As a poet, Ada Limón needs no introduction, not for being the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States or for having her poem “In Praise of Mystery” commissioned by NASA to be transcribed onto a spacecraft Clipper, and sent into outer space this coming October, traveling 1.8 billion miles to explore Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons; or for being recently selected as one of 2024’s TIME Women of the Year. (Not to mention having a MacArthur Fellowship aka the “genius’” grant and for being awarded a Guggenheim). No, Ada Limón needs no introduction whether it’s to outer space, or with her feet on the ground because of how she has impacted an entire new generation of minds with the weight of her words.
So when I had the distinguished pleasure to interview Limón over Zoom for her upcoming anthology, You Are Here: Poetry In The Natural World, I couldn’t help but revel (and maybe even fangirl) in wonder of how prolific, calm, and level-headed Limón was on my computer screen when discussing the urgency of the climate crisis, and how we are in conversation with it since we are responsible for it. No matter who you are, Limón sees poems as a vessel and a remedy for all kinds of hurt, even for the hurt we cause. And now we need poems and their remedies more than ever to bring us back to earth and back to ourselves. Since poems are a conversation with, and a conduit that allows us all to belong.
Maria Santa Poggi: What specifically inspired you to put together this anthology of poetry that reflects our relationship with the natural world?
Ada Limón: I originally thought of the idea of doing something that bound poetry and nature together and there are two elements to the project as a whole. And the first element is this anthology where I asked poets to create an original poem based on the natural world around them. I wanted this anthology to speak back to some of those original nature poems that did not feel like they were representative of the makeup of the United States. I really wanted to also have these poems recognize the crucial moment that we are in as our planet faces the catastrophe of the climate crisis. So when I asked all the poets to be involved in this, it really was a way to allow the poets to give voice to some of their joy and wonder and love of the planet, but also some of the anxiety and fear, the way the planet is shifting underneath our feet and give some voice to those thoughts and feelings as well. I wanted it to be a complex array of beautiful new poems that spoke to this urgent moment. I can’t even tell you how incredible it was every time I got one of these poems, I would just weep, they were so beautiful.
And the next element of the project is I will be traveling to seven different national parks around the United States and their poetic installations of legacy poets that will be in these incredible parks in our protected lands across the country that will give people access to poetry in the natural world. So they can sit at a picnic table that has a beautiful poem on it, and then be asked to maybe create their own original poem that will speak back to the natural world that they’re looking at. In my mind, it really tries to link the power of poetry, and the power of nature, to not just offer us some kind of healing, but to offer us some sense of reciprocity and a sense of belonging.
MSG: How did you go about choosing which poets were included and was there a back and forth editorial process with the poems you put into the collection?
AL: Yeah, it was actually really difficult. If it were up to me this anthology would actually be endless and I think in my heart it is endless. I keep thinking that this is a book, but it also is just a sampling, and a starter for all the poems that will come from all the great poets that are writing today.
For me, I really wanted to have some geographical diversity. I wanted there to be different landscapes that were honored within the book, I also wanted there to be stylistic and representational diversity so that we can get an opportunity to see poems that are wide-ranging in structure, and also wide-ranging in their voices. Choosing was very difficult, but one of the things that surprised me is that almost everybody said yes. I didn’t really have to do much of anything except stewardessing the order.
It was important putting together the anthology that it was [from] living contemporary poets, and that it had all new work. I thought there was something to be said for really making it an urgent matter, and not going through older collections and choosing poems that already existed.
MSG: Earlier you mentioned the precarious climate that our country is in, especially with our relationship with the environment. Why do you think we need a collection like this?
AL: A lot of people are thinking about the climate and nature all the time. I’m on the road a lot and I talk to young people, and poets, and non-poets on a daily basis. And the climate is on their minds. Folks graduating from college, folks graduating from high school, they are very concerned, and very interested in what is going to happen next. I talk to climate scientists, I work with the National Climate Assessment. This is a huge issue, and what we haven’t yet talked about is how to process our feelings about it. We’re really looking for smart, intellectual ways that we can help mitigate, and adapt to what’s coming. But what we haven’t done is really try to make room for how we’re feeling about nature. How do we fit in nature? I think we need to do some grieving, I think we need to do deep loving, and I think that process will only help lead us to more creative solutions to collectively move toward answers.
MSG: I saw in one of your TIME 100 Women of the Year interviews, which congratulations on by the way, that you talked about this hunger people have for poetry and what really stuck with me was you were saying that you don’t need to convince anyone to have this hunger. I just wanted to hear your thoughts on through accessibility how we can nourish, you call it this grief people have—this hunger, this grief, people have for poetry?
