Poured Over: Ada Limón on The Hurting Kind

By Miwa Messer / August 27, 2022 at 6:00 am

“I think it’s really important to remember that poetry has always sort of existed in the moment. It’s full of the life that we’re living right now. It is a remnant of the life that we’re living right now. You know, distilled moments, it’s the mess of our life. It’s all of those things. And I think we do ourselves a disservice if we think those things don’t include joy, that don’t include breath and contentedness and moments of peace. And we all have that sometimes, as we struggle.” Ada Limón, our 24^th US Poet Laureate and host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, joins us on the show to take us behind the scenes of her newest book, The Hurting Kind, and talk about the purpose of art, honoring the slipperiness of time, the importance and pleasure of reading out loud, her literary inspirations and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books:

The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón

Lucky Wreck by Ada Limón

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Transcript for this episode:

B&N

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and it is my great good fortune to be sharing a microphone today with Ada Limón, who is going to be our 24^th US Poet Laureate. She is also a great advocate for the art itself. Obviously, she’s now our Poet Laureate. But still, she’s really fun to listen to you guys, this is going to be such a treat for all of us. Her sixth collection is out; It’s called The Hurting Kind. And we are going to cover I don’t know how much ground, but I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Ada, thank you so much for joining us, I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s such an honor.

B&N

So you have said in another interview, and I love this line, it’s an amazing time to be alive in the world of poetry. And I want to start there simply because I think there are still some folks out in the world who think that poetry is Yeats, and the guy who wrote Thanatopsis, who—I should remember his name, of course—but it’s really it is such a different way to experience the world and words, and it’s something that you do with quite a lot of joy sometimes. And obviously, the flip side of joy is grief and sadness. But we’ll get to those bits. But can we start with joy? Can we talk about how your morning started and what you saw outside of your window?

Yeah, I think it’s really important to remember that poetry has always sort of existed in the moment. It’s full of the life that we’re living right now. It is a remnant of the life that we’re living right now. You know, distilled moments, it’s the mess of our life. It’s all of those things. And I think we do ourselves a disservice if we think those things don’t include joy, that don’t include breath and contentedness and moments of peace. And we all have that sometimes, as we struggle as most writers do, you know, we start to think about what’s you know, what’s worthy of a poem, what subject matters or worthy of a poem, and you can hear students say, Well, I don’t really have anything to write about, or I don’t have anything that’s big enough or, or traumatic enough. And I’m always telling people to even just start with like looking at a tree outside your window, or describe something very minor in your day and see what happens. And for the most part, I think when we pay really deep attention to something, we start to see it in a new light, and it starts to transform, and it starts to become larger than it is. And you can start to see that our lives are made up of these small moments, that our lives are made up of these, you know, like the, you know, the coffee spoons, you know, it’s all of that it’s those little moments of being in the world of living and breathing. And I think it’s important to remember that poems exist in that space to that they’re not always about the huge things: the trauma, the grief, or even the huge ceremonial joy. Sometimes they are just about the day to day living, the getting through the day, the small triumphs of chatting with a neighbor, and having a good moment, whatever that looks like. And I think that’s important, because I do think, like you said, there’s so many of us that have thought for a long time that poetry is only the Robert Frost of the world, the Yeats, the Keats, the sort of great, dramatic orators that are wonderful and fabulous, but often dealing with big ticket topics. And I think sometimes it’s important to remember that poets are working in all the realms, you know, they’re dealing with the big-ticket topics, but they’re also writing about flowers, and they’re also writing about their grandparents. And they’re also writing about, you know, looking at a bird out a window. And I think that’s, I think that’s essential to how we reframe our thinking about poetry, because so much of what we think about arts in general, tend to be how we first learned about them or how we first encountered them. And sometimes I think we need to kind of give ourselves more room to explore what those arts are now in the world, as opposed to maybe what they were in our little classrooms when we were growing up.

B&N

How has poetry evolved for you, as a reader and as a poet?

