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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.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Even
Subject
Obsessive
Subjects
Formation
Imagination
Recent
Language
Abandoned
Write
Poems
Nature
Theme
Able
Particularly
Writing
English

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The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.
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One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
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I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.
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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.
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New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.
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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.
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I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.
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No one, evidently, except me has found No Alarms poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write.
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Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.
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I was not - even the notion of could not seems to suggest a moment of recognition, but it was such a repressed dimension - I was not able to NOT wear a shirt like my brothers could. My brothers would, in the heat, run around shirtless, and I wouldn't do that, obviously.
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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.
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I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.
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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
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The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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As a first-generation Asian American woman, for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an Asian American woman. Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.
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Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.
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Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
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When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.
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In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.
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I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim