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Speaker 1: Let's go to the show.
Speaker 2: Aida Limon is a poet Una Poeta. This spring, she
Speaker 2: ended her tenure as the twenty fourth Poet Laureate of
Speaker 2: the United States, and Aida is the very first Latina
Speaker 2: to ever hold that position. Aida, is it okay if
Speaker 2: I ask you to read some poems as we're going?
Speaker 1: Of course?
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is what it comes down to, me on
Speaker 3: a park bench, always writing, This is what it comes
Speaker 3: down to.
Speaker 2: Ada's work has been described as both tender and resounding.
Speaker 2: It rejoices in the simplicity of everyday life.
Speaker 3: I remember the carots. I haven't given up on trying
Speaker 3: to live a good life, a really good one. When
Speaker 3: I was a kid, I was excited about carrots. They're
Speaker 3: spidery neon tops in the Garden's plot, and so I
Speaker 3: rip them all out.
Speaker 2: Ada has been praised for tackling head on the imperfections
Speaker 2: of her body, the frailty of life, and the failings
Speaker 2: of our governments. But even in the darkness, Ada's poetry
Speaker 2: does not linger in despair, and her poems always find
Speaker 2: a way back to nature, to the delightful contradictions of
Speaker 2: being human.
Speaker 3: I'm thirty five, and remember all that I've done wrong.
Speaker 3: Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented the
Speaker 3: contentment of the field. Why must we practice this surrender?
Speaker 3: What I mean is there are days I still want
Speaker 3: to kill the carrots because I can.
Speaker 2: Sometimes you just want to take the carrots from futuro media.
Speaker 2: It's Latino Usa. I'm Maria. You know Josa Today Ada Limot.
Speaker 2: She has written seven books of poetry, and the most
Speaker 2: recent one is a collection of new and selected poems
Speaker 2: called Startlement. I sat down with Ada to talk about
Speaker 2: how she deals with grief through her work, what the
Speaker 2: art of noticing our natural surroundings is all about, and
Speaker 2: the importance of never giving up. So, Ada, you are
Speaker 2: the first Latina to be the Poet Laureate of the
Speaker 2: United States. But you know, your background is something that's
Speaker 2: really interesting. So I want to do the quick version.
Speaker 2: You grew up in Sonoma, California. You are the child
Speaker 2: of teachers and painters. Your mom is an artist, actually
Speaker 2: did some of the artwork for your books. Your dad
Speaker 2: is of Mexican descent. So yeah, were you always the
Speaker 2: little girl who was like, okay, just let me be
Speaker 2: on my park bench, I'm taking in the world, or
Speaker 2: were you rangbunctious and then poetry came to you later.
Speaker 3: I think they've always gone hand in hand. I think
Speaker 3: that I am someone that very much thrives in being
Speaker 3: alone and being with my own imagination, my own active imagination.
Speaker 3: And yet at the same time, I think I'm also
Speaker 3: a natural performer and a natural connector. So I feel
Speaker 3: oftentimes after I would write something, whether it was a
Speaker 3: little song or something, I would immediately want to share
Speaker 3: it with my family. So I think it's both, and
Speaker 3: I think I'm still both those things.
Speaker 1: So life as a kid was good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think that, like many people, you know,
Speaker 3: a childhood is complex and many layered, but overall, I
Speaker 3: had really a beautiful upbringing with four parents. My parents
Speaker 3: split when I was seven or eight, and then my
Speaker 3: stepdad came into my life, and my stepmom came into
Speaker 3: my life, and both of them were really wonderful people.
Speaker 3: And my stepdad's still with us. My stepmother died in
Speaker 3: twenty ten.
Speaker 2: I want to talk for a moment about some of
Speaker 2: the women in your life, the poems that you wrote
Speaker 2: for them. Your stepmother, as you said, she died of
Speaker 2: colon cancer when you were in your mid thirties. And
Speaker 2: I'm just wondering about this poem Forcythia.
Speaker 3: Hmmm, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Now I am a succulentologist hard.
Speaker 1: I know a lot about succulents.
Speaker 3: I love succulent, but I.
Speaker 2: Don't really know anything about gardening, so can you. So
Speaker 2: Forsythia is the one that blooms yellow.
Speaker 3: It blooms yellow, and it's really the first color of spring,
Speaker 3: so it's going to be when if you're in the
Speaker 3: Northeast especially, it'll be the first bloom you see.
Speaker 2: Why did you write this poem for your stepmother called Forsythia,
Speaker 2: And if you could read some of it for our listeners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, of course. I remember when I first heard the
Speaker 3: word for Cythia, and that it made me think of
Speaker 3: for Cynthia, my stepmother's name, with Cynthia Forsythia at the
Speaker 3: cabin in Snug hollow near McSwain Branch Creek just spring.
Speaker 3: All the animals are out, and my beloved and I
Speaker 3: are lying in bed in soft silence. We are talking
Speaker 3: about how we carry so many people with us wherever
Speaker 3: we go, how even when simply living, these unearned moments
Speaker 3: are a tribute to the dead. We are both expecting
Speaker 3: to hear an owl as the night deepens. All afternoon,
Speaker 3: from the porch, we watched as an Eastern Tohie furiously
Speaker 3: build her nest in the untamed Forsythia, with its yellow
Speaker 3: spilling out onto the horizon. I told him that the
Speaker 3: way I remember the name for Cythia is that when
Speaker 3: my stepmother Cynthia was dying that last week, she said,
Speaker 3: lucidly but mysteriously, more yellow, and I thought, yes, more yellow,
Speaker 3: and nodded because I agreed, of course, more yellow. And
Speaker 3: so now in my head, when I see that yellow tangle,
Speaker 3: I say, for Cynthia, Parcynthia, Forsythia, Forsythia, more yellow.
Speaker 1: Ada.
Speaker 2: You were the country's twenty fourth poet Laureate, and your
Speaker 2: signature project during your tenure was a program called You
Speaker 2: Are Here Poetry in Parks, and it plays poetry installations
Speaker 2: in seven National parks across the country. I once served
Speaker 2: on the centennial for the National Parks, so I was
Speaker 2: kind of there to say like, I didn't grow up
Speaker 2: going to national parks. I didn't think that that was
Speaker 2: where my family should be. And there's a big effort
Speaker 2: to turn that around. And I'm just wondering if you
Speaker 2: can talk for a moment about very specifically the idea
Speaker 2: that you wanted to have poems in the National parks.
Speaker 3: I love that you brought up. You are here.
Speaker 1: It was on.
Speaker 3: One of the most meaningful experiences of my life working
Speaker 3: with the National Parks, the Library of Congress, and the
Speaker 3: idea was that we put these legacy poems in parks,
Speaker 3: in National parks that covered the seven different regions of
Speaker 3: the parks, and then ideally the project will some day continue.
Speaker 3: And so we had poems on these picnic tables, and
Speaker 3: then there was a prompt that said, what would you
Speaker 3: write to the landscape around you? And so we began
Speaker 3: in Cape Cod. That was our first park, was Cape
Speaker 3: Cod National Seashore, and we put a poem by Mary
Speaker 3: Oliver in there, which felt really important because of course
Speaker 3: Mary Oliver lived in Provincetown in Cape Cod for a
Speaker 3: long time, so it felt important to put a queer
Speaker 3: woman in a very queer town, which was also important
Speaker 3: to the project. And then we continued with Redwood's national
Speaker 3: and state parks with Mount Rainier, with Cuyahoga Valley, Smoky Mountains,
Speaker 3: Everglades and soorrow, and it was just an incredible project
Speaker 3: to put these really beautiful legacy poems in some of
Speaker 3: our most incredible landscapes around the country.
Speaker 2: What is it like to live a poet's life in
Speaker 2: a moment like this? Like what is your emotional state
Speaker 2: as a Latina poet in the year twenty twenty five?
