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Aida Limon is a poet Una Poeta. This spring, she ended her tenure as the twenty fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, and Aida is the very first Latina to ever hold that position. Aida, is it okay if I ask you to read some poems as we're going?
Of course?
Yeah, this is what it comes down to, me on a park bench, always writing, This is what it comes down to.
Ada's work has been described as both tender and resounding. It rejoices in the simplicity of everyday life.
I remember the carots. I haven't given up on trying to live a good life, a really good one. When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots. They're spidery neon tops in the Garden's plot, and so I rip them all out.
Ada has been praised for tackling head on the imperfections of her body, the frailty of life, and the failings of our governments. But even in the darkness, Ada's poetry does not linger in despair, and her poems always find a way back to nature, to the delightful contradictions of being human.
I'm thirty five, and remember all that I've done wrong. Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented the contentment of the field. Why must we practice this surrender? What I mean is there are days I still want to kill the carrots because I can.
Sometimes you just want to take the carrots from futuro media. It's Latino Usa. I'm Maria. You know Josa Today Ada Limot. She has written seven books of poetry, and the most recent one is a collection of new and selected poems called Startlement. I sat down with Ada to talk about how she deals with grief through her work, what the art of noticing our natural surroundings is all about, and the importance of never giving up. So, Ada, you are the first Latina to be the Poet Laureate of the
United States. But you know, your background is something that's really interesting. So I want to do the quick version. You grew up in Sonoma, California. You are the child of teachers and painters. Your mom is an artist, actually did some of the artwork for your books. Your dad is of Mexican descent. So yeah, were you always the little girl who was like, okay, just let me be on my park bench, I'm taking in the world, or were you rangbunctious and then poetry came to you later.
I think they've always gone hand in hand. I think that I am someone that very much thrives in being alone and being with my own imagination, my own active imagination. And yet at the same time, I think I'm also a natural performer and a natural connector. So I feel oftentimes after I would write something, whether it was a little song or something, I would immediately want to share it with my family. So I think it's both, and I think I'm still both those things.
So life as a kid was good.
Yeah, I mean I think that, like many people, you know, a childhood is complex and many layered, but overall, I had really a beautiful upbringing with four parents. My parents split when I was seven or eight, and then my stepdad came into my life, and my stepmom came into my life, and both of them were really wonderful people. And my stepdad's still with us. My stepmother died in twenty ten.
I want to talk for a moment about some of the women in your life, the poems that you wrote for them. Your stepmother, as you said, she died of colon cancer when you were in your mid thirties. And I'm just wondering about this poem Forcythia.
Hmmm, yeah, yeah.
Now I am a succulentologist hard.
I know a lot about succulents.
I love succulent, but I.
Don't really know anything about gardening, so can you. So Forsythia is the one that blooms yellow.
It blooms yellow, and it's really the first color of spring, so it's going to be when if you're in the Northeast especially, it'll be the first bloom you see.
Why did you write this poem for your stepmother called Forsythia, And if you could read some of it for our listeners.
Yeah, of course. I remember when I first heard the word for Cythia, and that it made me think of for Cynthia, my stepmother's name, with Cynthia Forsythia at the cabin in Snug hollow near McSwain Branch Creek just spring. All the animals are out, and my beloved and I are lying in bed in soft silence. We are talking about how we carry so many people with us wherever we go, how even when simply living, these unearned moments are a tribute to the dead. We are both expecting
to hear an owl as the night deepens. All afternoon, from the porch, we watched as an Eastern Tohie furiously build her nest in the untamed Forsythia, with its yellow spilling out onto the horizon. I told him that the way I remember the name for Cythia is that when my stepmother Cynthia was dying that last week, she said, lucidly but mysteriously, more yellow, and I thought, yes, more yellow,
and nodded because I agreed, of course, more yellow. And so now in my head, when I see that yellow tangle, I say, for Cynthia, Parcynthia, Forsythia, Forsythia, more yellow.
Ada.
You were the country's twenty fourth poet Laureate, and your signature project during your tenure was a program called You Are Here Poetry in Parks, and it plays poetry installations in seven National parks across the country. I once served on the centennial for the National Parks, so I was kind of there to say like, I didn't grow up going to national parks. I didn't think that that was where my family should be. And there's a big effort
to turn that around. And I'm just wondering if you can talk for a moment about very specifically the idea that you wanted to have poems in the National parks.
I love that you brought up. You are here.
It was on.