I think poetry has always been really important to me, which, even as a child, I loved poetry. I think it’s evolved in a sense that I didn’t think I could become more attached to it. And yet here I am more and more attached to it. And I think it’s also at a time where I was coming up in graduate school and even before that in undergraduate, I, you know, I felt like everyone had to have an opinion about poetry. You had to sort of either be, you know, the narrative school or the lyric school, or you had to have some idea of what poems you liked and what poems you didn’t like. And there seem to be a little bit of a polarizing effect of, of graduate school and I think partly it’s so that people can kind of hone their skill and, and their intellect and form their opinions. And all of that can be wonderful and important in its own way. But I think as I’ve aged, I make room for all sorts of poetry. Now, I think that I am much more willing to, if someone says, oh, no, this is a poem, I think, okay, yeah, it’s a poem, you know, and I tend to really like that poetry exists. And I tend to, I think, maybe push aside preconceived notions about maybe my own likes and dislikes, and instead sort of celebrate the isness of poetry in the first place.

B&N

Okay, what’s the isness of poetry?

You know, I think that poetry very much works on breath. It works on— it makes room for breath, right? The poetry is as much the words on the page as it is the blank spaces. It’s as much what you’re saying as much as it is the breath. And I think that attempt to do anything on the page in that manner, is a really a triumph. And so I think sometimes maybe a poem that I don’t feel like is the most successful poem in the world—including poems I’ve written—I still can celebrate them for being because I think they are working in a different and strange and ethereal art form that deserves to be celebrated.

B&N

And you work in a lot of different— I’m not sure I know the right phrase for this, but I’m going to ask you to read a poem from The Hurting Kind that’s called Calling Things What They Are. And it’s in fact, a paragraph of text, which isn’t always how you see poetry presented on the page.

Yeah, that’s called a prose poem. It’s a prose poem, because, for the most part, poets honor the line versus the sentence. We work in the sentence for sure, but it’s, it’s the larger unit. Our smallest unit is the unit of sound, and then we go to the syllable and then we go to the word and then we go to the clause, and then we go to the line, and then we go to the sentence, and then we go to the stanza. So, we work really small, right? So just imagine that our units are much smaller than the prose writer’s units. And then when in prose poem, you instead of honoring the line, you are honoring the sentence as the full unit. So it works as a paragraph of text versus a lineated poem.

B&N

Can I ask you to read Calling Things What They Are.

I’d be happy to. Calling Things What They Are.

I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later, I yell Mourning Dove afterparty. (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground, the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was young, and heading to the Cape with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean. Tufted Titmouse! And Lucas laughs and says, Thought so. But he is humoring me; He didn’t think so at all. My father does the same thing. Shouts out at the feeder announcing the party attendees, he throws a whole peanut or two to the Steller’s Jay who visits on a low oak branch in the morning. To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón

you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

B&N

I really love that poem.

Thank you.

B&N

You’ve always sort of written about our connection to the natural world. But in a way you reconnected with the natural world at the start of the pandemic because we were all home, you spend quite a lot of time on the road and you were not able to do that. And The Hurting Kind is the result of that time and that quiet and that work that you were able to do just for yourself. Right?

