geok-lin-lim-3190_alphabet_i-do-want-to-do-the-entire-alphabet-ther_2466643.jpg)
![“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.” quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/7d6/shirley-geok-lin-lim-3190_alphabet_you-ve-read-some-of-the-poems-in-this-ne_1020439.jpg)
![“I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.” quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/26d/shirley-geok-lin-lim-3190_compassion_i-feel-compassionate-because-i-know-stud_214814.jpg)
