Quotes from Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.

The crows live in the world like you do. They are part of nature.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.

The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.

In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.

One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.

I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home.

I'm always resisting [my muse]. I'm resisting her power.

I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer.

The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act.

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."

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

"Time" does not mean "occasion."

I really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up a lot of oxygen from my time and my creative thinking.

My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak.

Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.