Yeah, I would say maybe 50% of poems in The Hunting Kind were written during the pandemic. And, you know, it was true that I think for the most part, and you know this well is that I think as working artists, you think, oh, you know, I will go to my studio and paint, I will spend most of most of my days out writing and, in my office, and reading and, you know. And then in reality, a book comes out and you hit the road, and you give that book a life, a different kind of life, right. And so, a lot of my time was spent on the road and is spent on the road, and when everything shut down, and I should say that, you know, didn’t shut down for our urgent care workers and all of that, but for me, I was lucky enough to, to be able to have the privilege of getting off the road. And in doing so, I really had to make my life just became very small. Part of that smallness was allowing for me to, or allowed me to look at the world, and the natural world in a way that made me realize how connected I was to everything. I think I felt very distant from my family, my family is in California, and I live in Kentucky. I have most, you know, a great deal of friends here. But I couldn’t see them. And then I have lots of friends in New York, but I was I was quite isolated. And so my husband was actually working and wasn’t here for a lot of the time as well. And so I did a lot of just sort of visualizing sort of what it was to be a body moving in this space and reconnecting with, like, the trees and the plants that were in my front yard and my backyard, the birds, the feeder, you know, now I have like many feeders, and many, many bird baths. You know, I see them it’s funny, I have, sort of, the mourning dove family and I know them and now when I see them every day, and I think Oh, those are those are my mourning doves, and you know, our mourning doves are we belong to each other, if you will, that was a big part of staying grounded and staying, you know, connected to my own sanity, during those times when anxiety and fear and all of those, you know, hard, grieving subjects that we were dealing with were so being thrust upon us every minute. And it was really, really helpful. And I, you know, I was surprised because I thought, we saw articles coming out about you know, birdwatching and all those things, I kept thinking, I have always kind of felt that way, I’ve always been connected to nature. But anytime you’re given that time to have a little quietude, and a little bit more space for watching things and a little more silence, you know, I was surprised at how much the world opened to me once again, and I was so, so grateful for it. So grateful for it. To this day, it really, really helps me and heals me.

B&N

I’m gonna go back to something you just said a minute ago, where you’re talking about building a poem— from the sound to the phrase to the line to the stanza, or the difference between using a sentence and a prose poem. But then you ultimately build a collection of poems, and The Hurting Kind, it is broken out into four sections. But when you’re sitting down to create a collection, and you’re pulling work, you’re not writing a collection in a linear fashion, right? The poems come when they come, you know when you’re ready to let go of them, put them into the world. So how do we build a collection?

I think it’s different for everyone. And I’ll say this, that poets for the most part, I mean, everyone works differently, as we know, all artists are different. But I think that poets for the most part, we work on one poem at a time. And it’s everything. It’s our entire world where like, I am working on this one poem, and it is my life. And everything depends upon the poem. So, it feels like you know, there’s this idea that you finish this one thing, and it’s the poem, and that’s how it travels in the world too, you know, poems travel by one poem at a time, you know, they get posted on a website, or they get posted on social media, or they get shared from, you know, a friend to another friend or a family member to another family member, it travels that way, one poem at a time. And so a collection can be really daunting, because it does feel like what you want to be doing is really making sure that you’re, you’re helping all those poems come to life and not dulling them by sort of putting them next to each other. And so, for me, I get really excited about putting together a book. I actually very rarely call them collections only because the “collection” feels like it’s more like a collecting where I actually do think you build a book, and there are times you do write towards the book. So, if you’re looking at— for me, if I’m looking at things, and I’m sort of, oh, it’s got something going on, I’ll think, what am I missing? You know, what is it that I’ve left out, what have I not challenged myself to do in a poem. You know, maybe I need a prose poem, in here and I haven’t written some prose poems, or maybe there’s space for some, you know, more strangeness that needs to be in this book. And so this book, in particular, took shape in a different way. It’s organized by the seasons, and one of the reasons that I wanted it to be that way, is that I wanted there to be a sort of centering principle that wasn’t the autobiography of the self. And I feel like not that this book doesn’t contain me. I mean, I’m all over its pages, and the “I” is definitely me. But at the same time, there was this idea of wanting to kind of decenter the self a little bit and step back from it. And an idea of ongoing-ness and continuation that would happen, maybe without me present. And I also liked the idea that you would get to the end, it ends in winter, and that you would return to the beginning and begin again in spring. So that was important to me. And I feel like when I’m putting together a book— have you ever done that thing where you take, like beautiful stones home from a river or the ocean, and they’re so beautiful, and then you get them home, and then they kind of lose their color. And you’re like, I thought this was green and now it’s just kind of brown or the color of sand. And I don’t, you know, and so I feel like the job when you’re putting together a book is to sort of you take all those poems that have kind of turned into the earthen color, and you put them back into the river, or you put them back into the ocean, so that they all get their colors back. And so I feel like that’s when I’m really putting together a book that’s sort of what I’m doing to the poems is I’m hoping that they each start to shine again, in their original colors, and sheen.

