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| Ada Limón |
A Conversation
with Ada Limón
POLLY BUCKINGHAM, MIRIUM ARTEAGA, TORI THURMOND, SARAH KERSEY, & KYLE BEAM
Weaving natural imagery with memories of the past and moments of the present, Ada Limón’s work explores both gender and race while incorporating elements of the surreal. The Los Angeles Review describes her work as being filled with “discovery, and rediscovery of self and world.” Limón’s poems guide her reader through her speaker’s self-exploration and encourage them to find beauty in the unconventional—in the way a neighbor mows his farm, in an 8-pound female horse heart, in a lady groundhog eating a tomato.
Ada Limón is the author of The Carrying (2018), the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Bright Dead Things (2015), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award; Sharks in the Rivers (2010); Lucky Wreck (2006); and This Big Fake World (2006). Her new book, The Hurting Kind, is expected from Milkweed Editions in May of 2022. Limón was a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, and she teaches remotely from Lexington, Kentucky, where she also hosts The Slowdown, a poetry-focused podcast.
Ada Limón agreed to meet with us over Zoom during the winter of 2020. Amid a year of isolation, our conversation surrounding the importance of underrepresented voices in literature, poetic process, and the evolution of poetic style provided a much-needed sense of togetherness. Limón was candid, encouraging, and realistically hopeful while she allowed us into her world for a few hours on a chilly afternoon.
Tori Thurmond
Something that I love about your collections is the variety of form. I read in a past interview of yours that breath is really important when writing poetry. Does the incorporation of breath in your poetry determine the form of each poem or is that a different process for you?
Ada Limón
No, they’re completely aligned. Breath, for me, determines how the poem is read, where we want the reader to breathe, where we as the writer breathe. Allowing for the line breaks, caesuras in the middle of the line, stanza breaks, all of that, where the white space is, is always allowing for breath. In some ways, they operate like stage directions. Once I’ve actually completed the poem, when I hand it to a reader, they should be able to read it in a similar manner to how I’ve placed it on the page and how I intend it to be read.
Mirium Arteaga
In Lucky Wreck, there were a lot of shorter, haiku-like poems. How does breath operate in those?
Limón
I love that you asked about Lucky Wreck. It’s coming up on its 15th anniversary. Which is crazy because I feel like I’m not that old, right? Those little poems were meant to be like Post-It notes within the book, notes to myself on some level, moments to stop, especially after a longer poem or maybe a more complex poem or a poem that had a heavy subject matter. They were like little breaths, little breaks throughout the book, a place to land after a longer journey—the psychological journey of a poem.
The last poem, “Thirteen Feral Cats,” which is all one poem in thirteen sections, needed to be the ending, the reason for the book. It’s almost backwards in some ways, like it’s built to have some lightness, some cleverness, some joy of living, but that last section confronts mortality in a larger way.
Lucky Wreck was the first manuscript I put together as a manuscript; I would type into one word document. I wrote each poem individually, but I started to see them as a collection right off the bat. I started putting them together, and then “Thirteen Feral Cats” came at the end, and it felt like, “Oh right, it’s supposed be this journey I’m working through, and then here is the reason. My stepmother was diagnosed with cancer. How do I live with this information? And how do these thirteen feral cats play into what it is to want something, to live and also want to tame something?”
Polly Buckingham
Have you ordered your books since then in that way, or do you say, “I have enough. I’m going make a book”?
Limón
It’s a combination. Bright Dead Things, Lucky Wreck and Sharks in the Rivers all started as one poem at a time. Then I start to see them talking to each other, and I start to lay them next to each other and I think, “If this is a manuscript, what am I missing?” It felt like Lucky Wreck was actually missing some of that real straightforward conversation about death.
Now when I build a manuscript, I think, “Okay, if this is a book and these poems are connected, what are the parts I’m leaving out? What are the things I’m scared to say? What are the things I need to push myself into, whether it be scary or hard or maybe even joyful?” The hardest poem to write is a joyful poem or a contented poem. I mean, what does a contented poem look like? There are times when I start to put together a manuscript and I think, “Oh, this needs more contentment. I’m content. I have joy. I look to see what parts are missing, and then I start to fill in those gaps and create a book that has a sense of wholeness to it. I’ve never wanted my books to be just a collection of poems. They’ve always felt like they needed a heart, that they needed a core, and that there was some sort of, for lack of a better word, narrative arc for the reader.
Sarah Kersey
You have that thirteen-part poem in Lucky Wreck, and you also have a fifteen-part poem in Sharks in the Rivers called “Fifteen Balls of Feathers.” How do you decide when to include section breaks in poems and when to use stanza breaks?
