Shirley Lim: California Poets Part 10, One Poem
- Jun 12, 2024
- 21 min read
Updated: May 20
Shirley Lim
April 2nd, 2026
California Poets: Part X
Shirley Lim
One Poem
Water & Ocean Shush: This Land
‘Nature is a language… I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson
1. Monarch
A monarch flits by my face, single, singular.
Is it searching for a eucalyptus leafy strand,
eggs waiting for regeneration? Or
has it not found a soulmate to flirt
among the ancient one-hundred-foot
towering eucalyptus planted one-
hundred-fifty years ago, when a passenger
who’d adventured in Australia
down under, planted roots and seeds on
the Central Coast on the right upside
continent of the world? Now the cathedral
of green long dangling minty fragrant
leaves, white blossoms, hard-seeded
blue gum threatens wild fires summer
and fall. Monarchs had reigned supreme in this
winding footpath, thousands golden-winged
hymnals to a Presence secularists
call Awe. I watch the only monarch of the
winter settle on a sapling, failing
flight to the high branches of stalwart
trunks whose barks shred like chemo
has burned through to their smooth
surfaces. Their feet are soaking
in muddy embankments of the Mario
Ignacio Creek. Foamy white rapids,
clear waters swift stream from skies taken
over by atmospheric rivers.
Forecasters no longer forecast
predictability. Catastrophe
has a face it bares whether we wish to
see it or not. The atmosphere showers,
storms, floods. It powers flows, slides,
slippages, breaking cliffs, cracking
curbs, heaving sidewalks, unmindful
of human feet, my timid body.
The creek spills, rushing clean waters
over a mini fall, with mini roars,
curving over stones that had been scoured
round though decades of drought-defying
floods. Fresh water to the Pacific Ocean
salt king tide waves. Fresh plus salt now
pool in the brackish wetlands.
2. Shakespeare in the Weeds
Like the monarch, my mind flits, no mate
in mind. I hear sonnets raise their voices
in the Mario Ygnacio’s rustling
waters, steady eddies after
atmospheric storms have belted through
our hemisphere, and find Shakespeare
by my side, country man to any
who will claim you in pages you’d
boast in five centuries past. What comfort
comes with your music mingling in white
foamy rushes fresh from skies dark through
two days’ double digits rain? Britishers begin
friendship with talk of weather. Here, climate-
changeful weather ends, sighing, like your sonnets
distraught, wearying of mortality
digging trenches, the seasonal onslaughts
in beauty’s garden, in Pacific surf and swells.
3. Just Another Day — June 4th
There is never just another day. The moon will glow strawberry
bright on June 4th on an Earth where only a few humans have tasted
strawberries. Skeletal thousands die today and every day.
One hundred years ago, white women were granted the right to vote
and they did not grant the right for other raced Americans.
Seventy-eight years later, across the ocean, the day
was so special it was erased by Calendarists afraid
of just such another day. Every day such non-trivia
ripple through my frontal cortex. June 4th today
is a different day with different facts to quiz my sleep.
Just another day when Ukraine will be blown up and nuclear
radiation will be our extreme challenge. On June 4th
I am depressed and will find a new reason to be happy.
The loquat tree, an import from China,
plumped by California’s river rains, fills my neighbors’
baskets. It is never just another day.
4. Shush
Another biker speaking to her phone.
Another morning or is it near noon?
Is there a listener in the ether
other than who she thinks is there?
The listener behind the door
of perception is only the Pacific
that shushes via the tarmac tunnel
to joggers in black tights attending
the funeral of another morning.
The ocean is without attention.
Life swarms in its shallows,
scuttling sand crabs, bio-lights
of plankton. Its depths cross continents,
unvisited trenches, shelves
beaching on boats, canoes, kayaks,
craft carriers shaped by hands
that once were fins, remembering
how to cut through water.
Shush, the mother says to the child
waving his fists, fingers curling
and uncurling, fins flipping
in the womb, amniotic
waters the little fish swam in,
ocean water crying in air.
Air is his life now. Water
his drink. Sky his roof and
Earth, sweet Earth girdled
oceans his mystery.