Speaker 3: I think, like most people who have a tenderness to
Speaker 3: the world, a sensitivity to injustice, it feels really like
Speaker 3: a very difficult time to be alive and making art.
Speaker 3: And it also feels like a really important time to
Speaker 3: be alive and making art. As a poet in particular,
Speaker 3: I am doing a lot of protection because I think
Speaker 3: I can be prone to surrendering to weeping, and I
Speaker 3: don't think that that is exactly what I need to
Speaker 3: be doing right now. That's part of it. I think
Speaker 3: grief is part of it, and I think we're entering
Speaker 3: a grief cycle that we've never really quite seen before.
Speaker 3: But I also think that my courage comes from stillness
Speaker 3: and from a place of deep connection to the earth
Speaker 3: and a rootedness, And so I need to go to
Speaker 3: places where I can feel that courage developing, which oftentimes
Speaker 3: is the natural world, and remembering that we cannot be
Speaker 3: unbelonged from this place that we belong to and belong with.
Speaker 2: Coming up on Latino Usay, we talk about the importance
Speaker 2: of paying attention to nature and about the urgent request
Speaker 2: that Ada got from a scientist after she agreed to
Speaker 2: write a poem for a report on climate change.
Speaker 3: And she was near tears, and she said, I know
Speaker 3: you have to write this poem, but do me a favor.
Speaker 3: Don't make it nostalgic. There's no going backwards.
Speaker 1: Stay with us.
Speaker 2: Yes, they were back in twenty twenty three, Eightily One
Speaker 2: was asked to write a poem for the introduction of
Speaker 2: a national government report on climate change that was mandated
Speaker 2: by Congress. The result was her poem Startlement, which later
Speaker 2: became the title of her most recent book. Before writing
Speaker 2: the poem, Ada says she met with the scientists and
Speaker 2: environmentalists in charge of studying the country's changing climate.
Speaker 3: I met with a lot of them in DC at
Speaker 3: a location that was close to the Library of Congress.
Speaker 3: And as I was talking about noticing and how I
Speaker 3: think poets and scientists have so much in common, which
Speaker 3: is that we begin with noticing, we begin with paying attention,
Speaker 3: and we begin with questions. So I was talking about that,
Speaker 3: and I gave a talk, and then as I was
Speaker 3: leaving for the next obligation. As you know, when you
Speaker 3: go to DC, it's like you've booked here and here,
Speaker 3: you know, and this woman followed me out. She was
Speaker 3: one of the scientists, and she was near tears and said,
Speaker 3: I know you have to write this poem, and you
Speaker 3: agreed to write this poem for the front matter of
Speaker 3: the fifth National Climate Assessment. But do me a favor.
Speaker 3: Don't make it nostalgic. There's no going backwards. And I
Speaker 3: held that so closely and thought, Okay, you know, I
Speaker 3: think that kids, they have heard their whole life. Oh
Speaker 3: you should have seen this back when it was even
Speaker 3: more beautiful, you know. Oh you like to go there,
Speaker 3: Oh it used to be this.
Speaker 1: Way, etc.
Speaker 3: That can be true, but it can also feel really
Speaker 3: limiting when people are trying to figure out how to
Speaker 3: empower themselves to make change. So this is the poem startlement.
Speaker 3: It is a forgotten pleasure, the pleasure of the unexpected
Speaker 3: blue bellied lizard skittering off his sun spot rock, the
Speaker 3: flicker of an unknown bird by the bus stop. To think,
Speaker 3: perhaps we are not distinguishable and therefore no loneliness can
Speaker 3: exist here, species to species in the same blue air, smoke,
Speaker 3: wing flutter, buzzing, a car horn, coming, so many unknown languages,
Speaker 3: To think we have only honored this strange human tongue.
Speaker 3: If you sit by the river side, you see a
Speaker 3: culmination of all things upstream. We know now we were
Speaker 3: never at the circle's center. Instead, all around us, something
Speaker 3: is living or trying to live. The world says, what
Speaker 3: we are becoming. We are becoming together. The world says
Speaker 3: one type of dream has ended and another has just begun.