Limón
In both of those poems, each section acts as if it’s an individual poem, but it’s going to be more kinetic and vibrant if it’s part of the whole. It’s sort of about whether or not it can actually exist outside of the poem. Whereas with a stanza break, there’s no question that it needs to be connected, and so it’s giving into the leaps the brain makes. The section breaks feel more like that sort of pinging, where the brain goes over here then over here, whereas the stanzas, there might be a little pause, but the brain is still on track.
Buckingham
You’ve talked a lot about silence in your poems, and we were talking earlier about those smaller poems with a lot of space around them. I thought of Lorca, who you mention in The Carrying. I wonder if you could speak to his influence.
Limón
Yeah, Lorca has been a big influence on me, and one part of that is those leaps. That’s one thing Lorca has always been really wonderful at, trusting the reader to go with him when he goes into a new realm. It’s no wonder that Salvador Dalí and Federico Lorca were partners and friends, or whatever their relationship was. That giving into the reality has always been a big influence on my work. When I allow my brain to go, “Okay, this is just where it’s going,” instead of stopping myself and going, “This is too weird,” the Lorca mentor in my mind says, “Go with it. Go with it.” I don’t know if it’s always about the silence or the breath, but more about trusting the weirdness of the self. The weirdness of the self might lead you to some place that might not be factual, but it might be truthful.
Kyle Beam
Could you speak to sectioning in your collections?
Limón
With The Carrying, I started reading it as all one section. I was going through fertility treatments, but that wasn’t necessarily the entire thrust of the book. I needed there to be a place where you could close the door on that and talk about a poem like “A New National Anthem” or “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual.” Even though our emotional state as we’re writing any manuscript is going to color an entire manuscript, I still felt that there were moments where I wasn’t thinking about my own fertility. I needed those moments of breaking. Even though that was the big impulse for the book, I didn’t want it to be the only engine. Those sections became a safe place for me to not always talk about the exact thing that was troubling me.
In the first section of Bright Dead Things, I’m in Kentucky. Why am I here? Why am I writing? And then the second section is dealing with what came before, which was the death of my stepmother, and I probably would not have been in Kentucky if it wasn’t for that. Then the third section feels like a return to the past, all the things and all the people we carry with us. There’s moments of talking about the exes, talking about past loves. Who are we when we enter a new relationship? Do we bring all the people who have been in a relationship with us behind us? We do. Sometimes you notice it. Sometimes you wish you didn’t. Then the fourth section was like, “What is it to be in a relationship?” and having that complicated. It ends in love poems. They’re less than smooth; they’re a little distressed in a way that I hope is truthful. Once I saw the organization for that manuscript happening, I was like, “Oh, this is exactly what it means, what it needs to be.” Also, once I realized there were poems about what the ex would bring to the relationship, I thought, “That person’s going to need a poem,” and I allowed myself to explore that. Sometimes the sections allow me to do what I was talking about earlier, which is to give myself prompts to explore something that I haven’t thought about or maybe haven’t even thought was worthy of a poetic impulse until I’ve seen what’s already there.
Kersey
You mentioned that the first section of Bright Dead Things is a lot about your move to Kentucky. I was wondering how place and physical space influence your poems and if you set out to write poems about Kentucky, or did those happen without intention?
Limón
Landscape is really important in my work. If I were to say that there are themes in my work, in general, it would be the natural world and animals. Bright Dead Things is the first book that was written entirely outside of New York, so it does have a certain amount of greenness and the natural world, whereas with Sharks in the Rivers, there’s the natural world—the mention of the Stillaguamish, and my family lived in Stanwood, Washington—but, at the same time, the rivers and the animals felt almost metaphorical. In Bright Dead Things they become more real, partly because I was living among them. It’s a different experience to talk about a horse when you’re in a high-rise office in the middle of Times Square than it is to talk about a horse while you’re actually looking out the window at a horse.
There were two things that moving to Kentucky gave me that I didn’t have in New York. One was that greenness and that true interaction with the natural world and the second one was the time to interact with it. Because when you live in a big city, especially in New York, most of your time is spent working to pay to live in that city. I had huge jobs. I was the creative services director for Travel + Leisure Magazine, and I left my house at 7:30 a.m. and came home at 7:30 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. When I moved out and started freelancing, my relationship to nature changed because I was out in it almost daily. The landscape became much more of my home. It went away from metaphor and became real.
Arteaga
Do you think it’s necessary or beneficial for any poet or writer to put themselves into the natural world?
Limón
If I were to say what is good for writers, I would say, no matter where you are, recognize the bioregional area you’re in. I actually think that you could live in Brooklyn and have an incredible relationship with trees and plants and animals. I don’t think I had that because I was so distant in terms of time, but if you have time to walk in the botanical gardens, to walk in the parks—all of those things—you can have an incredible relationship with it. It’s really important, as human beings, for all of us to be in nature. We can talk about ecopoetics or nature poetry, but it’s really important just to recognize the plants and animals that surround us and are part of our community, the non-human animals.