B&N

I love that metaphor too, because I’m looking at my notes, and I’m saying things like Nashville After Hours and The Problem with Travel, and The Way Things Have Been Going Lately. I mean, obviously, these are all poem titles: A Good Story, Joint Custody. You take these moments that are I don’t want to say pedestrian, but they’re very every day. And you create this really marvelous art around these moments. And so the idea that you take these words and situations, I mean, I love the way A Good Story ends, and I’m not going to spoil it here, I’m going to ask people to go find. It’s in The Hurting Kind, it’s early in The Hurting Kind. And the way it ends is just, I have been that person. I have been that person. There’s so much beauty in these tiny moments. And I know you said it at the top of the show, but I so appreciate it. The other thing I really appreciate is the way you capture movement, physical movement, in all of the poems that I’ve read, and other people have noticed that you like to write about cars, which I hadn’t quite pulled that out until I heard someone else say, but the way you capture movement, and I’m not just talking about emotional change, I’m not just talking about intellectual shifts, I’m talking about physical movement. Whether it’s you or a horse or bird, or, you know, squirrels. Can you talk about that movement for a second, because that feels really urgent in a way to the work that you do.

Yeah, that’s a really beautiful question and thank you for pointing that out. It’s something I think that for me, the poem is very much a bodily experience. And you know, that it sort of depends on how you move your body, what your relationship with your body is, that can mean all sorts of things, even though even the abstraction of body can be a little too intense first for some of us, right? But I really believe in it. This sort of the sensorial aspect of making the poem, I kind of resist the idea that it is sort of something that takes place in the mind, or that takes place in the mouth. Or even that takes place just in the eyes when you’re looking at something. I feel like all parts of my body are working in making the poem. And in doing so, I think that movement is actually really important because movement is not just honoring sort of all the sense work of the body, but also it’s honoring the way time moves and I had this, I had a student one time that said “how— I don’t understand how you make these moves of, you’re here one moment in the present, and then you move, you move in the back, you know, in the past, and then you move forward.” And I started laughing. And he said, “what, is it not a good, you know, not a good question.” I said, “no it’s a great question.” I said, “I just, I’m afraid that my only authentic way to answer it is because I don’t know if time exists.” For me, that I was like, I don’t know if time exists. And I think it’s because for me, and when you talk about movement, that’s part of it, for me it’s time. Because I really believe that my relationship with time is super tenuous. I do feel like there’s sort of, there’s like, you know, that that Feist song, “there’s so much past and my present.” And I feel like that’s constantly happening. And so the movement is not just sort of the body’s reaction, but the memory, the body memory. And how so much of us, like so much of our experience is what’s happening now, but what’s happened in the past, you know, what’s happened, what we dream about, what we’re either catastrophizing or thinking about in terms of our future. And I’m, I want to, I guess, in my work really honor that that slipperiness of time, and the way in which we move from one thing to another, so seamlessly, and we call it Life, and yet, it’s really kind of a magical and strange existence, when we start to think about what our real consciousness is doing to us on a regular basis.

B&N

I think there are also still a lot of people who think of reading as a very quiet, passive act. And I don’t find that to be true for me as a reader, but also, certainly, you always recommend reading poetry out loud, so that you can catch the breath and the quiet and the pause. Because it’s very easy, I read very quickly, and it’s very easy for me, at first read to accidentally sprint through a poem and then have to recalibrate.

Well, you’re reading for sense. I mean, that’s what we do, right? That’s what we’re taught to do. You read for sense, you read for structure, you’re like I’m getting the plot, I’m getting the point. I mean, it’s especially in your line of business, I mean, that’s what, you know, reading fast is a gift.

B&N

It is, but at the same time, I do love having to go back. It’s rare that if I’m reading a novel, or a memoir, or a piece of history, whatever, that I need to go back and reread something, I always catch it on the first go. But with poetry, it’s kind of a delight to have to step back and say, Hey, wait a minute, I love this particular piece. But how did I get here?