One of the most meaningful experiences of my life working with the National Parks, the Library of Congress, and the idea was that we put these legacy poems in parks, in National parks that covered the seven different regions of the parks, and then ideally the project will some day continue. And so we had poems on these picnic tables, and then there was a prompt that said, what would you write to the landscape around you? And so we began
in Cape Cod. That was our first park, was Cape Cod National Seashore, and we put a poem by Mary Oliver in there, which felt really important because of course Mary Oliver lived in Provincetown in Cape Cod for a long time, so it felt important to put a queer woman in a very queer town, which was also important
to the project. And then we continued with Redwood's national and state parks with Mount Rainier, with Cuyahoga Valley, Smoky Mountains, Everglades and soorrow, and it was just an incredible project to put these really beautiful legacy poems in some of our most incredible landscapes around the country.
What is it like to live a poet's life in a moment like this? Like what is your emotional state as a Latina poet in the year twenty twenty five?
I think, like most people who have a tenderness to the world, a sensitivity to injustice, it feels really like a very difficult time to be alive and making art. And it also feels like a really important time to be alive and making art. As a poet in particular, I am doing a lot of protection because I think I can be prone to surrendering to weeping, and I don't think that that is exactly what I need to
be doing right now. That's part of it. I think grief is part of it, and I think we're entering a grief cycle that we've never really quite seen before. But I also think that my courage comes from stillness and from a place of deep connection to the earth and a rootedness, And so I need to go to places where I can feel that courage developing, which oftentimes is the natural world, and remembering that we cannot be unbelonged from this place that we belong to and belong with.
Coming up on Latino Usay, we talk about the importance of paying attention to nature and about the urgent request that Ada got from a scientist after she agreed to write a poem for a report on climate change.
And she was near tears, and she said, I know you have to write this poem, but do me a favor. Don't make it nostalgic. There's no going backwards.
Stay with us.
Yes, they were back in twenty twenty three, Eightily One was asked to write a poem for the introduction of a national government report on climate change that was mandated by Congress. The result was her poem Startlement, which later became the title of her most recent book. Before writing the poem, Ada says she met with the scientists and environmentalists in charge of studying the country's changing climate.
I met with a lot of them in DC at a location that was close to the Library of Congress. And as I was talking about noticing and how I think poets and scientists have so much in common, which is that we begin with noticing, we begin with paying attention, and we begin with questions. So I was talking about that, and I gave a talk, and then as I was leaving for the next obligation. As you know, when you go to DC, it's like you've booked here and here,
you know, and this woman followed me out. She was one of the scientists, and she was near tears and said, I know you have to write this poem, and you agreed to write this poem for the front matter of the fifth National Climate Assessment. But do me a favor. Don't make it nostalgic. There's no going backwards. And I held that so closely and thought, Okay, you know, I think that kids, they have heard their whole life. Oh you should have seen this back when it was even
more beautiful, you know. Oh you like to go there, Oh it used to be this.
Way, etc.
That can be true, but it can also feel really limiting when people are trying to figure out how to empower themselves to make change. So this is the poem startlement. It is a forgotten pleasure, the pleasure of the unexpected blue bellied lizard skittering off his sun spot rock, the
flicker of an unknown bird by the bus stop. To think, perhaps we are not distinguishable and therefore no loneliness can exist here, species to species in the same blue air, smoke, wing flutter, buzzing, a car horn, coming, so many unknown languages, To think we have only honored this strange human tongue. If you sit by the river side, you see a culmination of all things upstream. We know now we were never at the circle's center. Instead, all around us, something
is living or trying to live. The world says, what we are becoming. We are becoming together. The world says one type of dream has ended and another has just begun. The world says, once we were separate, and now we must move in unison.
Yeah, that was beautiful, thank you. That's the thing about poetry is actually I think the best response is to not have a.
Response, right, Yeah, to feel it, to feel it.
My friend sandresis Netto's what she says is almost to anything, having a problem, having nightmares, having writer's block, having insecurities, sanded as like, go read some poetry. Yeah, it doesn't come naturally to me to just pick up a book of poems, because I feel like it's almost too emotionally demanding and if you actually sit down with a novel.
In some ways, I think that one of the things when people do go to poetry, I will say this, give yourself permission to not understand it. Give yourself permission simply to feel it. Give yourself permission for the mind to wander and to go into your own internal world and to see what is revealed to you there. And it may not be what's on the page, But reading poetry is a way of reading yourself.
Can you talk about how nature has the power, especially in moments like these that are so confusing because people are a little bit like, oh, stop with the nature, stop with the birds. Okay, like stop, what's your argument to say, no, we can't stop? And in fact, you should take it a step further. You should consider yourself a poet in nature, even if you've never written a line of poetry in your life.
