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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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