Yeah, I love that, too. And that is one of my favorite things about poetry is that they can kind of shove you off kilter. And in an unexpected way, you know, suddenly, it’s like, wait, what, what just happened? Or I thought I was here and, you know, oh is he just looking at a statue, or like, you know, little moments that we’re trying to figure out. And I, you know, the nice thing about it is that, you know, poetry doesn’t necessarily— there’s not one way to read it. And so, you know, people who say, “Oh, this, this poem is reminding me of this”, and it’s like, that’s great that should also, it should also be that too, you know. But yeah, I think that rereading, and that experience with poetry as a sort of sensual pleasure is really beautiful. And I always say, yes, please read it out loud, or you know, even better, you know, have someone else read it out loud to you. And then you can really just experience it completely, and just have them read it to you. And I feel like there’s something so beautiful about not just the act of like sort of listening, but really receiving a poem in its full form. And sometimes you want to read it too and you want to look at all those all those things and look at how it’s made. But, you know, it’s not lost on me that the art form I’ve chosen to dedicate my life to is one that you have to go over and over again, back to the page and go, Oh, this is doing this, and this is doing this, and this is doing this, you know, whereas one paragraph in a novel, we may forget, or we may love but we probably aren’t going to read it again and again and again and again and again. With great poems, I’ll read them again and again, and have read them 20 times and then still get something new out of it, out of an experience that— oh, oh, wait, no, she was doing this, I had no idea or maybe she was doing this, but I just love it. You know, I love that kind of attention that it requires and I know for some people that can feel frustrating, and I think well, you can read it and listen to it or hear it and just let it wash over you, you know, it can be like music and be like a song. And you know, we don’t like a song because we figured out what it means, right? We’re not like, oh, the only reason I like X,Y and Z is because I know all of their lyrics and I know everything, you know, makes complete sense, right? We don’t like music that way. We like it, oftentimes don’t even know why we like it. And I think that poetry can exist in that same realm, it doesn’t necessarily have to have that kind of explication and obvious meaning for us to lean into it and suck the marrow out of it, if you will.

B&N

I think the musicality of poetry is really important, too. I mean, I think, you know, as the poet you know, when you’ve found the thing, because of the way it sounds to you. And I think that’s really important, because it’s not just the words, it’s also the absence of words. And that duality, is sometimes hard to explain, you just, you know it when you hear it. And that, to me speaks to a level of art where you just have to trust that you’re in the right place, and you found the right words. And one of the things I love about your story is that your stepfather is one of your early readers, and you have a Master’s in Fine Arts, in poetry from NYU. You have studied and studied and studied and rewritten and rewritten. And I love the idea that your stepdad who is not trained as a poet, but apparently has a very good ear is one of your early readers. And can we just talk about how, beyond the fact that he’s your stepdad and obviously, you trust him implicitly, there is a story that goes along with this, when you were first presenting a piece to him, and he said, “Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute” Would you tell that story?

Yeah, I remember, you know, he, when I was growing up, he would write short stories. And I would go to readings at the local bookstore, and he was just always a writer in my life. And so I had written, you know, maybe I think it was my first sort of two poems that I was taking seriously, like, oh these are— and I think I was 14 and I called him at work. He worked at the Store It All, which was— he was the manager of, like, a storage unit, a storage facility, and I called him up at the, on the landline, of course, and I said, you know, I’ve written two poems, and I want to read them to you. And he said, okay, okay. And he took it, he always took me very seriously, which I think, is the great benefit of having a family that takes your art seriously. And that was just, that’s something I can’t say enough about is like, you know, that they just came, they just said, okay, yeah, we’re going to take this seriously, as opposed to, you know, very easily dismissive. And I started reading my poem, and I read the title very seriously and then I started reading the first line very seriously and very slow. And he said, No, no, no, no, he’s like, don’t read it like that he’s like, don’t perform it. Just read it, like you’re telling me something. And like, I took a deep breath, and I remember just reading it, just sort of, like I was, like, I was just saying it to him. And, and it really shifted, how I thought about poetry in general, you know, because I had seen sort of the great poets speak their poems, and I thought, oh, it always had to be this kind of intense drama to it, which is wonderful. But he was really, he was really adamant that it especially, it was great to perform. It’s great to do all that. But I think he was really adamant, especially in the drafting phase, you know, you need to remember that this is, you know, you can’t just make it sound good. Like, it has to actually be a poem before you can kind of force it to make it, you know, sound like a poem. And he was very suspicious of the, you know, what they call the poet’s voice, et cetera. Which I that was really important to me, because it kind of grounded me and what it was to find your own voice, your own rhythm, your own musicality, and not someone else’s, you know, not to mimic some of the greats. Right, but to find, well, you know, who was Ada Limón as a writer. You know, I was 14, so, you know, who was I? I didn’t know. I was a mimic. I was many things. I was an amorphous, you know, tadpole. And so I think that having him as a guide was really important, is really important in my journey.