Yeah, Yeah, that's a beautiful way of putting it. I think that, you know, the art of noticing and paying attention is really important. And it doesn't matter if you are or in the middle of Brooklyn, which has incredible parks as we know, same with Manhattan, and so it doesn't really matter where you are. Nature is all around us. Nature is us. We are nature. And I think that when people start to notice what is around them, whether it's clouds in the sky between the buildings or their
local watershed. Right we put on the tap and we think, oh, that's water. What if you started to think about what watershed you were a part of, where does it come from? And then you start to think about, oh, well, when the rains come, all of that trash that I see on the side of the road goes into the creek and then goes into the San Pablo Bay, you know, and you start to think, oh, you know, I'm going to stop.
And pick it up.
So noticing is a way of paying attention, and paying attention is a way of loving. And I think there's two things that happen once we start paying attention to the natural world. One is that we want to save it. The other that we want to change it, and we want to make it better.
We'll be right back not by yes, hey we're back Ada. You know, we've talked a lot about how you move in this world kind of in a highly emotional, sensitized way nature. Obviously we have to go out birding at some point, you know. But then you also you make it very very personal, right, And so I couldn't wrap up without talking about the fact that you have written a lot about your body, like Frida Carlo, you know, thinking a lot about her body, her pain. You home,
the vulture and the body. Also included in this latest collection, you write about coming to terms with infertility. You write, what if instead of carrying a child, I'm supposed to carry grief?
You know, for me, as someone who wasn't able to have a child, I have really thought of it as a different way of opening to the world that maybe I'm mother in different ways, right, that maybe I am supposed to hold things in different ways. I have a different relationship with my body because it's only ever been mine. I'm a daughter in different ways because I'm just my
mother's daughter. I'm not the mother of her grandchildren, and so we have the original relationship, which is mother and daughter, and that's very fascinating. So I think of the ways in which one door closing opens other doors, and I think about that a lot. I think about the ways we are called to this moment, the ways in which you want to go through doors that open. I think that people sometimes get overwhelmed by how do we respond,
how do we do things? And there is a lot, there is a lot that we need to respond to. There's a lot we need to activate our innermost warriors for right. And at the same time, you're not going to do that from a depleted place. You need to feel full, you need to feel brave and courageous and complete. I think poetry allows me to feel that way.
It seems like you kind of enjoy being the poet professor who's like, but you too, you too can do this.
Yeah. The work of a poet is always alone. In many ways, we write alone. We're alone in our rooms, or we're on the park bench, or we're by the creek and we're writing and we're making. But it's also in tandem with everyone who's ever written, and with every breath that has ever been made, and it's with every poet that ever existed. It's with my grandfather Francisco Carlos Lemon, you know, from San Juan de los Lagos in Mexico.
It's with everybody who has made something, and so even though it can feel like this isolating act of making some small thing that may not matter, it is in a collective spirit of everyone who's ever tried to sing back to the world and thought it might mean something.
Okay, give us your instructions are not giving up.
Here's a poem. Instructions are not giving up. More than the fusha funnels breaking out of the crab apple tree, more than the neighbor's almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy colored blossom to the slate sky of spring rains. It's the greening of the trees that
really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world's bobbles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come, patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty fine. Then I'll take it. The tree seems to say a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open poem. I'll take it all.
We are so happy that you Aida Lemon are a poet in the world. Thank you so much, Ada, Thank you for all of your words, and thank you for sitting and speaking with me.
Thank you so much. You remain an always inspiration to me. So thank you for all of your work and everything you do for all of us.
Aida Lemon is the twenty fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. Her latest book is called Startlement, New and Selected Poems. This episode was produced by Rebecca Ibarra. It was edited by Benni Lei Ramirez. It was mixed by
Gabriella Ayats. Fernanda Echavari is our managing editor. The Latino USA team also includes Roxan Na Guire, Julia Caruso, Renaldo Leanos, Junior, Stefanie lebou Luis, Luna Flodi mar Marquez, Julieta Martinelli, Monica Moreles, Garcia, j j Carubin, Annelo Reyes, Adriana Rodriguez, and Nancy Truquillo. Penni le and I are executive producers.
I'm your host.
Barriero Josa Latino USA is part of Iheart's My Kuntura podcast network. Executive producers at iHeart are Leo Gomez and Arlene Santana. Dear listener, join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, I'll see you on all of our social media and honestly, right now is the moment to do it.
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