5. Ocean
Three weeks after the rains
clear water still shushes like
a mother shushing children.
She is calming after play.
Play in a bright sphere.
Dry bubble of drought.
Laughter un-reckoning.
Fields brown and crisp
dry toast for dinners.
Shush is the lullaby
that rain water sings
calming for the season.
Shush are the waves
lisping on sand bays,
tidals when the ocean
stretches herself,
stormless jeweled
in sapphire.
6. All This from Water
Creepers dangle dingle stirring
as Pacific cool tunnels through the path.
Every one claims this narrow land:
slow Americans who consume
more than eighty-five per cent
of global population; also toy poodles
brisk trotting with besotted human parents;
strollers with real babies; some with
elderly dogs their health prescribed
oxygenated air sprinkled with salt.
I watch alone passing solitary bikers
helmeted, calves pumping slowly;
two partnered; three and more
rapid motion commanding the gravelly
corners. Dozens of grasses,
flowering weeds’ yellow petals turned
to light between soaring droops
of old eucalyptus. All this from
water, light breeding nature’s
all living things including the watcher
come from the ocean a lifetime,
no, lifetimes, eons ago.
7. CO2
Another pre-noon CO2 wafting my back hairs
stir as to a lover’s breath. Sweet the harsh distant
buzz of mowers all awake this sun-washed blue
scape from horizon before to horizon
back domed. Clouds blur water-washed
pastels clouds gentling to our eyes.
Our siblings of this Friday--born
of the Pacific--another generation
of waters. Today is unlike yesterday
with its cumulus hairdos. Tomorrow
is guaranteed to be unlike this
present. None step into the same
water moment to moment. The air
filters the Pacific salt momentarily
each breeze a casual breath on nape
and leafage.
8. Destiny
Each morning a solitary monarch flutters,
swoops, flits before, ahead, by me,
no soulmate in sight. Every morning one monarch.
I assume it’s a sign of population
collapse. Yet one still ranging solitary
low zig-zagging the footpath in between
the eucalyptus shadows and clear sun-lit
gravel flying, never pausing, its starved energy
never latching to the eucalyptus twigs.
Unmated freedom is desperate,
not freedom for living.
A white-haired man
passes, hands gripping stroller
bars, pushing a boy--not infant, legs non-toddler –
walking swiftly I cannot glimpse his face.
Do I assume the man has a soulmate,
the boy futurity in his destiny?
The monarch deserves a destiny.
It circles, soars above children
instructors send zipping, zip-a-dee-doo-dah,
down toward the spillway on the right,
embankments on left, biking
to the Goleta beaches. In Latin
left signifies sinister. The right, right-minded,
righteous rules the monarchs’ destiny.
9. Greens and Clouds
Lime green,
dark-shadow-shade grass,
circles-bruised-green
where dogs hurtle round,
round, chasing tennis balls and tails.
Above me, ribboned leaves
sway hula-half-sweeps
below February’s gigantic cup of sky
where white-grey
brackish clouds scarcely move.
Or Earth is wheeling
with these minutes,
breathing water-scattered coverlets.
Stilled on a four-wheeler seat
breathing with sibling clouds,
eyes swaying hula glances,
mind blowing with ocean breezes,
blown into America
half a century ago,
I am momentary indigenous
cloudy under a skylight
opening to other skies.
10. Seasons Senseless
A flash, blue sky swooping, dodges
into a tall succulent, water-plumped
by January storms. February is summer
eighties, our blankets tossed aside,
restless, seasons senseless,
like scrub-jays or blue birds,
ornithologists, bird watchers
count. Today a man stripped
to shorts pounds on the walkway,
hitting the steep rise in steady strides.
His bare back gleams, not shines,
as yesterday’s beige flesh had shone
in 2 p.m. summery heat.
Today his gleaming abs are brown
almond shells, darker flesh no less
unfaltering than yesterday’s creation.
No blue bird sky flashes in this low gray-
cool-cold afternoon. Each day itself,
each day myself, strange---created.
11. Earth Unsheltered
Noon, and most are likely in church
or late lying in. I imagine
brunch around three generations,
children home not babysitting
others or schooled. Not conjured
from early years or social ideals.