B&N

What’s your editorial process like? I’m assuming there’s quite a lot of rewriting too.

There is, yes. You know, it’s very rare that a poem comes out finished. It’s always a beautiful thing if you can get a draft that feels somewhat done, that feels like a, you know, a day like that you need to play the lottery. But, I feel like it’s very rare that something just kind of comes out and it’s like, oh, that’s complete. And so for the most part, I’ll work on drafts, and then I won’t even look at them, I’ll usually— unless I’m incredibly excited about it, and then sometimes I will send it to a few friends and to Brady, my stepdad. And just be like, oh, this is like, it’s almost there, right. But I have to be careful about even doing that. Because like most of, like most artists, I will, if I send it out too fast, even just for sort of proof of life, I will end up maybe sort of revising it overly revising it, or a friend will get it and they’ll revise it in a sweet, wonderful, generous way, and it’s still too fresh. So what I often do is work on something and then and then just set it aside, I’ll set it aside almost for a month or so before I go back into it, because then I feel like when I go back into it, I can kind of feel less desperate to break it apart and destroy all of its initial impulses. And then I can maybe more delicately revise it with the scalpel versus the chainsaw. So yeah, so there are poems that have taken me, you know, about a month or two to, to revise and then there’s poems on like the title poem in The Hurting Kind. And that took, you know, that took two or three years, I think, to finish. It’s a longer poem and it was dealing with grief. And honestly, it was just a poem I couldn’t figure out how to get out of. And finally, I ended the poem by sort of recognizing that there is no end, which is sort of the only way I could end the poem. So, so yeah, it’s very different, you know, and then there are times where there is that very lucky moment where something comes out, and you think, Oh, this poem is, is somehow already completed, it’s usually because it’s been working— you’ve been working on it, either unconsciously, or in your body or in your mind or in your sleep before it’s come out. So I feel like it’s not so much that it’s totally done. It’s just that it’s already arrived at itself. Before you may have even had the skill to know.

B&N

I love the idea of a poem arriving at itself. It does, it seems, you know, when I think about the poets whose work I love, and go back to, I don’t want to say that it seems effortless. But as you mentioned earlier, I feel like I get something new every single time. And it can be someone like Elizabeth Bishop, or Robert Lowell. I mean, if you go deep, or even Langston Hughes, I mean, there are just times and then you’ve got Claudia Rankin and you’re just like oh, hello. Yeah, there’s such an amazing range of work out there. And I mean, I think I started reading you somewhere between ‘06 and 2010, but I feel like I get something different from your work every single time I go back. So I think we would have had a different variation of this conversation if we had spoken 10 years ago, or even five years ago, or even, you know, a year ago kind of thing. And that’s something with poetry seems so alive on the page, and constantly capable of change in ways that not every written art form, is capable of. There’s some things that are just “the thing”. And then there are other things where you’re like, huh, huh, it really is about what you’re bringing to the page.

I love that you’re saying that because it is. Like that sort of, you know, incredible mystery to me that also poems, and I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but poems that I maybe even disliked or dismissed and thought, oh, you know, I’m not really, I don’t know, do I really like John Ashbury? And then, and then read and then have been like, oh, yeah, no, I love John. But like, there were moments like in graduate school where that just didn’t hit for me that, you know, I was like, oh, no, that’s not what I want to read right now. I want to read this, you know, and then later on now, I can really appreciate his genius. And so I feel like there’s all of these times too where poems find you at certain moments where you may be somehow resistant to them at another time, and then suddenly, it’s like, oh, oh, here you are— oh, oh, I remember you and you look so different. It reminds me that idea that it is a living thing, that it feels like it changes and it’s not just about what we bring to it but the world that we’re living through, right.