Buckingham
What I love about your work is that odd combination between the Spanish surrealist vein and that gritty I’m-gonna-take-control-of-things voice, which is also a more narrative strain. I noticed it in The Carrying. Would you speak to those two competing voices?
Limón
There are times where I’m in control and there needs to be a talking back, like the time you insert yourself into the world and you almost have a dominance because you need to for survival. You need to for rebellion. You need to for resistance. And then there are times where you need to receive the world, sit back and actually soak it in. You need to let the world be bigger than you. What a gift to let it be bigger than you. And then there are times you think, “No, I’m going to stand against this, and I will be the hummingbird in the hurricane.”
Those two voices exist within myself, and they very much existed in Lorca’s work, too. When can we be just the human animal, soft and receptive and listening and quiet and let the world happen to us? And then when do we need to say, “No, I need to be in this world, and I need to be using my voice in order to honor people maybe who don’t have the voice”? Those two things are not just necessary for my own poetics, but I think they’re necessary for my humanity.
BUCKINGHAM
Your imagery seems so connected to the Spanish surrealists. Some contemporary poets I can think of, Alberto Ríos and Sharon Olds, also have that striking and wild imagery within a more narrative structure. I wonder if you would speak to imagery and how you see it, where it’s coming from, what writers influence you in terms of imagery.
Limón
I think imagery is key to how poems are made. I don’t think they can be made successfully without it, but there’s also a level at which we edit our own imagery, often outside of our poetic life. We don’t generally talk about the way we’re creating metaphors, or seeing things, or describing something, because maybe how we see it is a little strange. Sharon Olds was my teacher at NYU. I never studied with Alberto Ríos, but I love his work. “Rabbits and Fire” is one of my favorite all time poems. There’s a permission granted with both of those poets to follow the weirdness. I mean, Sharon is really weird. And I also lean into that idiosyncratic self that sees things differently than other people.
Thurmond
All of the collection titles are just breathtaking. Sharks in the Rivers represents exploring the unexpected—you don’t expect there to be sharks in a river. And Bright Dead Things explores finding the beauty in unconventional places. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your process of selecting a title for each collection.
Limón
I love that question. Anyone who works with me always says, “You love titles.” I love titling poems. Why would I want a poem called poem? I don’t want that. I love Frank O’Hara, I love Alan Dugan, I love people who can get away with it, but for me the title does work. It sums up or contains everything that’s in the book. I will continue to be obsessed with titles. This Big Fake World is like a novel in verse—so it’s almost all fiction. And in Lucky Wreck, the idea is, “I’m a disaster but I’m also so happy to be here.” Once I found that title, I could put together the rest of the collection—it was dealing with mortality and the recognition of death as well as joy, and those two things are consistently balanced across all five collections. For Sharks in the Rivers, there needed to be something scary underneath it all; that was the first time really dealing with where my stepmother’s cancer was going. There was a recognition of the fact that the world started to feel a little more haunted, and I felt less and less comfortable living in the city. There was a pull for me going into that book, like a pulsing dark forest of the mind. I retreated into that as much as I could while living in the city. In Bright Dead Things, almost all of the poems deal with the idea of containing living and dying in the same breath. Sharks in the Rivers is the mortality underneath it, and then Bright Dead Things is the idea that we’re both living and dying at the same time. The Carrying is similar; it’s what we carry to be in the world. I feel compelled to say that I’ve always liked hard k sounds; the only book that doesn’t have that is Bright Dead Things, but it still has this brightness. I love a spondee. I tend to like how these sonics hit.
Arteaga
Are titles something you start with, or are they something you finish a poem or a collection with?
Limón
It happens both ways, but for the most part they come at the end. Sometimes I think, “What’s this poem doing?” If I give it this title, suddenly it all connects, and I realize what the poem is about. Sometimes I ask myself, “What is this poem trying to teach me, what is it trying to tell me?” As we write, we don’t always know where the poem is going. If we did, the poems would be terrible for the most part. We have to not have any idea what we’re writing. The title also comes from the question, what is working?
Kersey
Earlier you mentioned how The Carrying occasionally focuses on fertility. I also noticed a lot of the expectation for women to have children. I was wondering if this expectation is as common in literary circles as it is in the rest of society?
Limón
I think it is. I think you’d be surprised if a man wrote about being a father. People would be like, “Oh, the sensitivity, the bravery, the courage.” But then if women write about being a mother, it’s like, “Oh, it’s sentimental.” It’s very strange. It’s very gendered and, like most of all our culture, hetero-maniacal—not just heteronormative, but hetero-maniacal. There’s something about white-predominant culture that’s constantly saying, “Okay, once you have a partner. . . .” That was one of the things about Bright Dead Things I started with. The line “People were nicer to me once I was partnered” has always stuck with me as if I was a problem that had been fixed. Like, “Oh, you’re now more human than you were before when you were single.”
