When Ada Limon quit her marketing job to try writing full-time, she assumed it would mean writing fiction. So she spent her working hours imagining the lives of other people. After that, she said, she would immerse herself in poetry, where she could be herself.
She has never published a novel. But it is as a poet that she is awarded the highest honor in her field: On Tuesday, the Library of Congress announced that she will become the next Poet Laureate of the United States.
Limon, who has published six books, will begin her term this fall as the 24th Poet Laureate, a position held by some of the country’s best-known poets, including Louise Gluck, Juan Felipe Herrera, Robert Haas and Tracy K. Smith.
The poet laureate has few mandatory duties, but becomes an ambassador for the form. Smith focuses on increasing access to poetry in rural areas, for example. Joy Harjo, the current poet laureate and member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, created a project called “Living Nations, Living Words,” which includes a map that highlights Native American poets and their work.
Lemon is just beginning to think about a project she might pursue, but she has ideas about how poetry can help at such a difficult time in the United States.
“Right now we are so often numb to grief and numb to tragedy and numb to crisis,” she said. “Poetry is a way back, to the recognition that we feel human beings. And feeling grief and trauma can actually allow us to experience joy again.”
In a poem called “Dead Stars,” she encourages her readers to lean into their strength:
Look, we’re not unremarkable things. We’ve come this far, we’ve survived this far. What
would happen if we decide to survive longer? To love harder?
What if we stood up to our synapses and our flesh and said: No.
Lemon, 46, who is originally from California, lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband Lucas Marquardt, their pug Lily Bean and an extremely old cat named Olive. She hosts a poetry podcast called “The Slowdown”—which was started by Ms. Smith during her time as Poet Laureate—and teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Her melodious poems, which embrace the orality of poetry and language, often touch upon the natural world, which she uses as much more than mere decoration. Trees, for example, become characters in her poems; sometimes they dance. (“The American basswood sways disturbed by the storm, / A bounce here, a flutter there, just trembling like music / Left from the end of the night, drifting down the lanes before sleep.”) In this context, too, she hopes to be an ambassador.
“I think we’ve lost our reciprocal connection with the land,” she said, “and poetry has the ability to draw attention to the natural world, even if it’s the tree in the backyard or the pigeon in the street.”
The post of Poet Laureate is an apolitical position that may seem limiting against the backdrop of the country’s sharp political divide. But the limitation, she said, doesn’t feel like a challenge because of poetry’s endless possibilities.
“It has the ability to show us rage, to connect with our fear, to celebrate joy, to make room for the whole spectrum of human emotion,” she said. “Great poetry is where we come to receive the power to heal, to become whole again, and then to give ourselves back to the world.”
Add Comment