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I have such mixed feelings about social media for lots of reasons, but I will say it’s delightful when I see other people discovering voices like Mary Oliver’s, and I’m like, Yes. Stick with her. She will lead you down the right path. You know, even Ray Carver’s early work. Oh yeah, Michael Ondaatje. I’m just like, Hey, you’re the guy who wrote The English Patient.

People always freak out when you tell them that, you know, that he was a poet, same with Raymond Carver. They’re always— I had, I had a wonderful experience one time in Monterey, where a student was like, “I just don’t get poetry at all. Like, I just would, I just want to read Raymond Carver.” And I said, “well you should read his poems”, and he was like, he was horrified.

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Ondaatje has that great poem, A Gentleman Compares His Value to a Piece of Jade. And it’s like, oh, man, I love that. If anyone’s looking for it, it’s in The Cinnamon Peeler. Go find it because it’s great. And you can see how the prose and the poetry for someone like Ondaatje or Carver folds in, pulled in and back on itself. And I didn’t know that your book, Bright Dead Things, that was possibly the product of a failed novel, is how you described it. And I didn’t realize you had tried to write fiction, because I’ve always known you as a poet, and known your work as a poet, I should say. I know poets have people coming up to them and saying, Oh, I know you. It’s like, well, no, I know your works. But c an we talk about that little experiment? Because I had no idea that was a part of your repertoire.

Yeah, it’s a very well-kept secret. No, I, I really believe, you know, I’m an artist. And so I love to try my hand at things. And then sometimes I fail, you know, I, I was in a band in Brooklyn called Lucky Wreck, which was the name of my first book. And it was one of my favorite things was to make music and play out for, you know, a couple, three years or so. And there’s lots of different art that I’ve made in my life. And so when I, when I quit my job in New York City in 2010, and moved to California, and then Kentucky to become a full time writer, whatever that means. I thought, well, I’ll write a novel, as one does right— just write a novel. And I did, and, yeah, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s not terrible, but it’s not great. And then I, you know, decided to sort of, write another one. And it’s sort of a similar experience. I really enjoy doing them. I’ve written three, I think. And I think I learned a lot about structure. And I learned a lot about I think, sometimes as a poet, it’s really good and healthy to get out of the self. So it was really fun for me to work in a genre that didn’t necessarily require my own mining of my biography. Not that poetry requires that, but sometimes I think it does that for me. And so, but I always laughed that it was kind of like getting, you know, like an MFA in fiction. Like, it was learning that, but then also really solidified for me that what my art form was, in terms of my music is always poetry. It’s like, you know, that’s it’s you gotta dance with the one who brung ya, like it was like this. This is me. I love reading fiction. But I will say, you know, trying your hand at it will definitely give you a new kind of awe when it comes to those great masters of fiction.

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Okay, so who are you as a reader of poetry? And who are you as a writer, reader of fiction? Where’s the overlap?

I think for me, I do really love lyrical novels. I love, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is one of my favorite books. I just adore it. And you know, it’s one of those that every time I teach it, I feel like halfway through students are like, wait, what, you know, and then they just fall madly in love with it. I also think humor is really, really difficult to do in books. And so I love Andrew Sean Greer’s Less. I think that its just, like, an acrobatic display of what it is to be sort of, humorous and that you know, and incredibly, just, gifted as a writer. I think of also the novelist Alejandro Zambra, I just finished this book, Chilean Poet, which if you haven’t read, it’s a delight. It’s a great translation. It’s also wonderful because it gives you some insight into what it is to be a poet in South America, which is different— being a poet in Chile as opposed to a poet in the United States. But yeah, so I really like lyrical novels. I think those are some of my favorite. Those sorts of things where it feels like yes, we’re honoring the sentence but we also have, you know, that sort of playfulness and that sort of if the etherealness of time.

