It’s always very interesting that we have to make a case for art because we don’t have to make a case for fast food. Like, we don’t have to make a case for all of these sort of things in our lives that we do not need, and yet we have to make a case for beauty? We have to make a case for the soul? We have to make a case for humanity? We have to make a case for singing back the wounded world? That to me is fascinating
My guest today is Ada Limón. She served two historic terms as the 24th poet laureate in the United States. She has brought poetry to public parks across the US, and her words have traveled through deep space, engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft. In over 20 years of writing in celebrated collections like Bright Dead Things and The Carrying and her new book, Startlement: New and Selected Poems, Ada has brought a sincerity to American poetry rooted in connection to the natural world.
She’s written with inspiring honesty about the death of loved ones, trying to conceive and also the unexpected liberation of deciding to step away from societal expectations of motherhood and embrace a life happily childfree. Her latest book on craft, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, asks how a poem can hold our heaviest grief without letting the human spirit fracture.
After years living in Kentucky and New York, she bought back her childhood home in Sonoma Valley, stepping back into the rooms where her poetic imagination first took root. We’ll talk about the discipline of paying attention and why poetry remains an essential act of human survival.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Ada Limón, welcome back to The Creative Process.
ADA LIMÓN
Oh, it’s so good to see you and be with you again. Thank you for having me, and thank you for all the work you do.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Well, thank you. You know, in bringing Startlement to the world, which is looking back on over 20 years of poetry, what were you learning about the way your mind works? I feel it’s like a mother tree looking at the roots of your life’s work and seeing those connections again. So I was just wondering what it’s like to be in conversation with your imagination, with your different selves in the past and now and what has gone before, because it’s an important year for you and also for me too. I’m also coming up to my 50th year. It’s also America’s 250th. So I feel like in the beginning, you have this, to use the name of one of your poems, this endlessness, and now it’s going home. You can go out in any direction, now you’re coming closer to the horizon. A sense of ending, but not yet. What does it feel like to return?
ADA LIMÓN
That’s such a beautiful question, and it was very interesting to experience the physical return, the body and the brain and the mind returning to my childhood home, not just to my home valley but to my childhood home, a place where my office, where I’m talking to you right now, was my childhood bedroom. To return in that way, in the physical way, while I was also returning to all of the poems I’ve written, working on putting together the newest book, Startlement, and looking at all the poems that I’ve made.
And like you so deftly put, the idea of the past selves, the many selves that we are inside what we create. I think that one of the things that kept coming back to me, kept returning, kept coming up, if you will, rising to the surface, was that I have such amazement at being alive. And I think at the earliest poems, that it’s there. It’s this strangeness of being in a body, of living in a world, of this incredible Earth that we get to have in our lifetime. And I think what surprised me the most when I was working on the book, and even maybe as I return to this valley, is that I haven’t lost it.
I think that not only is it still present, this sort of complete bewilderment at this world, this life, the connections that we have, but that it’s deepened. It’s deepened in many ways, and I think that’s what surprises me. I think that there are moments where you think, “Oh, that’s something that we will get used to, that we will tune out as our life begins.” Sorry if you heard my dog drinking water, speaking of life.
But I think that is what was a big takeaway for me, not just the move back but the move into a state of reflection when making the newest book. And so I think that I was surprised at how much of me is still me, how much of me is still in a constant wonderment at the living body in a living world.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes. Now wonderment, that’s a gentle word. I mean, it opens up, but of course you chose startlement, which is a spikier word, and I like it.
ADA LIMÓN
It is a spikier word. That’s a great way to say it.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And that’s what I appreciate, and I think so many people love about your poetry, is a sense of wonder. I guess we’ll get later to the reason for choosing that word startlement, but staying a little bit on the place of childhood, the place of memory, you know, where dreams begin, where the longing begins, which leads us out and leads us back. When you walked back into those rooms, and I guess there are ghosts and memories and people who are no longer with us and all those things, what is that like? It just sounds like a rebirth, a renaissance.