AL: I think a lot of it is about giving people permission. I think that as it is with any art form we’re quick to say, oh, that poetry is an intellectual endeavor, that it is an artistic endeavor, and we have a hierarchy of what poems matter, what poems count. And when you’re moving in the world of non-poets, it’s good to remember that hierarchy doesn’t exist. To them all poetry is poetry. I would encourage, especially those of us in the poetic and literary realm to encourage a love of all poetry and to give people permission to skip poems if they want, to move on from a poem that they perhaps might not relate to.
If Whitman is not your favorite poet, I personally love Whitman, but you might not, then go ahead and read Cesar Vallejo, or go ahead and read Alejandra Pizarnik or Gabriela Mistral or Audre Lorde. The more permission we give for people to seek out what they love, that will enable people to feel more secure in even talking about poems. Poetry can be very intimidating, and poets need to talk to people outside of our realms, and to encourage them to share at a dinner party to share a poem with a friend to share at an occasion for gathering—oh, I wanted to share this poem with you.
I keep calling it “normalizing poetry,” but not only we need to give people more access to it, but also encourage people to have any response they want to have to it. If someone is loving Instagram poetry, let them love it. There’s so much shaming that happens when we talk about art and the way in which those of us who have a stake in its future talk about it. I, for one, think we shouldn’t shame people for writing poems that may not be the highest art form. That’s like getting mad at flowers. Getting mad at more poems is like getting mad at flowers.
MSG: This idea of poetry shaming is something you notice at a certain academic level…
I call it ‘normalizing poetry,’ we need to give people more access, but also encourage people to have any response they want.
AL: That’s what makes people scared and that’s what turns them off. We’ve scared people in classrooms, and we’ve scared them on social media. And we just have to remind ourselves that if we want people to use poetry as a type of tool to remember that they are human beings then we have to give them permission to like all sorts of different styles of poetry.
MSG: In your introduction of the anthology, you liken trees to poems, and poems to trees that connect us together. Do you think if everybody wrote poems it could be a sort of remedy to save us from the hurting?
AL: Mahmoud Darwish once said “maybe poems only change the writer themself.” I know I’m a better person, a more whole person when I am writing and have written. And if we can tap into not just the creating of poems, but the creating of space to make poems. What that is is allowing breathing room. It’s allowing a certain meditative distance so that we can step back from the world, and step back from ourselves for one minute. And in that reflection see that every single person is going through something. We don’t have a lot of time and space for that. We don’t make a lot of time and space for that in our society. Everything is about the to-do list, checking off the to-do list, what’s next, what I’ve gotten wrong, what I’ve gotten praise for, what I’ve gotten shamed for. If everyone could write even a line, or a reflection of their emotions, it doesn’t even have to be a whole poem, I absolutely think we’d be better off.
MSG: I don’t know if you’ve seen this on social media, but people joke about notes app poems and venting their feelings. What are your thoughts on that?
AL: I honestly think it’s great. As long as you’re making it, I travel with my notebook all the time, but it’s a little large. So if I’m on a hike or on a plane, which I often am as you might imagine, I will definitely write a poem in my notes app. Anyway that we can access our own idiosyncratic language in the moment is really useful in terms of not just the final creation of a poem, but recording our day to day movements to allow some kind of reflection.
MSG: What are some of the stereotypes of nature poetry you’re hoping to break with this collection?
AL: Even growing up, I thought about intentional nature or the idea of nature, nature poetry was almost always primarily by white men. It also has a very colonizer mind, it’s this idea of land ownership, this land is here to teach me something. I would love to break those old ideals and really talk about what it is to have every human being having access to nature because we are nature. I want to make sure that we understand that the relationship is reciprocal. That the human being in response to nature, it’s a circle and we’re all in it together. It’s really important for me as a Latina woman to reclaim nature as my own. And to not think of it in the colonizer mindset or the ownership mindset, but to instead imagine the relationship as a reciprocity.
There’s another idea that to see nature we have to go into it. Like Diane Seuss has a poem in this book, “Nature That Can’t Be Driven To,” and I love that because that’s exactly what I’m trying to get across.I live in Lexington, Kentucky and there’s nature all around me. I can be in the busiest time of my life and look around and go oh, right, I’m looking at the silver maple, I’m witnessing squirrels build a nest, I’m looking at the buds coming out, like all of this is a wonder and a gift. I don’t need to necessarily take myself on a hike or drive to a special spot, but instead I can be a part of nature and recognize my part in nature right now. I lived in Brooklyn for many years, and I remember finding the trees that I loved in certain parks and recognizing when the dandelions would come up through the cement, and when the drainage ditch would fill or empty. All of the ways that seasonality affects us, all of the ways we are in relationship with nature. It’s not always intentional, it’s the dailyness. It is a way of being.
MSG: There’s this tendency to treat nature as “other,” or you talk about this distance. Why do we distance ourselves from the self in nature? Why do we do that to ourselves?