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And who’s on your regular rotation for poetry? Who are your “musts”, the people that you keep coming back to?

Oh, yeah, I mean, there’s so many I’m sure as you know, it’s almost an impossible question just because they always change. But um, some of my sort of my sort of anchors, if you will, are Audre Lorde, Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Gabriela Mistral, Alejandra Pizarnik. And then you know, there’s also I just find that we are at really have an incredible array of poets writing today that I just admire. And that’s like Natalie Diaz and Tracy K. Smith and Kevin Young. And there’s just there’s so many more, but I feel like you know, Joy Harjo for one. But I think of our you know, Sharon Olds and Ellen Bass and Marie Howe and my teacher Colleen McElroy out of Seattle. Just some incredible writers that have not only been poets for a long time, but have really been the people who’ve paved the way for a lot of the poetry we’re seeing today.

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So you’re about to step into a really visible role as the US Poet Laureate, which I am so excited for you. I’m so excited for readers. I’m so excited for anyone on the periphery of poetry because I do think, and Joy Harjo obviously, is your predecessor, and there have been really amazing other people like Robert Hass who’ve done it as well. But what are you thinking about for your tenure as the poet laureate? Where are your thoughts wandering now?

Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s all still a little fresh for me, as you know. But I think that one of the things that I’m very curious about as an artist is, what art can do, what poetry can do. And I think that a lot of the other Poets Laureate in this position have had to really work at elevating poetry and letting people know that poetry exists. And I think that we’re actually at a moment that people know poetry exists. And now I think it’s more about like, providing access and providing opportunities to witness poetry, to have experiences with poetry. And also to talk about, like, what its value is. So I that’s something that is really important to me, because I feel like young students now today, they know, they know what, you know, they know Oh, yeah, poetry, and, you know, they hear it. And they’ve seen the incredible Amanda Gorman at the inauguration. And, you know, there’s been this real delight and pleasure and sort of watching the rise of American poetry over the last 10 years. And that I think, is beautiful, because I feel like there’s so much groundwork for poetry itself. And now I’d love to turn that conversation into sort of its power, and the impact that it can have, not just on our education, but on our wholeness as humans, because I think so often we forget that, you know, art can serve a purpose. And the purpose is not always just play and enjoy, and all those things are wonderful, but it can really be about, oh, this can be a tool to remind myself that I am a human being that I have feelings that have the full spectrum of human emotions, whatever those may be. And I think, right now, as we’ve, you know, we know its that we’re just leaping from sort of one, sort of catastrophe, or chaotic moment to another. And I think, you know, poetry is a place where we can acknowledge those things and into really sort of sort through some of our rage and, and joy and grief and all of those things. And I don’t know, I feel like we’re getting a sort of a tenuous grasp on our own realities, and everyone is sort of in a separate reality. And I think poetry can maybe help us remember that, that we’re connected and that we are also all experiencing these things. And we have gone through something hugely traumatic and continue to go through it. And I do think we need to remember that. If we suppress everything, we will pay the price.

B&N

You are the host of a podcast called The Slowdown you have new and selected poems coming next year, the year after?

the year after,

B&N

okay, and there’s another collection of poetry that I am blanking on, but I remember being very excited when I saw it. Would you tell us what that is, please?

Yeah, there’s an anthology I’m working on right now called Beast, and it’s all poems about animals.

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I think that’s really great. I think, and that’s so that’s 2023 that’s coming out.

That should be 2024. And the new and selected will be after that. So that’s, you know, so I just really love writing about animals and talking about animals than I was trying to put together an anthology that feels accessible to people of all ages and to really just like, okay, these, you know, here are some, you know, 20 poems about birds. And here’s 20— and just see to see how these kind of act together. It’s been a real pleasure putting it together.

B&N

It feels like so much fun and it feels like the exact moment for us to dive in to something like that. Ada Limón, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. The Hurting Kind is out now. You start your tenure as the US Poet Laureate. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all of your work. It is such a joy to read you.

Thank you so much for such a wonderful conversation. It was a pleasure.