ADA LIMÓN
Yeah. You know, it’s funny because I have a line in a poem that I believe is in Bright Dead Things, but it might be in Sharks in the Rivers where I say, “The office was not haunted, but I wish it was.” And that refers to a moment where I was working for magazines in New York, and my friend Jessica Yen had died of cancer at the age of 30. When she left this world, I actually ended up working for the same magazine she was working at when she had passed away. And they waited for a while to tell me that I was in her office. And so I kept thinking, “Oh, I’m going to see her. I’m going to feel her.” And then I was so disappointed when I didn’t.
And so I think that I thought maybe I wouldn’t feel any sort of sense of hauntedness here in the house, and yet I do. And I think that it’s not a sort of hauntedness of ghosts but that idea of memories and really the many selves that we are, you know? The thought of the little self who I was when I first made my first steps, when I first read a word, when I first learned how to read, all of those things were here. And so I moved into this house when I was six months old, so this is the place of memory for me.
And so I was thinking, oh, it might not be... I might be sort of putting a lot of my own expectations on how the house might feel, how this might feel, and instead it was actually more so. I think that the two answers I’ve given you already, I’ve just said more so. But that’s, that’s how I can feel my little self in this room. And I remember so well spending hot summer days inside with the fan on, reading and trying to figure out the language for songs that I was going to make up for my dog.
I walk in the same valley, and I go for the same walk. In fact, I just got back from a little three-mile jaunt that I do near daily. And I was thinking about how many times I used to walk to that same spot and look at it and dream, and now here I was doing the same thing.
So it's not as much the people who have passed, although they're here, but it's my past selves that I feel are so intertwined with the experience of moving home and of childhood, that they're inside of us, that they're with us. It's not something you move past. I keep thinking about the idea of growth. You mentioned the mother tree, which is so beautifully said, and I keep thinking about how as we grow up, grow older, we think of growing wiser and we think of forward momentum.
And what I'm finding here is the deepening of the root systems, so that all that forward momentum might be happening, but at the same time the roots are going further and farther to stabilize and to reach out, and they're happening at the same time. It's not one or the other. It's not looking back or looking forward. It's that the simultaneity of this moment is creating this really rich present that is new for me, and I'm really delighting in it, and sometimes I'm overwhelmed by it.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Well, you're glowing with it. It's evident. And I've always loved this word arborescence, since we're talking of trees. I just can't wait to read more of your poetry that you do now in this place of childhood and memory and creativity because it's like you're in this forest. It can be an old-growth forest, but there are always new saplings, so there's this wisdom of old and the new life pushing up. Have you selected a poem from Startlement that you'd like to share with us?
ADA LIMÓN
Yeah, I would love to share something. I'm going to put my glasses on so that I can... You know, it's funny, when I first started writing poems, I didn't need glasses. I thought I would read this shorter poem. It's a poem that I wrote... here we go. For me, it's a poem about this feeling of being both inside the world and of the world, figuring out where the self exists, as so much of that was what I was doing here. So this is a poem called "On Earth As It Is On Earth”.
Green and green and green, I speak
to the tree line, a booming body, trying
not to boom. I see myself as I once
was, hiding inside a manzanita outside
the ceramic studio, the mirrored rain
drops hanging on urn-shaped blooms
and soon, too, my strands of hair. There was
always a line where the rain fell and where
it didn't. It was the line between abandonment
and freedom, loneliness and imagination.
How I waited in there, composing in my mind
a life without rules, without money, cruelty,
clocks, or clothes, how still I am the same,
in the green, in the green, waiting out the rain.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
That's... I love all your poems. I always try to guess which one you'll read, but I think that sums up so many things about your writing. You obviously have this appreciation of the natural world and the many intelligences and languages that you're listening to but we can't fully speak.
If you had to talk about the mind of the universe or talk about the mind of the forest or the spirit of the ocean or any of the other smaller living creatures, if you had to be one or a few—okay, I'll grant it, you could be a few if you want. We're in magical thinking mode. What would they be?
ADA LIMÓN
I like how you say we're in magical thinking. I think I'm always in magical thinking mode. You know, I've always thought that I love the idea of being a bat, and it goes back to my friend Jason Schneiderman, the poet, who said this to me once. I thought, for sure this is a beautiful way to be, which is that if you're a bat, you have wings and hands.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And a little dog face too.