The literary culture is very much also the predominant culture. The one thing I will say is that you do find more of us who have chosen not to have kids. We’ve leaned into a child-free life. You’d probably find that across the board in creative cultures. We’re making something that fulfills us. There’s also a little bit of a selfishness to being an artist. We’re selfish with our time, and that’s important. There’s an enoughness that we feel. People will say, “Oh, I didn’t feel complete until I had a child,” but as artists, there’s a completeness when we create something that non-artists don’t experience.
Arteaga
In The Carrying there’s this focus on the body, but then going back to Lucky Wreck, the focus is on the inner self. Is there a distinction between the body and the self? Or are they codependent or independent of each other?
Limón
I’m really glad you pointed that out to me because I don’t think I would have noticed that. The body is essential in The Carrying because I was also dealing with vertigo and chronic illness. It also might have had to do with fertility treatments. It felt like my pain levels were almost always sixes, sevens, and eights while I was writing the book. So, the body was not just with me, but it was with me in a painful way. And I was very aware of it all the time. It was hard not to write about it. Whereas when I wrote Lucky Wreck, I was younger. I didn’t have the chronic illness. I had scoliosis, but the pain levels were not anywhere near what they were when I was writing The Carrying. I love the fact that I was able to not consider the body as much in Lucky Wreck because there’s a youthfulness to it.
We think what we are is our minds or hearts, but if our bodies betray us in any way, if we are having a chronic illness or if we are not able in the way that we were once able, the body becomes a deeper consideration. The body and mind are absolutely connected, but I sometimes wish I could only think about the inner self. I was laughing just the other day at someone asking if I liked teaching on Zoom and I said, “Yes.” Partly because it’s freedom. As someone who has had vertigo and had trouble walking and literally trying to get around, I said, “It’s really nice not to have to worry about falling while getting to a classroom.” There’s a freedom in just entering a space without my body, and my body has become much more of a consideration as I’ve dealt with some severe health issues.
Arteaga
Earlier you mentioned that This Big Fake World was a collection more fictional than personal. Is that something you plan to return to?
Limón
There are times I really like to write fiction, and I particularly like to do it in poems. About a year ago, I wrote a project of twenty poems for the Art for Justice Fund grant that was about what it was like to be in a relationship with an incarcerated person. It was all fictional. A lot of things were pulled from real life and real experiences, my own and others, and they’re all in a different perspective. The poems were gifts; it was really fun to get out of myself for a little while. They were heavy poems, but it also felt like, “How can I explore this in a real way?” It felt like the only way to do it was to speak from someone who was not the incarcerated person but the person who was left; I kept thinking about how we grieve people when they’re not gone but they’re caged. That felt like a really important project. But now I have these twenty poems that I adore, but I’m not sure if they’ll fit because my sixth manuscript is more like Bright Dead Things than The Carrying. It’s dealing much more with the self. And I wonder if I should put them in a section or if they’ll be in something else at some point.
Buckingham
We’d love to hear about the new book.
Limón
I’m sure you guys totally relate to this: I don’t want it to be pandemic poems. I don’t mind if there are some, but I don’t want this to be my pandemic collection. I want it to have a sense of ongoingness and timelessness, though there are poems that deal with the pandemic and that deal with politics in the last four years. But it’s still quite a personal collection. There are a lot of animals in it; it feels like a very alive animal book. It’s slowly coming together, and I’m excited about it.
Beam
A lot of your work is somewhat autobiographical. How much do you find yourself embellishing to fit the poem or the themes?
Limón
I’m pretty factual. I stay close to what has happened in my own life, but I’ll always bow down to sound. If something sounds better for the musicality or muscularity of the line, I’ll always choose that sound whether it’s true or not. For the most part, the autobiographical thrust of the poem is true, but specifics will be changed, and almost always because of sound.
Thurmond
“How to Triumph Like a Girl” is one of my favorite poems in Bright Dead Things. It’s a new take on the phrase “fight like a girl.” Could you speak to the importance of writing about the female body and female characteristics in today’s society and what that means to you?
Limón
I always say my two favorite F-words are forgiveness and feminism. I feel very drawn to writing feminist work because it’s important to me to recognize what it is to be in a gendered body in a society that privileges one gender. That poem came out of a moment where I was interested in what it was that made me root for those particular horses, what it was to feel a bond to a female animal, and how that felt different than the bond to a male animal. What is it that I’m connected with? I also think that when horses come into my work, they symbolize power. They’re enormous, beautiful beasts. They’re not like the dog or the cat. It wasn’t really about celebrating my own power, but about trying to get power. You write yourself into something you want to believe. I want that huge beating genius machine in my body. What would it be like to have an eight-pound heart?
Arteaga
In The Carrying, there is a reoccurrence of suppression of anger versus accepting anger. How do you showcase that in poems about race or gender or politics?