Sundays were dull, hunger unallayed,
body sharpened to energy feeding
off flesh, bones butting off elbows,
neck clavicles latched like chains
in a rare black-and-white photo,
like the teens shrunk to under-tens
flashing in my super-large 8K pixels
Korean television screen,
raising unease at plenty and donations.
This Sunday the Pacific is tender
the shades cast by the eucalyptus
wavering gentling the waves
of heat unpredictably
February. I flew over oceans,
the Indian and Pacific like gulls
squawking, flapping on laps
of foam, who rest steady
on salt water, white and grey,
scavengers of human garbage,
water rodents, for whom salt air
is living grand. Grand living.
What humans who have plenty want.
Humans who have water, air,
earth, burn fires and live grand, grander,
now breathe in the smoke, filter
ashy water, and spade earth
unsheltered in California.
12. Switching
Valencia oranges are goldening all at once
freighting their little tree in my backyard
centuries later after the Conquistadors
are come, some say had conquered,
had gone away, some say with gold bars.
Spanish cathedrals adorned with stone
that shines even in the dark undimmed
no matter which history stains, the sun
captured in stone. Here, the sun is freckling
the peel. Another ocean rushing on other
shores. The planet turns on its axis, seasons
today switching faster and slower, sky water
stalled. Danger stalks creation, uncreating
as Earth slips-slides away, un-birthing.
13. February Summer
Face flushed from February summer sun
I sit by the mini fall’s background tracking
over and over waters freshing
wayward to the Pacific.
Pacific coastline debris, plastics, weeds,
long strands of kelp torn
from underwater forests to slime
in sunlight. Wavering shade-canopy
cools my human skin.
Ocean airs passage through sunny
pathways. Is Paradise part-sun, part-shade?
Part-heat, part-cool? The perfect
part-good, part-less-than?
I cannot tell. The moment
when watery winds dry
the sweat by which I know
I am fallen body
is today’s perfection.
Postscript:
“[The poet] is the only teller of news, for [she] was present and privy to appearance which [she] describes. ]She] is a beholder of ideas and utterer of the necessary and casual.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
Interview
May 18th, 2026
California Poets Interview Series:
Shirley Lim, Poet, Writer, Academic
interviewed by David Garyan
DG: Given that you’ve lived and worked in different places, I’d like to start with the environment. How have places like Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, and Massachusetts influenced your writing and how was this contrasted with the work you’ve done in California?
SL: Your opening question literally spans the Pacific across North America to the Atlantic. I do not think of my life and work in the places you referenced as situated in an environment. Born in the British colony of Malacca, completing my doctorate at Brandeis University Massachusetts, resident in Brooklyn, then exurban Westchester New York, and now firmly grounded in Santa Barbara, California, I have also, as your question noted, spent long months teaching, lecturing, and resident, not only in Asia but also in Australia, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Germany, and for brief periods in many other locations like Canada, Mexico, and countries in South America, like Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Argentina. I have wandered with guides and often alone everywhere my feet landed, and I believe my feet have left prints on many of my poems. In contrast, I arrived in Santa Barbara in early 1990, and despite the frequent leaves of absence from my university (UCSB) to serve in other universities both national (MIT) and international (University of Hong Kong, National University of Singapore), my poems for the past ten years at least speak to an attachment to California as home-ground, a commitment of feelings and politics, and a smitten imagination.
DG: At the age of 10, you published your first poem. What was it about and how has your opinion of it changed through the years?
