There is no shortage of talented writers in Western North Carolina. Many call WNC home, others share their penned musings while passing through. The country’s official poet is the latest on that list. Ada Limón is the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate and first Latina to hold the title. She visits Asheville on Monday for an evening of poetry on the UNC Asheville campus.
Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Her most recent book, The Hurting Kind, was published in May 2022.
She grew up in California and has lived in Kentucky for the past decade, but she's no stranger to the Tar Heel state. Since 2015, Limón taught in the Master of Fine Arts Program at Queens University in Charlotte. She was born into a family of artists and teachers. She majored in drama in college. Limón is known for her emotional sincerity and thoughtful observations of nature and human's place within it. BPR’s Helen Chickering caught up with her by phone last week at her home in Lexington.
On her love for poetry, performing and spacing out: I’ve always loved poetry, even as a kid. You know, anything that rhymed, I was in love with! When I was 15, I found the poem One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. And I remember it struck me as this sort of wonderful love poem, and it had so much visceral ache in it that I just, you know, at 15, that's all you'd do is ache. And that poem just struck me as brilliant. So at 15, I found the joy of really reading poetry. But then I also got curious about making it. Along the way, I wrote a lot of failed poems, and well - I still write failed poems. But, it wasn't until my junior-senior year at the University of Washington in Seattle that I started taking poetry classes and started studying it in any kind of academic way.
But I also think, if I'm totally honest, that I've always been a person that was very interested in watching and listening to the world, not so much in an isolated way, but actively. I also love to perform and do all the fun things that children love to do. You know, put signs down by the road that say, “Show at five o'clock,” even though I didn't know what that meant. And I also really loved, for the lack of a better phrase - spacing out. I was the kid that was staring out the window, letting my imagination go. That was really fostered in my household, and I know not everyone had that kind of experience. And so, I feel really grateful for that.
On being a private poet: You know, this is a public role, right? The poet laureateship is to represent poetry in this public way. But I always want to just shout out to all the people that are writing poems in private ways, because I am also a private poet. I write poems that I don't share, and I guess if there's anything that I never get asked is -what it is to be a private poet? So, for me, I think it's really important to remember that first and foremost, I'm an artist and that if you're listening or watching or you come to a reading and you think, wow, to be a poet, you have to be on stage - I don't think that's true. I think you can be a private poet, I think you can be a private person and make art, and that's just as essential and as important and as necessary as anyone who's doing it in a public way.
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