Limón
It’s not only about how I balance it in my own writing, but how I balance it in my life. That’s partly the reason those poems have those moments that lift away from anger, because I don’t want to live there. I can live there, but I don’t want to. I know what anger does. I know what it does to my body. Anger can be useful—it has brought me to the page, rage has brought me to the page before, isolation and otherness have brought me to the page. But when I’m stepping away from the poems or when I’m ending the poems, I do need some sort of acceptance or recognition that I won’t let this eat me alive. That to me is also rebellion, like how Audre Lorde talks about self-care as a radical act. I sometimes write so I can say, “You stay here now, you get to stay on the page, and I get to go walk my dog and have a beautiful day.” I get to have that. I’m not going to live in a place where I’m feeling that fear and anger and torment all the time. It’s a lot about laying it down. I need to put it somewhere. I’ll put it in poems and explore it in poems so that I can also walk away from it.
Buckingham
I was thinking about “Dead Stars,” which embodies what you’re saying. It’s a political poem with that really nice moment where we “bargain for the safety of others.” How do you see politics in your poetry?
Limón
Yeah, politics are there. You can’t separate them out. You can’t separate who I am out of my poems, and that includes my political beliefs. Who I’m writing for is part of my politics, who I feel seen by is part of my politics. “Dead Stars” is a political poem. It’s an eco-political poem. It’s asking, “What is it to not only use our bodies to bargain for others but also to speak to the animal and to speak to the trees?” There’s so much giving up, and sometimes I want to give up, too. Sometimes it’s all too much, and it’s all too hard.
There are so many topics, we almost become a circular firing squad with each other because we think, “Oh, well if you’re working on women’s rights, are you making sure to include trans rights? Are you making sure to include the intersectionality of race relations? And, if you’re talking about BIPOC, are you making sure that you’re talking about Latinx folks? Are you using the Latinx term or should we say Mexican—because I’m Mexican?” I’m very aware sometimes that it can be overwhelming, and I just want to be like, “No, I don’t want to think about it.” And yet, I’m always thinking about it.
I’m thinking about my ancestors, I’m thinking about my connection to the earth. My connection to the earth is a political act as is knowing where I come from, writing for ancestors who did not have a chance to write because they were crossing a border and living in a chicken coop and not having a chance to actually be an artist. I think, “Okay, I’m going to be an artist because my grandfather, who was very much an artist, didn’t have that opportunity.”
But I also don’t want to write a polemic. I don’t necessarily get a lot from poems that are just telling me what to do. I don’t have the answers. I have a lot of questions, even of myself. I interrogate myself: What can I do more of? When have I done enough service? When do I get to say no? When do I get to say, “I don’t have to be the loudest person in the room right now. Someone else can do that on my behalf.” All of those things are active in my work.
There’s also a leaning into beauty that I feel is very important, especially for writers of color. It’s important that we get to have beauty. We all read nature poems, but it’s primarily white men who write nature poems—or the poems that we know, at least. But then you look at Camille Dungy’s amazing anthology Black Nature, and you realize that’s actually not the case. It’s an incredible anthology, a game changer. It came out in 2009. It’s great also if you’re teaching. It blows people’s minds because it really is like, “Oh wait, I didn’t know how segregated even poems about trees were.” We’ve celebrated those nature poems by white men, but people of color have been writing about nature forever. It’s just that we haven’t read them. We haven’t celebrated them. We haven’t published them. We’re not aware of that legacy. It’s important politically to show that writers of color can write about a groundhog or a butterfly if one needs to do that, if one feels like that’s the pulsing energy within them. We do sometimes have an expectation of and on writers of color that they need to write about their identity—you need to write about your identity in order to be published. I find it a huge disservice to us as writers and as creative people because I didn’t sign up for anything limited. I want an endless opportunity to write about whatever I want to write about. I maintain that I will do that forever.
When we get that pressure from within and outside of our communities to write about certain topics, every part of me is all elbows. Within my community, there are people who are like, “Why do you say Latinx? Why don’t you say Mexican? Do you ever write about your ancestry? Do you ever write about your identity?” All my work is about my identity, but my identity may not be the identity you want me to write about. Of course, there’s also pressure from outside of my community which is like, “Oh, in order for us to sort of fill a quota in this magazine, we would like to have a poem that represents the Mexican-American experience in Lexington.” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t think that’s me actually. I would prefer to write about a bird. Or I’d write it like a love poem.” That to me is a huge permission I don’t feel like we’re always granted. I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no. I want to write what I want to write.” Leaning in towards beauty feels like a political act.
Arteaga
We know that there’s this push for diversity in poetry, which has been historically very white and heterosexual, and I totally agree that there are negative side effects. But do you think there are more benefits to pushing diversity in the poetry world? Or do you think it comes with a cost for both the reader and the writer?
