This week, award-winning poet Ada Limón was named the nation’s 24th poet laureate by the Library of Congress. Limón, a Latina of Mexican-American descent lives in Lexington, Kentucky and teaches at Queens University in Charlotte in the school’s Masters of Fine Arts Latin America program.
She’s written six books — the latest, “The Hurting Kind” was published in May. Limón, 46, has won a National Book Critics Circle Award, was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and has been a National Book Award finalist. The Library of Congress called her a poet who connects with the world and quote, “grounds us in where we are and who we share the world with.”
Limón says she was at a loss for words when she was invited in an early morning Zoom call to be the country’s next poet laureate.
Ada Limón: I had a moment where I was, I really had to take a deep breath and process what this ask was and what this invitation was and what it meant. And of course, I said, yes, of course. Yes.
Gwendolyn Glenn: Have you been thinking about what you want to do as the poet laureate?
Limón: It's still new, so I'm doing a lot of groundwork and questioning. And but I would like to make sure that poetry is seen as a tool to help us reclaim our humanity. And I think it's really important to remember that poetry is a tool for healing. The other thing I would like to do is recognize that poetry can be a tool to help us repair our relationship with the natural world. I'm thinking in terms of a project that perhaps something about poetry in public spaces, whether poetry in parks or poetry at a place that can be in green spaces. Too often I think that we think poetry just belongs in the school or in the academic world or, you know, in a book even. And I think that we can look at it in new ways, how we can have access to it, and let other people who maybe, perhaps aren't poetry seekers, you know, stumble upon it.
Glenn: You talked about a way of poetry being a way to healing. How do you explain that to someone, especially someone who is not a big poetry fan? How can poetry be healing and help us to reclaim humanity?
Limón: I think it's not dissimilar from the way that music can help us. It kind of recalibrates your body. Poetry that moves you can have that same experience. Not every poem is going to do that for you. Right? So, I think it's important to remember that poetry travels in one way, which is one poem at a time. And so, I think that if I write a poem about my stepmother who passed away in 2010, that home death, feeling that grief in me. And I read that poem. Or someone reads that poem or hears it, or however they have access to it. And they might remember someone they lost.
Glenn: Could you read that for us?
Limón: Absolutely. Her name was Cynthia Limón. The poem I wrote was about her experience of one of the last swims that she took before she died. And she wrote a letter to all her friends saying goodbye.
“Open water”
It does no good to trick and weave and lose
the other ghosts, to shove the buried deeper
into the sandy loam, the riverine silt, still you come,
my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistent
in water I cannot tell if it is a wave or you
moving through waves. A month before you died
you wrote a letter to old friends saying you swam
with a pod of dolphins in open water, saying goodbye,
but what you told me most about was the eye.
That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fish
that passed you during that last–ditch defiant swim.
On the shore, you described the fish as nothing
you’d seen before, a blue–gray behemoth moving slowly
and enduringly through its deep fathomless
North Pacific waters. That night, I heard more
about that fish and that eye than anything else.
I don’t know why it has come to me this morning.
Warm rain and landlocked, I don’t deserve the image.
But I keep thinking how something saw you, something
was bearing witness to you out there in the ocean
where you were no one’s mother, and no one’s wife,
but you in your original skin, right before you died,
you were beheld, and today in my kitchen with you
now ten years gone, I was so happy for you.
Glenn: That's beautiful. And I notice the water. And in a lot of your works, you write about trees. And horses. Some people have described your poetry is that you're kind of a naturalist.
Limón: Yeah. I mean, I definitely believe in the connection to the natural world, and I don't know where I would be without it. Having that deep appreciation to trees and plants and animals and living things is part of what gets me through day to day. I wouldn't mind being called, you know, a nature poet.
Glenn: Being a person of color.
Limón: Yeah, I consider myself Latina. My paternal grandfather was from Mexico. San Juan de los Lagos. Yeah. I mean, he crossed a border and, you know, he lived in a chicken coop when he was a kid and didn't get his citizenship until he was 18. But he went on to graduate from San Diego State.
Glenn: I was reading one of yours, “The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to be Bilingual.”
Limón: Yeah.
Glenn: Could you read some of that?
Limón: Yeah.
Glenn: I thought that was very powerful.
Limón: When you come, bring your brown-
ness so we can be sure to please
the funders. Will you check this
box; we’re applying for a grant.
Do you have any poems that speak
to troubled teens? Bilingual is best.
Would you like to come to dinner
with the patrons and sip Patrón?
Will you tell us the stories that make
us uncomfortable, but not complicit?
Don’t read the one where you
are just like us. Born to a greenhouse,
garden, don’t tell us how you picked
tomatoes and ate them in the dirt
watching vultures pick apart another
bird’s bones in the road. Tell us the one
about your father stealing hubcaps
after a colleague said that’s what his
kind did. Tell us how he came
to the meeting wearing a poncho
and tried to sell the man his hubcaps
back. Don’t mention your father
was a teacher, spoke English, loved
making beer, loved baseball, tell us
again about the poncho, the hubcaps,
how he stole them, how he did the thing
he was trying to prove he didn’t do.
The ending of that poem is a true story. My father was in a faculty meeting and someone had said that they didn't want to park their car in this certain area because the Mexicans there would steal their hubcaps. And my father, being Mexican, went out to the parking lot and stole the man's hubcaps. He waited till the next meeting, and then he dressed up with the poncho and the sombrero and then was like, oh, do you want to buy your hubcaps back? And he was really just trying to make this point of like, Hey. Be careful what you're saying. Look who you're talking to.
Glenn: And my Charlotte audience would not forgive me if I didn't ask you about your connection to Queens University here.
Limón: It's so wonderful that you asked. In fact, I will be flying to Buenos Aires for our two-week residency in Argentina. One of the very first sort of unofficial events that I will do as a U.S. poet laureate will be to have a discussion about Latin American poetry in U.S. poetry with two Argentinean poets through the Queen's program.
Limón officially becomes the country’s 24th poet laureate in September.
Copyright 2022 WFAE. To see more, visit WFAE. 9(MDAzNzE4NjE2MDEyNDcxNzIzNTk2MDZlOQ004))
