The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and "the poet," my multigenre… — 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Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems.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