ADA LIMÓN
Yeah, which I kind of love, and I also love the idea of existing in that space between the light and the dark in the shadows. I also like the idea of the community. Bats are in community. I also think that they have this different viewpoint as they are often upside down and then right side up. So that is something that I've often thought about.
If I were to be an entity or I got the gift of dissolving into something, I think water. Water would be incredible for me, and I think that as much as I love the vastness of the ocean, I would choose a creek. I would want to be the creek water because where I am, my closest watery love is a seasonal creek that I visit every day and talk to. Sometimes it's gone and sometimes it floods. Sometimes it's just a small little dried-up pool, and then soon it's something rushing and dramatic, and I love all the different changes the seasonal creek goes through.
Another one that I really love is the bird, the coot, because they do something that is sort of like walking on water, which is that they skim the water. They have, you know, like ducks do, that sort of... But they can run on top of water, and then they're just as comfortable in air as they are in water, and they're incredible swimmers. The way that they dive is really remarkable. So I also love the idea of being a bird that is as comfortable in the air as I am in water.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So yes, you like the transformations. Of course, this is a big theme for you, the becoming. It's never static in your poetry or life. There is movement. It's not all nostalgia. That was a point that I think was behind a particular commissioned poem for the IPCC. Let us face those truths, but also the beauty and wonder. I can imagine the questions you ask yourself and you're constantly asking yourself as you appreciate what we have and what we may be losing.
ADA LIMÓN
Yeah. I think a lot about that, about how we live. Like everyone, I'm sure all of your listeners who are living a creative life, how can you live a creative life without bearing true witness to the destruction that humanity has had on this planet and humanity has had on humanity?
And as an artist, there's some part of us that wakes up and thinks, "Okay, how do I take this and make something? How do I start the day and move in a way that is bearing witness and paying attention, but can also foster some sort of calm and vastness from which to create something, some kind of rootedness, you know?"
And I think that's a very interesting place to be, because we cannot just surrender to our grief. I've always thought there's a great privilege in giving up. There's a great privilege in just thinking, "Well, everything is going to hell, and that's what will happen."
I really believe that we have to try our best continually, just to raise awareness as to what is happening, but to act in small ways and in large ways. And I think we do that as artists. Sometimes we can only do that through our art because that's how we gain our strength, and sometimes we have to be more of an activist. Those two things sometimes go together and sometimes they don't.
Sometimes they're quite different, depending on who you are and how you can move in the world safely and in a way that sustains you. But yeah, I think about that a lot. As you say, the questions that come up are large questions. And how can they not be? How can they not be?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yeah, it's as large as our earth and beyond our smallness in the vastness. Sometimes people think this is a Band-Aid. You know, they say that about the arts sometimes. It's like, "Ah, we have to think about the important things." But even going forward, because I know you're having conversations with scientists and so many who are doing important work, the arts are important work, and it gives them something to take away.
When you have the project in You Are Here and also in the public parks, people can take that poem even when they're not near nature and think about their responsibility. Not that art has to have a function, because the music of life is important. Anyway, I'm going on.
ADA LIMÓN
No, I totally agree with you, and it's always very interesting that we have to make a case for art because we don't have to make a case for fast food. Like, we don't have to make a case for all of these things in our lives that we do not need, you know?
And yet we have to make a case for beauty? We have to make a case for the soul? We have to make a case for humanity? We have to make a case for singing back the wounded world? That to me is fascinating. What a fascinating thing we have to do that. You're not wrong. People think it's frivolous. And how many of us think a life on Wall Street is frivolous? You know?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And it's imaginary.
ADA LIMÓN
Yeah. I mean, money is a concept, and yet we bow down to it. So I'll make a case for arts and beauty all the time. But just like in this role that you have made for yourself, that you've created, sometimes it can be exhausting, right?