Limón
I think one hundred percent pushing for diversity outweighs any of the pitfalls of it, but I just want to point out that there are pitfalls. If I were an editor of a magazine and I wanted to make sure that I had a diverse array of voices, I would also look for diverse range, like formally, but I would want to make sure that I was also asking, “Okay, am I publishing a Black man out of Detroit because he’s writing about guns in Detroit, and that’s my own stereotypical perception?” I feel like some of these editors don’t quite have the self-awareness to recognize that what they’re doing is not just diversifying their pages, but actually doubling down on their own stereotypes about who can write what. If you want to diversify—which we do, and it’s a huge, beautiful thing to push for diversity in the pages, a great, necessary thing—we need to have our poetic community look like America, but at the same time, we need to make sure that we’re also not perpetuating stereotypes about who can write what and allowing for people to write whatever they want. Like Wanda Coleman can write a poem about a bird, but then also can write a poem about identity. The poems should get praised equally, and that’s also the hard part. I love the more political work, the overt work about identity. I’m all on board for it. But I also want to make sure that young poets coming up see that they can do that work, but then they can also lean towards joy, even as a way of self-preservation. Doing that heavy lifting all the time is not always good for us. There are times where we need to protect ourselves and write about our friends and about some things that have actually gotten us through, to write about survival. I want to make sure that young writers of color coming up in that world know that the world is open to them and that they don’t have to fall into one category. They can write whatever they want.
KERSEY
I’m curious how writing during this time, during this pandemic, during this political era looks for you and how that differs from normal life.
Limón
I miss life. This is what keeps coming out of my head: I miss life and there is also life. I really, really miss my family. For the most part, I get to see them often, and I’m very close to my mother and my stepfather and my father and his wife and my brothers. I haven’t been able to travel to see them, and that has been the hardest thing. I’ve also been feeling like, “How can a poem matter right now?” I really have to convince myself that it can. Some days I’m like, “It matters!” and I can really feel it, and then sometimes I’m like, “Does it?” Like, what would be more important? A vaccine. A new president. As artists, we’re always asking, “How do I write? How do I find my voice? How do I even allow myself to think that this counts for anything? That this matters?” That has increased a hundredfold during the pandemic. How can I even write when so many people are grieving? When we’ve lost so many people? I try to remember that writing is not just a connection to other people, but a connection to myself. During the pandemic, it’s become more of a discipline, like taking my dog for a walk. This is part of what I need to do to survive. It’s very easy to think, “What good am I doing? Shouldn’t I be volunteering? Shouldn’t I be doing something different?” But this is part of my survival technique, and I need to continue.
I’m also very interested in how our bodies carry grief. It’s important right now, and we’re not even talking about it. When I’m teaching, I’m always asking, “How are you? Are you okay? How’s your mental health? How are you doing?” Students are so used to it now, they’re just like, “Yeah, I’m fine. Just moving on.” And yet, I just read a study that our workday has increased by 48 minutes during the pandemic. Suddenly, people aren’t taking breaks. And then we’re asking, “Why are we so stressed?” Remember when it first started? It was like, “Just take your time, I know we’re going through so much.” And now everything is, “Can I have that ASAP?” It’s completely shifted. I don’t know if that’s just a North American thing, but it feels like we’re all distracting ourselves from grief with our work, and we’re also all trying to make money. We need money, but I’m worried that we’re not paying attention, we’re not grieving, we’re not leaving space to recognize what’s happening because it’s too much. We’ve lost our daily life and then we think, “Oh, who am I to complain that I can’t go get ice cream with my friends? Or I can’t whatever when someone is dying? How does my grief about what’s gone even matter?” I’m worried we’re not processing. The act of writing poems can help us heal. It can help us process some of the things we’re not saying in our Zoom conversations. It seems like this spring people are—for the lack of a better word—feeling harder. What we’re going to start to miss is our softness, the parts of us that can be vulnerable to the world. We put on masks to leave the house. We put on masks to be with each other. Everything now has doubled down on armor, and it’s hard for sensitive people. It’s hard on artists because we create from a vulnerable, soft place, but the world is requiring a much harder exoskeleton.
Arteaga
You mentioned in your interview with American Literary Review a few years ago that writing poems that reach outward and inward at the same time was the project of your life. Do you think this will always be important in your poetry?
Limón
I think so, yeah. The idea is that I want to connect, but oftentimes, who I’m trying to connect with first is myself. It’s important to connect with the self and if the poem connects with anyone outside of that, that’s a gift. I don’t sit down thinking, “I’m going to write a poem that someone else will like.” I’m trying to write a poem that will help me or that will remind me about my own connection to the world.
KERSEY
So Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; you mentioned in a previous interview how you felt the pressure was on after it got so much attention. I was wondering if the popularity of this collection influenced your writing process for The Carrying, and how does the increased attention to your work affect your revision process for your poems now?