Speaker 3: The world says, once we were separate, and now we
Speaker 3: must move in unison.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was beautiful, thank you. That's the thing about
Speaker 2: poetry is actually I think the best response is to
Speaker 2: not have a.
Speaker 1: Response, right, Yeah, to feel it, to feel it.
Speaker 2: My friend sandresis Netto's what she says is almost to anything,
Speaker 2: having a problem, having nightmares, having writer's block, having insecurities,
Speaker 2: sanded as like, go read some poetry. Yeah, it doesn't
Speaker 2: come naturally to me to just pick up a book
Speaker 2: of poems, because I feel like it's almost too emotionally
Speaker 2: demanding and if you actually sit down with a novel.
Speaker 3: In some ways, I think that one of the things
Speaker 3: when people do go to poetry, I will say this,
Speaker 3: give yourself permission to not understand it. Give yourself permission
Speaker 3: simply to feel it. Give yourself permission for the mind
Speaker 3: to wander and to go into your own internal world
Speaker 3: and to see what is revealed to you there. And
Speaker 3: it may not be what's on the page, But reading
Speaker 3: poetry is a way of reading yourself.
Speaker 2: Can you talk about how nature has the power, especially
Speaker 2: in moments like these that are so confusing because people
Speaker 2: are a little bit like, oh, stop with the nature,
Speaker 2: stop with the birds. Okay, like stop, what's your argument
Speaker 2: to say, no, we can't stop? And in fact, you
Speaker 2: should take it a step further. You should consider yourself
Speaker 2: a poet in nature, even if you've never written a
Speaker 2: line of poetry in your life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, that's a beautiful way of putting it. I
Speaker 3: think that, you know, the art of noticing and paying
Speaker 3: attention is really important. And it doesn't matter if you
Speaker 3: are or in the middle of Brooklyn, which has incredible
Speaker 3: parks as we know, same with Manhattan, and so it
Speaker 3: doesn't really matter where you are. Nature is all around us.
Speaker 3: Nature is us. We are nature. And I think that
Speaker 3: when people start to notice what is around them, whether
Speaker 3: it's clouds in the sky between the buildings or their
Speaker 3: local watershed. Right we put on the tap and we think, oh,
Speaker 3: that's water. What if you started to think about what
Speaker 3: watershed you were a part of, where does it come from?
Speaker 3: And then you start to think about, oh, well, when
Speaker 3: the rains come, all of that trash that I see
Speaker 3: on the side of the road goes into the creek
Speaker 3: and then goes into the San Pablo Bay, you know,
Speaker 3: and you start to think, oh, you know, I'm going
Speaker 3: to stop.
Speaker 1: And pick it up.
Speaker 3: So noticing is a way of paying attention, and paying
Speaker 3: attention is a way of loving. And I think there's
Speaker 3: two things that happen once we start paying attention to
Speaker 3: the natural world. One is that we want to save it.
Speaker 3: The other that we want to change it, and we
Speaker 3: want to make it better.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back not by yes, hey we're back Ada.
Speaker 2: You know, we've talked a lot about how you move
Speaker 2: in this world kind of in a highly emotional, sensitized
Speaker 2: way nature. Obviously we have to go out birding at
Speaker 2: some point, you know. But then you also you make
Speaker 2: it very very personal, right, And so I couldn't wrap
Speaker 2: up without talking about the fact that you have written
Speaker 2: a lot about your body, like Frida Carlo, you know,
Speaker 2: thinking a lot about her body, her pain. You home,
Speaker 2: the vulture and the body. Also included in this latest collection,
Speaker 2: you write about coming to terms with infertility. You write,
Speaker 2: what if instead of carrying a child, I'm supposed to
Speaker 2: carry grief?
Speaker 3: You know, for me, as someone who wasn't able to
Speaker 3: have a child, I have really thought of it as
Speaker 3: a different way of opening to the world that maybe
Speaker 3: I'm mother in different ways, right, that maybe I am
Speaker 3: supposed to hold things in different ways. I have a
Speaker 3: different relationship with my body because it's only ever been mine.