Because you think you have to show up and you might just want to talk about poems. You know, when I was serving as the laureate, you want to talk about poems, or you want to talk about creation or making or joy or something like that. But then you're confronted with, "Why should poetry matter? Why does it even exist?" It's a very interesting thing.
And so I learned to do it. I learned by watching the other beautiful laureates like Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith and Juan Felipe Herrera and Natasha Trethewey and all of these wonderfully articulate, creative geniuses that were able to talk about poetry in a way that was both expansive and personal.
But there were times where, you know, I thought, "Oh, if one more person asks me, 'Why does poetry matter?'" I felt like I was going to fall over, you know? And I'm sure that happens in your world too because I think there is this strange thing when you go into the arts, whatever they are, whether they're painting or photography or acting or music, whatever it is, someone is going to say, "Why does that matter?"
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's interesting because I hadn't thought about poetry being the closest thing to consciousness. But then when I thought that that was the closest thing to consciousness, well, that's how we prove that we're human. Like now all the conversation is about whether AI has consciousness. So you know, it's life itself, and I don't see why we have to make that case.
You mentioned beauty, and so I just want to ask simply... There's a line in In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa. You say, "We are creatures of constant awe, curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom, at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow." And it's kind of an ode to beauty. So for you, what is beauty?
ADA LIMÓN
You know, I think I find it in so many different things. But for me, because I'm such a feeler, it is a feeling. And it is that moment when I feel like the smaller self in me, the self that deals with the details of life, you know? The self that makes coffee, feeds the dog, gets groceries, sees my parents, checks in on my family, does the Zoom call and checks the emails. I think beauty happens when my smaller self dissolves a little, and the larger I in me—and I don't mean the I as the letter, but the I as in the observer—opens and is just suddenly alert and more open.
And I find that beauty, to me, is that sort of turning on. It can happen primarily in the natural world for me, but it also happens with human connection, with animal connection, a moment between two people or someone caretaking another person, small kindnesses. But it's that the small self just went away for a moment, and the larger observer, the deeper self, just kind of got a little excited and all the feelers came out.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Well, it's hard for me to believe that you're not constantly in contact with it just because of living in poetry, and I feel like you are there. Actually, it surprised me when I was asking about animals that you didn't mention horses. I thought that might be, but maybe because there's only so much time. I'm sorry, I'm kind of mind-wandering at the moment.
ADA LIMÓN
No, I love that. And I couldn't have an answer for why I wouldn't choose horses because I love horses, but to me, there's a power in them that I adore and admire, and when I need power, that's the animal I think of. I think of them as power.
But I also find them, in some ways, so distant, which is why I think I write about them, because I'm fascinated by them. They feel to me very otherworldly, and I think there are some people who move with them like they're sort of big dogs. They move so easily with them. I don't. I'm not scared of them, but I am very reverent of horses, so I think that it's hard for me to choose that as my animal being because I think that they're my husband's animal being. Horses are his, and so I see that as, I love them, but they're not mine.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
That's interesting. So it's sacred too. You're a visitor and observer. That's nice to see. And yes, because in some of the poems it's like you're not jealous of the horses. Like, "Oh, come back from the field." And there's your mother also, her connection to horses.
ADA LIMÓN
Yes.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
There's a kind of sibling outside. The sibling out in the field. And it's interesting. I love that you have humor and you have all the emotions. It's not just the appreciation of nature that we get in your poetry. You write about many different kinds of love too. We've been talking about family or your husband or nature. Over the years and then coming back into your childhood home, what have the years taught you about love?
ADA LIMÓN
That it's a choice. I thought love when I was younger was something that was uncontrollable and wild and outside of the self. And now I think about how it deepens and deepens, and that you can choose it. You can choose it. You can move towards it. And I had no idea that that was true.
You can choose it from people who didn't even... You may feel like they didn't love you, and then you can look back and think, "No, there were times that they did." And I think that there's a lot of recasting and recalibration sometimes that happens when you think about love in the past.
For me it's much more of a... I don't want to say it's controllable, but you can set your intentions toward it and move toward it, and there's way more of it in the world than I thought. I thought that maybe it was scarce, it was rare, but I actually think it's everywhere…