Limón
Bright Dead Things has sold more copies than I could have imagined. I was really having a hard time trying to figure out what to write, how to write, and how to not consider the success of the book. I never considered success as part of poetry. So I thought, “I don’t want to consider it now because it’s never influenced me in any way.” You never sit down being like, “This poem’s going to make me some money.” It’s just not what we think. With The Carrying, I had to write poems for myself that I thought I might never publish. I got through it by not thinking about the audience, whereas normally I consider it. I pushed the audience away so that I could write as authentically as possible. Then, once I started to put the manuscript together, I let the audience in. It was big, surrendering to composing and creating poems without the expectation of even sending them out, maybe not even publishing them at all. I also had to let go of The Carrying’s success itself—maybe nothing would happen to it, maybe people wouldn’t like it. I just didn’t know. It’s a very different book than Bright Dead Things. They talk a lot to each other, but Bright Dead Things gets read a lot in undergraduate poetry workshops and The Carrying is a little more mature. It tends to get taught more in graduate school. I was really pleased that The Carrying had a nice reception. I was even told by a friend who loved The Carrying and thinks The Carrying is my best book, “I’m so sorry no one’s going to read this.” He’s like, “Your last book was so successful—usually after the success the follow-up isn’t really lauded or read as much.” So I was prepared for it to underperform, and that hasn’t happened, which is nice.
Arteaga
How do you feel knowing that there are hundreds of students out there reading your work versus how you feel about family members reading your work or friends?
Limón
It’s super hard sometimes. We’re okay with the strangers. We could tell the strangers our deepest secrets. And then you see your aunt reading it. I don’t think I will ever get over that gut-wrenching fear of family members reading a book, or even just a poem. And I’m really lucky because I have a super supportive family who not only reads my work but praises it and comes to readings. When I was nominated for the National Book Award, they all showed up; we had a whole table. But still there are moments of, “Alright, how will they receive it?” I feel a need to do right by them: to write them well, to write them truthfully, but also, to honor them. That kind of obligation doesn’t come into play when you’re thinking about strangers reading your work.
BUCKINGHAM
Can you turn us on to any poets? Who are you loving right now?
Limón
There are so many great books out right now. Victoria Chang’s Obit is fantastic. It’s heavy, but the way she starts with truth in every single poem and then ends with sort of a magical realism—something strange happens—it’s really marvelous. Jericho Brown’s The Tradition is fantastic and of course it won the Pulitzer Prize so maybe I don’t need to mention it. John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is really great work. I’m literally looking at my books now. Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz is phenomenal. Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood is a beautiful book. Eduardo C. Corral’s new book Guillotine is crushing, but wonderful. Jennifer L. Knox’s Crushing It—bizarrely surreal and funny and just very weird and wonderful. I’m currently reading and re-reading this book by Alejandra Pizarnik, she’s Argentinian, from Buenos Aires, and it’s phenomenal. It’s a new translation called Extracting the Stone of Madness.
THURMOND
Who was the poet that made you fall in love with poetry or your first favorite poet?
Limón
It was kind of a combo, but it was one poem in particular that I was like, “What is this doing?” Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” I read it when I was fifteen. I had read poetry before that, but it felt like, “This is amazing.” Also Sharon Olds, “Connoisseuse of Slugs.” I was like, “What’s happening here, this kind of feels dirty.” Lucille Clifton was a huge influence on me, still is a huge influence; her collected is one of my favorite books. Pablo Neruda, even simply the love sonnets. When I was sixteen, I thought, “These are phenomenal.”
Arteaga
Do you think it’s important for people to explore international writers as much as, or even more than, American writers?
Limón
Yeah, I mean we’re in a global conversation and all of these things are connected. I don’t think Merwin would be writing the way that Merwin was writing if he wasn’t translating these Spanish poets, and I don’t think Robert Bly would be writing the way he was writing if he wasn’t translating Lorca. There’s all of these conversations happening. We often get stuck in this idea that the father and mother of poetry are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. I just don’t believe that. There’s more to it. We’re seeing a bigger recognition even with the wonderful Native poetry collections that have just come out, like the Joy Harjo book When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through, the brand new Native American Anthology from Norton. It’s fantastic. There are a lot of limitations to the western poetry traditions. When we talk about Neruda, who was before Neruda? Gabriela Mistral. And Mistral was phenomenal, but we don’t know a lot about her. She influenced Neruda, and yet he got all the credit. We kind of stop at the greats—and I love Whitman, I love Dickinson, it’s just that I feel like sometimes it’s a false dichotomy. There’s much more of an international influence. Poetry doesn’t really pay attention to borders. When we talk about great poets, we don’t talk about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz of Mexico writing in the 1600s. We have limits, and I get that, but it’s a kind of exciting time where we can break some of those limits.
BUCKINGHAM
Where do you see your own work in that line of Spanish and Latin poets?