Speaker 3: I'm a daughter in different ways because I'm just my
Speaker 3: mother's daughter. I'm not the mother of her grandchildren, and
Speaker 3: so we have the original relationship, which is mother and daughter,
Speaker 3: and that's very fascinating. So I think of the ways
Speaker 3: in which one door closing opens other doors, and I
Speaker 3: think about that a lot. I think about the ways
Speaker 3: we are called to this moment, the ways in which
Speaker 3: you want to go through doors that open. I think
Speaker 3: that people sometimes get overwhelmed by how do we respond,
Speaker 3: how do we do things? And there is a lot,
Speaker 3: there is a lot that we need to respond to.
Speaker 3: There's a lot we need to activate our innermost warriors
Speaker 3: for right. And at the same time, you're not going
Speaker 3: to do that from a depleted place. You need to
Speaker 3: feel full, you need to feel brave and courageous and complete.
Speaker 3: I think poetry allows me to feel that way.
Speaker 2: It seems like you kind of enjoy being the poet
Speaker 2: professor who's like, but you too, you too can do this.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The work of a poet is always alone. In
Speaker 3: many ways, we write alone. We're alone in our rooms,
Speaker 3: or we're on the park bench, or we're by the
Speaker 3: creek and we're writing and we're making. But it's also
Speaker 3: in tandem with everyone who's ever written, and with every
Speaker 3: breath that has ever been made, and it's with every
Speaker 3: poet that ever existed. It's with my grandfather Francisco Carlos Lemon,
Speaker 3: you know, from San Juan de los Lagos in Mexico.
Speaker 3: It's with everybody who has made something, and so even
Speaker 3: though it can feel like this isolating act of making
Speaker 3: some small thing that may not matter, it is in
Speaker 3: a collective spirit of everyone who's ever tried to sing
Speaker 3: back to the world and thought it might mean something.
Speaker 1: Okay, give us your instructions are not giving up.
Speaker 3: Here's a poem. Instructions are not giving up. More than
Speaker 3: the fusha funnels breaking out of the crab apple tree,
Speaker 3: more than the neighbor's almost obscene display of cherry limbs
Speaker 3: shoving their cotton candy colored blossom to the slate sky
Speaker 3: of spring rains. It's the greening of the trees that
Speaker 3: really gets to me. When all the shock of white
Speaker 3: and taffy, the world's bobbles and trinkets, leave the pavement
Speaker 3: strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come, patient, plodding,
Speaker 3: a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us,
Speaker 3: a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite
Speaker 3: the mess of us, the hurt, the empty fine. Then
Speaker 3: I'll take it. The tree seems to say a new
Speaker 3: slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open poem.
Speaker 3: I'll take it all.
Speaker 2: We are so happy that you Aida Lemon are a
Speaker 2: poet in the world. Thank you so much, Ada, Thank
Speaker 2: you for all of your words, and thank you for
Speaker 2: sitting and speaking with me.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much. You remain an always inspiration to me.
Speaker 3: So thank you for all of your work and everything
Speaker 3: you do for all of us.
Speaker 2: Aida Lemon is the twenty fourth Poet Laureate of the
Speaker 2: United States. Her latest book is called Startlement, New and
Speaker 2: Selected Poems. This episode was produced by Rebecca Ibarra. It
Speaker 2: was edited by Benni Lei Ramirez. It was mixed by
Speaker 2: Gabriella Ayats. Fernanda Echavari is our managing editor. The Latino
Speaker 2: USA team also includes Roxan Na Guire, Julia Caruso, Renaldo Leanos, Junior,
Speaker 2: Stefanie lebou Luis, Luna Flodi mar Marquez, Julieta Martinelli, Monica Moreles, Garcia,
Speaker 2: j j Carubin, Annelo Reyes, Adriana Rodriguez, and Nancy Truquillo.
Speaker 2: Penni le and I are executive producers.
Speaker 1: I'm your host.
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