By Minyi Jiang
Shirley Geok-lin Lim began writing poetry as a child simply because she enjoyed it. “Reading poetry and writing poetry was what gave me pleasure, it was my escape,” said Lim, a UC Santa Barbara English professor emerita and a former chair of the university’s women’s studies department.
Lim recently shared new poems from “In Praise of Limes,” her 11th poetry collection, at Writers & Wordsmiths of Santa Barbara II, an open mic poem reading event at the UCSB Library.
“This collection is really a collection of love poems, and it’s a collection of love poems to Santa Barbara, to California, to mother nature, to all the creatures that are central in this world,” Lim said. “What I try to do with the eco-anxiety that hunts these poems, is to change that anxiety to an enabling anxiety… to transcend the droughts, the wild fires, the extremities of climate change.” She said she was reading her poems “out of love, out of anxiety, and out of activism.”
UC Santa Barbara English professor emerita Shirley Geok-lin Lim, reading from her newly published poetry collection “In Praise of Limes” at an open mic poem reading event hosted by the UCSB Library. George Yatchisin, back left, and Chryss Yost, back right., of the Gevirtz School of Education also read.
In California, anything on the sidewalk is public property, Lim noted. “In my neighborhood Goleta, my neighbor leaves boxes of avocados, and oranges, and limes [on the sidewalk].” Lim said limes are native to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. “So like me, I am from Malaysia, the fruit that grows in my neighbor’s yard, limes, are also immigrants from South East Asia,” she said. “So much of California is composed of immigrants from other places, including the fruits, the flowers, the trees.”
Lim read from her poem “In Praise of Limes,” where the anxiety of newcomers to the country transforms to hope, in the praise of lime trees. “Each day unexpected, each morning miraculous sunrise in a new country,” Lim recited. “Although new and old split apart, unknown to each other, we will persist in praising the lime tree spring, newcomers to our town, too many for the breaking earth to tear down.”
Lim’s new poetry collection consists of three sections: “Passing Through,” “The Fire Land,” and “Wild Life.” Dana Gioia, an award-winning poet and critic, called the book “rhapsodic and elegiac” in a recent review. Lim, he said, is “caught between hope and anxiety but never remote from the bliss of being alive.”
In an interview after the event, Lim called herself an “embodied” poet. “I get my subjects from what I see, hear, smell, that is from my body, from where my body is,” she said “I write about every day, and wherever I find my body in.”
In addition to the 11 poetry collections, Lim has published three chapbooks, two of them about the 2014 democracy movement in Hong Kong, when she was a visiting professor at the City University of Hong Kong. She recalled undergraduate students occupying the city, staying in tents, who would come back to their professor, to talk and cry. “I was also like their mother,” she said. “I wrote a lot of poems from the intense experience of living through, with my students, and my seeing Hong Kong from their eyes and from listening to their stories.”
Following Lim, UCSB English professors Stephanie Batiste and Swati Rana as well as Chryss Yost and George Yatchisin of the Gevirtz School of Education, and several members from the Santa Barbara community shared their poems.
UC Santa Barbara English professor Stephanie Batiste sharing her pandemic poems in Writers & Wordsmiths of Santa Barbara II, an open mic poem reading event hosted by UCSB’s library in honor of English professor emerita Shirley Geok-lin Lim.
Life during the pandemic was a prevailing theme for many of the other poets who read. Batiste, a UCSB Black Studies and English professor, addressed the structural racism that came to the surface during the pandemic, and the murders and deaths of black men at the hands of police. “The poems think about different generational responses to the pandemic and to quarantine, and thinking different ways about loss,” she said.
“Poetry gives us a keener sense of experience, even as it removes us from it, because poetic language often is not the language of the everyday,” Batiste said in a later interview. “It’s condensed, selective, rhythmic, and often abbreviated, so it really removes us in some ways from what we know easily, while putting us closer to the emotion of it, the sensibility of it, and sometimes the profoundness of a simple thing.”
“Getting closer to one’s feelings through writing, or one’s relationship with the world through writing, is just an excellent practice for thought and personal development,” Batiste added.
Heather Silva, development director for the Library, said the event was to honor Lim, a donor. “I forget how sometimes soul-lifting and soul-searching poetry can be, it reminds me of how even reading one poem a day can be transformative in your life, and I challenge all of you to do that,” Silva said.
Minyi Jiang is a fourth-year student at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in Middle East Studies and pursuing a minor in Professional Writing. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.