Limón
It’s funny because in the last five or six years I’ve done a lot of traveling to South America and it really brought me an understanding of what I was doing, like, “Oh, I’ve been doing that because of Lorca or the Spanish poets,” or, “I’m interested in duende in a way that I don’t think I was ever taught to talk about.” Even in the sixth book I call on Mistral and Pizarnik and Borges, and it starts to feel like there’s more of an international legacy to the Spanish language poets that I don’t think I had because, honestly, I had to teach myself. I had to do that work myself. I’ve been lucky that I was able to travel to South America and then teach a class on Latin American poetry. Of course, any time you have to teach a class, you have to learn the stuff and explore it. It made me recognize how much Latin American poetry is in my own work.
BUCKINGHAM
What has the role of teaching been on your work and on you as a writer?
Limón
It’s interesting because, for the most part, I don’t teach that much; I’m still what I call a “rogue poet.” I quit my job in New York City in 2010 and have been primarily working from home as a freelancer—on the road as a poet since then, which is kind of crazy to me. I haven’t had a full-time job, which has been really good for my work, not always for my bank account but sometimes that’s okay, I took a risk. It’s been important to have a sense of freedom as an artist. I’ve been curious as to what it would be like to work full time for a university, and maybe someday, down the line, that’s something that would interest me more. Right now, I really love doing visiting positions. I teach for a low-residency program, so I get to teach for like two weeks. I do these visiting writer things, and I can bring a lot of energy. I can also maybe not get as bogged down by administration and the political work of a creative writing department. In some ways, I still am leaning towards my freedom.
Teaching also keeps me reading. I’m reading and I’m re-reading things, and I get excited—“Oh right, I really love this Marianne Moore poem.” Or you get to say these marvelous things like, “It turns out Elizabeth Bishop was amazing.” A lot of times, if we’re not teaching, we may not revisit things. You may not actually think about reading all of Neruda or all of Mistral, but if you’re teaching it you think, “I’m going to do it.” That’s the big gift, revisiting texts. Right now, I’m the Mohr visiting poet at Stanford and I’ve been loving it. Amazing undergraduates. And it feels like a deep conversation. Especially during this pandemic, it felt really nice to have a sense of community, to feel like we’re in this together as poets. But teaching hasn’t been my identity as a writer like it has for a lot of my friends. I like to do it and I enjoy it and I want to keep it that way. I feel like I always want to bring my best self to teaching, and I don’t know if that would be the case if I was doing it all the time.
Arteaga
What would you say to the young poet unsure about pursuing their talent in poetry, or writing in general? Because the United States is dominated by Hollywood and the music industry, and then all the other arts are pushed aside as useless. What would you say to that young writer in today’s world unsure of writing on a daily basis, unsure if it’s going to get anywhere?
Limón
One of the things I would say is that it’s not about making a career, it’s about making a life. When you choose poetry, you’re choosing to pay deeper attention to the world, and you’re choosing really to lean into silence and beauty that could sustain you for the entire length of your years. It’s not about necessarily making an income. I’ve always joked that there’s that saying, “Find what you love and the money will follow.” And poetry, it’s like, “Find what you love and then also get another job that you don’t hate too much.” Poetry, for the most part, won’t make you a lot of money and maybe that’s a beautiful thing. Maybe that’s what keeps it pure. No one’s sitting down like, “I want to write myself a million-dollar poem.” Even Amanda Gorman—she wrote an incredible poem and did an amazing thing, an incredible performance, but she knows that this is a crazy lucky thing that’s happening. She’s very aware, “Okay, this is a moment and I’m going to write it and I’m going love it and enjoy it, but this is a moment.” If you really are interested in being an authentic artist, a lot of what you’re doing is focusing on what it is to create things, and the best joy you will ever have is when you’ve made something that you like, when you’ve created something that you actually recognize is good. The rest of that stuff, publication or recognition, if you keep at it, those things will come.
This is actually a really wonderful time to be a poet. I would encourage young poets to recognize that we’re at a time where we’re the most diverse—there are books coming out all the time, a plethora of books, from all over the world. Internationally, globally, poetry is having a little shine on it right now. It’s partly because the gatekeepers are different now. They’re like dams that got overflowed. But still, publications come slowly. They come far and few between. The thing you can rely on the most is creation itself. There’s a great quote from Richard Hugo: writing is a way of saying you have a chance in the world. I have a chance and the world has a chance and we have a chance together. That’s survival skills right there. I was listening to a Ten Percent Happier podcast. This wonderful Stanford professor, Jenny Odell, was talking about all the things people can do to recommit themselves to the world during the pandemic. She was talking about making time for silence, making time for recognizing the birds out the window, staring at trees. Every exercise, I was like, “Poets do that.” All the skills she was talking about for non-artists are what artists do all the time. You may not make a living out of poetry, but poetry can and will save your life.
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