There’s so much shaming that happens when we talk about art and the way in which those of us who have a stake in its future talk about it.
AL: One of the reasons is that if you are in relationship to it, you cannot harm it. And you have to rethink the ways of farming practices, and rethink the ways of how we use our watersheds, our water sources. Everything has to shift, and it is easier to not do that work. When we think of it from a colonizer mindset and it’s all about taming and controlling and ownership that is a cleaner and easier relationship because there are no consequences. In shifting that mindset, we have to embrace the consequences, and embrace our own actions and we have to see how we affect nature and how we ourselves are affected by it. That’s a harder, and emotional thing that takes deeper work.
MSG: Where in nature and the natural world do you find your poetry?
AL: I do like to have a sense of smallness. I love to feel like I’m nothing. Like I could dissolve with one little breath. And I think of that when I’m by the ocean. I think of that when I’m in the woods. How easy it could be to be a part of everything and to de-center myself. There’s a great joy in not being the story’s subject. Sometimes just looking up at the night sky, even in smaller worlds when I’m by a creek and I look at all the different animals and life forms in a little creek and I think all of this is happening without me paying attention to it. I love the ongoingness of it. A few places for me is the Raven Run here in Kentucky, also the Red River Gorge, and also in Sonoma, California in my hometown going to the Mayacamas Mountains and spending time in that valley always feels like it re-connects me to a sense of belonging.
MSG: On a little bit of a different note. What is it like to have your poem, “In Praise of Mystery” engraved on a spaceship to be launched into outer space and to explore Europa casually?
AL: It’s still something I’m kinda in awe of…when I was asked by NASA to write that poem I really felt as someone who grew up loving the stars, and the planets, and exploration, even Star Trek, and Star Wars, and all of those space fantasy things—I immediately said yes. And then writing the poem was very, very difficult. It was really hard. It’s one of the hardest tasks that I had to do. A lot of it is because I realized in trying to reach the second moon of Jupiter with a poem, and in trying to think, and imagine what it would be like to travel in all of that space, cold space to find if there is a second moon and any signs of life, the thing that finally got me into the poem was coming back to the earth. I was like no, it has to point back to us. It has to point back to this earth. And every NASA scientist you talk to will say this is the best planet. The one we’re on, this is the best planet.
Just the other day I got to see it engraved on the vault plate that will be attached to the spacecraft on the Europa Clipper, and I’ll be there at the launch to read the poem. It was a deeply human endeavor, and there is a lot to be said about AI and the use of AI in the literary, and artistic worlds and I’m really happy that it was a human hand that wrote it. I wrote all the drafts in my handwriting and it’s engraved on the spacecraft in my handwriting.
MSG: In your poem, there’s this line about an “offering of water” is what “unites us” rather than the “darkness” or the “cold distance of space” and I was wondering how when putting together this anthology, how you find the “ordinary” droplets of water that connect us together?
There’s this endless desire of I want, I want, I want, I want, and sometimes we need to be like wow, I am alive and one day I will die.
AL: When I finally got all of the poems together and I printed them out, I put them on my table, and all over the floor going through [the collection] and they just reached this natural, beautiful order and I realized these are all speaking to each other. The order fell into place like that [snaps her fingers] in maybe two hours, just like bam, bam, bam. I realized we’ve all been in conversation, we’re already doing this. Poets, you and your colleagues, and your classmates are doing this now, we are having a conversation about where we are at in the world. And when these poems came in it was like of course this is happening. To find how they reacted to one another really was a tremendous moving moment for me. Not only because of the generosity of the poets who gave their poems to me and did such beautiful work, but also because it felt like the thing that we often forget is that we are moving in community. And it’s very easy with our social media, and the divisiveness which is encouraged by our immediate social media tools that are designed to divide us so that we can have power as a collective. That we can come together in communion. I needed this book as much as I hope other people need it, or help other people want it. But I needed to be reminded of the power of the collection and what coming together felt like and this book for me did that.
MSG: My last question for you is that there seems to be this emphasis on the “ordinary” everyday or the “ordinary” natural world around us…and oftentimes it may not seem like the everyday isn’t prolific in poetry. But I think in poetry the ordinary always becomes magical. And I wanted to hear your thoughts on the “ordinary”.
AL: Yeah…what is ordinary? My thoughts are what is ordinary? Because it is so amazing that we are alive. That this planet made us. That we have fingers, toes, and ears with tiny little hairs in them that sense things. I think about evolution and the power of it and how strange it is, and how weird everything is. I don’t know what is ordinary because to be alive is completely a miracle. It’s completely strange, completely a wonder. There’s this endless desire of I want, I want, I want, I want, and sometimes we need to be like wow, I am alive and one day I will die.