SL: The first poem was encouraged by my second brother (I am the only daughter, third-born, with five brothers). He knew I loved the poems in the British literature books assigned in his school, and I had written a few for teachers in the all-girls Catholic School I attended. He said he’d submit my poem for the Malacca Times daily newspaper’s competition for best poem, and if it won, we would split the prize money of 10 Malayan dollars. Ten dollars for a child in a working-class family was big times. I composed a poem on men soldiering through “burning desert sands,” a good word that rhymes with “lands.” I used the image of the sun and its noon heat on an army marching, obedient to commands. You can see immediately that the poem was in strict scansion, end-rhymed, the diction having both assonance and consonance (although I learned those stylistic terms only a few years later). That is, I wrote in imitation of poetic forms common to British poets like Alfred Tennyson, William Blake, Robert Louise Stevenson and Walter de La Mare. I was always an autodidact, and it comforted me greatly when I later read that the Greeks held mimesis in high regard, rather than demeaned it as proving lack of originality. My opinion of this first published poem is to thank the Muse that I did not stop learning after this first publication! My doctoral thesis was to trace the transformation of American poetics from the 19th century of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” and E.C. Stedman’s anthological grip on middle-class tastes through E.A. Robinson’s negotiations of form and feeling. William Carlos William’s “free verse,” Ezra Pound’s Imagistic Movement, and the contemporary free-for-all among the New Formalists, Language Poets, Spoken Word, Performance Poetry, and many more all teach me how to stretch in unfamiliar ways. I remain an autodidact and little known beyond the dining room table where I write.
DG: You had a difficult childhood in terms of family dynamics and you didn’t find much reprieve in school for wanting to study the English language. Arriving to the US didn’t make the issue of identity easier. Could you talk about your early years in relation to those in America and in what way the issue of being has influenced not only your writing, but how you live in general?
SL: The “issue of being.” Your question raises one of my most obsessive questions, and one whose answer continues to elude me. From childhood I have wondered about what is and what is not. This unsettling uncertainty in a child perhaps had to do with family fractures and my daily struggles as the only girl with five brothers who treated me as radically different from them, physically weak, and inferior in my very being. These early forces turned me inward to another reality of my self not as weak but possessing interior invisible strengths, not different but unique. I began reading and writing poems at a very young age. Writing empowered me, was expressive, visibilized a spirit, an imagination, a mind rebellious of a girl’s social standing. It was obvious to my father, my brothers, my teachers, especially the nuns in my Catholic school that I was a bad girl. Issues of ontology drive the ways my imagination works. I hold firm to an Imagistic, particularistic, concrete stylistics, and avoid abstractions as far as possible. Yet the stylistics are driven by a belief in constants, that the river that is never the same when you step into it twice is nonetheless always water. Readers have remarked that they find my poetry intuitive rather than rational, but intuition is not mysterious, not guesswork; it is what undergirds the conscious mind, maybe perhaps consciousness itself. I also do research, structured, conceptual writing, and publish expository and critical texts. A mind can think in multiple circuits and not fall apart. I arrived in the U.S. already prepared for these mental and identity complexities, with the added complication of immigrant/foreign resident status. Today, I have made my peace with these contradictions, the constant instability of what we call “life”, and am happier than I’ve ever been, a naturalized citizen grounded in California. The word “naturalized” is to my ears a beatific word, associated with becoming a part of a natural world.
DG: You’ve talked about how research and academic writing wasn’t something you particularly enjoyed, but having retired from teaching, is there anything you miss about being in class?
SL: Yes, yes, yes, I miss a lot about being in a class room. As a part of my 2025-26 Dickson Professorship Award, I am currently teaching a seminar on journaling to fourteen women and two men, sophomore up to senior undergraduates. The seminar fulfills no requirements, and has drawn young adults who are committed to writing consistently, daily if possible, in journals that I have gifted them—handwriting, and reading out loud in the safe space of the seminar room. I draw upon my decades of teaching and researching creative writing pedagogies, including brief meditative exercises, free writing, and sharing the passages if so inclined, to claim their words. I dress up for each seminar; the last seminar is a reading, with flyers publicizing all 16 faces, and light refreshments, open to all, and attended by roommates and friends. For most of the 16, this will be their first public presentation of self. Most, like me, are afflicted with anxiety, and like me, have had panic attacks. Our age gap illuminates how humans who need to write face similar social pressures through time and space. This is what I miss most about being in a classroom, the one-to-one relationships and the collective identity despite age and other identity differences. It keeps me young, and I help them welcome the ancient spirits that they breathe in when they walk under the campus Pacific breeze-blown trees.
DG: Given that you had the privilege to teach in various parts of the world such as Europe, Asia, and the US, what differences did you notice between students and universities abroad?
SL: There are many more similarities than differences. American students are allegedly more relaxed about grades and time toward degree completion. But if it had ever been true, it is clearly no longer the case. Universities abroad are distinguished by the nations that fund them; and nations want their universities to be highly ranked by the usual markers of achievement, to raise their reputational international standing. That is, universities abroad are nation-culturally differentiated but driven by homogeneous international standards (see The Times Higher Education World Universities Rankings, QS World Universities Rankings, and US News Best Global Universities Rankings). I have marked a few distinct differences in the students I had taught in Asia and in the U.S. Students in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong esteem their professors; they hardly if ever question the validity and accuracy of lectures, not to say the lecturers’ acumen and intellect. Hong Kong students have an added quality, of loving their professors. Malaysian and Singapore undergraduates view their teachers across a distance of respect. Hong Kong students dwell on professors’ lovable traits; they send them adoring cards, smile shyly and often, are over the moon if a lecturer praises their work or chats casually if they meet outside the class room. Most American undergraduates are too busy, too burdened with work-study time pressures to consider an office visit unless it is mandatory. They take too many required courses across multiple departments, have too many extracurricular activities, party more or work more to cover rising tuition, rent and other costs of living. They are financially independent before they can afford to be. Most students in these universities are grade-minded and stressed. I cannot measure which of them are more affected by these 21st century tertiary illnesses.
DG: Being a first-generation immigrant who later became a US citizen, I’m fascinated by your poem “Learning to Love America.” The entire piece is powerful but it ends with such a quiet resignation that the most poignant part, for me, is really in those final two lines: “because it is late and too late to change my mind / because it is time.” Given what’s going on in our country today, to what extent have you reappraised the poem? In other words, if you had the opportunity to change any lines in the piece, are there any you’d want to rewrite?
SL: Yours is an insightful question that I have already tried to answer. I’ve tried parodying the poem, titling it either “Unlearning to Love America” or “America Unloved.” But I was unable to riddle it out. The opposite of love is often said to be hate. I disagree. For me, learning to love America today is about re-learning to love America, despite the hate of the few neighbors who fly the American flag as if it belongs only to their house, who place Trump placards on their lawns and maybe continue to wave as I walk pass their flag and placard. It is whether to ghost or not to ghost them; and I decided not to ghost, because the neighbor went through a grueling year of surgery and chemotherapy for breast cancer and lost all her hair, and I had gone through similar though less severe treatment, and more binds us as women than divides us as race and party.
DG: Do you think poets have a duty to be more politically conscious today, or is language itself still the foremost concern?
SL: Poets had always been politically conscious. Think of the World Wars 1 and 2 poets, of Wilfred Owen whose war poem “Dulce Est Decorum Est” is deeply political, as well as tragically foreshadowing his own death in combat at barely 25. Consider Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, her long poem-masterpiece that records for both Russia and the world the Stalinist years, so we may in poetry’s beauty be mindful, be words-ful, of the horrors of unrestrained authoritarianism and the evils of a surveilled society. Most poets do not write out of duty—except perhaps for poet laureates whose crowns come with thorns of dutiful composition. But language is weighted with socio-political consciousness, as we hear in Greek tragedies like Sophocles’ Antigone or in Shakespeare’s tragedies and history dramas. To write poetry stripped of all political associations is deliberately to disarm language. William Butler Yeats’ poetry covers a spectrum of aesthetic and political inter-weavings. Who can gainsay the “terrible beauty [that] is born in “Easter 1916,” a poem whose political message cannot be separated from the green stem of poetry through which the force of the message is expressed?
DG: In addition to poetry, you’ve also written fiction, and memoir. Conventional wisdom dictates that the memoir is the most personal—or at the very least biographical genre. But your poems and stories—if we look at Two Dreams, for instance—also draw quite a bit from your life. I’d hence like to ask how working across genres changes the way you present different elements of your life to the reader, and also, if perhaps, some of those elements in the creative pieces are closer to the truth than what’s in the memoir?
SL: Gosh, you’ve done a lot of research on my writing, the kind of research that results in questions that demand my looking back to acknowledge the patterned threads of my multi-genre, multi-decades oeuvre. I have seldom looked back analytically at my publications; it is always the next writing project that fills the hours that often feel miraculously to open up in between the quotidian duties and distractions of a middle-class aging housekeeper—cooking, gardening, health maintenance, socialization. Writing, even for Facebook posts, is the zone of intensities, and looking back is not an exercise I have thought rewarding.
To write an answer to your question is to pause. Yes, my creative work has sprawled over short fiction and novels, genres associated with imagined characters, plots and places; and my memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, is catalogued as life writing, narrating persons, acts, scenes under the mantle of truth-telling, what Philippe LeJeune theorized as the “autobiographical pact.” Your question dismantles these conventional boundaries that had ruled literary studies established under Aristotelian classifications. You are correct that my poems, short stories and, I add, novels draw “quite a bit” from my life as does the memoir.
But your questions—“how working across genres changes the way you present different elements of your life to the reader, and also, if perhaps, some of those elements in the creative pieces are closer to the truth than what’s in the memoir”—ask for an analysis of the works as they relate to each other and for a definition of “truth” as it is scripted in fiction, a genre of creative imagination, and in memoir, a genre of memory work drawn from the archives of lived experience.
My first foundational response is that words are always mediated reality. The signifier and the signified are not one and the same. In a very early poem riddling what a poem is, I concluded: “every poem begins with a lie.” Words are human-made and therefore, unlike divinity, are flawed, riven with the misreadings that have accrued to them over time, with individual play, individual misunderstandings, errors, and more. I take your first question as a statement I agree with, that working across genres have changed the way different elements of my life are presented on the printed page.
But I do not accept your suggestion that “some of those elements are closer to the truth than what’s in the memoir.” Some critics who are acquainted with me insist the female protagonists in my novel Joss and Gold are autobiographical. My rebuttal is nuanced but confident. Emily Dickenson’s wry words “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” raises a question: what is slanted truth? For me, it is the nuance of a truth in the choices not taken. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is usually taken as a positive. “I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” That was the pivotal decision I made as a young woman, to take that road less traveled by, by women, a choice men make more easily. However, my slanted truth also lies in the What-If-Self who took the worn road, the self who did not materialize, a Not-Me, who forms an aspect of my shadow self, what you call “elements of a life”, a life not taken: the who-I-would have been if I had married and remained in Malaysia--a man from a wealthy business family who drove an expensive German car; an endearing Christian who trembled when he danced with me; a mixed race, wannabe artist-painter; and an academic with the aura of a U.S. education. The memoir tracks the actual choices made, the decisions and actions in historical time and space, whether made well with deliberation, or badly, rashly, stupidly: a life lived as real as my thumbprint, although the words may slip-slide away.
DG: You have spoken about the importance that Chinese and Malay cultures have in your life. In what ways can each respective literary tradition enrich the anglophone literary tradition?
SL: Malay and Chinese cultures are not clearly defined nor bounded. Malaysia and Indonesia (which has 17,508 islands and at least 700 local languages) have cultures that overlap, including a lingua franca, Bahasa Indonesia/Bahasa Melayu, regulated in Malaysia as its national language. The original language’s simplified grammar historically served sailors and tradespeople who had to negotiate diverse island languages and spread across these vast island terrains, a language and culture that then adopted Islam and its dogmas. It had a rich oral literary culture that in the 20th century, influenced by British colonial values, transformed into print literature that generally adopted Anglophone genres, like poetry, fiction, and drama. Malay poetry has a few notable indigenous forms, like the syair, that have not crossed over to English poetry. One may say the enrichment was more one-way than circulative, with one exceptional form that is highly regarded in the West, in French poetry as well as in Anglophone stylistics, the pantoum or pantun. Only one pantoum appears in my 12 poetry collections, "Pantoum for Chinese Women," and it has been reprinted, studied, and praised perhaps more than 99% of the poems in the collections. The title is itself a cultural anomaly, a Malay poetic form customarily deployed for humor or romantic address, on the subject of female infanticide during the one-child policy in China.
My mother’s family is a cultural hybrid. Originally Batak women who married Chinese migrant workers, the Peranakans (a Malay word meaning ‘native-born’), my maternal ancestors spoke and dressed as Malays, but they preserved their husbands’ Chinese culture, including Taoist and Buddhist rituals, ancestral worship, and culinary preferences, particularly eating pork, forbidden to Muslims. Peranakans who lived chiefly in my home town Malacca, in Penang, and Singapore, three early British Straits Settlements, being more urban and adaptable, attended English-language schools. The colonial officers found their triple linguistic abilities (Malay, Chinese, and English) useful. Peranakan men entered the colonial British Civil Service, their children received scholarships to British universities to return as English-language school teachers, and as my students would say, yadda, yadda, yadda. For many Malaysians today, the short summary above is ancient history. In 1963, post-Independence, Malaysia was formed out of a union of the Federated Malay States, Sarawak, and the Straits Settlements of Malacca, Penang and Singapore (which left Malaysia in 1965 to form an independent city state), and Peranakan culture has struggled against erasure since the shift to a majority rule—a major motivation for the trajectory of my memoir.
As for Chinese cultural influence on Anglophone literary writing, much of it is admitted, even valorized, achieved through Ezra Pound’s transmission of Chinese literary values through his quirky English-language translations of Chinese poetry (see Cathay 1915). In 1919, Pound published The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, claiming “that the unique architecture of the ideograph, a symbol created through the juxtaposition of two (or sometimes three) distinct parts, without connecting links, and without reference to phonetic representation, should form the basis for the new American Poetry” (R. John Williams, 146),1 i.e., Imagism. And Imagism’s profound and abiding influence on Anglophone literature is not debatable.
DG: Throughout your career you’ve done a great deal to support feminist literature. How would you appraise the progress that has been made and what are things that still have to change?
SL: The progress made in “feminist” literature may be visually seen in the absence of that adjective in practically every cultural representation reviewed, accessed, funded, awarded, taught, and circulated, at least in the U.S. today. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale is categorized as speculative fiction, not as feminist literature. The MeToo movement, a powerful, now world-wide movement, is many things to many activists, but is in not called a feminist movement. This, to my mind, is progress. To enter the mainstream of world culture, to have the label peeled off so the substance of female subjugation in its manifold sufferings, horrors, and agentic power are articulated sharply with no ambiguity, that is real progress. There is much that needs changing, but I leave it to a younger generation of women and men to work on changing our human condition, so beleaguered, divided, imperiled as it is with our seeming inhumanity to nature and peoples.
DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?
SL: My journal seminar has been taking up much of the oxygen in my brain. I’ve been reading research on the act of journaling, science-based evidence that this kind of daily observation and writing works on the amygdala to reduce anxiety. That self-expressiveness shapes becoming. And I've been piecing new poems to my current poetry project, a Neighbor poem sequence. Like the poem you published which addressed climate change in Santa Barbara, these new poems map and clarify social observations and community themes, forms of American identity that I find compelling in Santa Barbara, my days feeling like where the local meets the global, and where emotions and politics entangle in knots too tightly tied to be untied. These times in California, in the US at large, and elsewhere in the world are Gordian knots that no politician, even less a poet, can sever....
Sielke, Sabine and Kloecker, Christian, eds. Orient and Orientalisms in US-American Poetry and Poetics, Peter Lang, 2009.
Author Bio:
Shirley G. Lim (PhD, Brandeis University). Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara. Recipient of Commonwealth Poetry Prize; American Book Awards for The Forbidden Stitch and Among the White Moon Faces. Published 12 poetry collections, most recent In Praise of Limes and Dawns Tomorrow; three novels; The Shirley Lim Collection; three story collections, two critical studies; and edited/co-edited over a dozen anthologies and journal special issues. Recent publications in The Hudson Review, Feminist Studies, and Good Eats, NYU Press. Co-founder of Journal of Transnational American Studies. Received UCSB Research Lectureship, Multiethnic Literatures of the United States and Feminist Press Lifetime Achievement Awards. Visiting professorships at MIT, NUS, National Sun Yat-sen University; served as English Chair Professor at Hong Kong University.
Comments