Just last week my Spanish-language translation of Ada Limón's The Hurting Kind was made available for sell at Valparaíso Ediciones, a publishing house that is doing a lot of good work to bring US poetry into Spanish. Today marks two years since giving these introductory remarks to Ada's reading at Emory.
On February 15, 2023, I had the pleasure of introducing Ada at the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading at Emory University. This was a bear to write and so much was cut out so that I would not drone on and on. After all, were there to hear poetry.
We’ve gathered this afternoon as part of the Raymond Danowski Reading Series, founded by the good people at the Rose Library. We, lovers of the word, have gathered to hear Ada Limón, our 24th poet laureate. We’ve come together because there’s something about the experience of listening to poetry as a group. For the psychologist Dacher Keltner, collective experiences of beauty and compassion lead to awe and human thriving.
Ada is originally from Sonoma, California. She received an MFA from NYU and, after a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, she returned to New York City to work for various magazines. Lucky Wreck and This Big Fake World, her first and second books, won awards in 2005 and were published in 2006. In 2010 she published Sharks in the River and that same year she moved to Lexington, Kentucky. In an age when the academy has been the route to economic stability and cultural recognition for poets, and where marketing or publishing has been a second professional path, this choice to go freelance was a risky gamble. Since moving to the Bluegrass State, she has published three more books widely celebrated by readers and critics alike: Bright Dead Things (2015), The Carrying (2018), and The Hurting Kind (2022). Ada is a poet who isn’t just bicoastal, but who also knows the heartland, knows America.
I love our original national motto, e pluribus unum, out of many, one. I love it because it describes a hope. I love it because this nation, to quote Whitman, contains multitudes. I
also love it because it first appeared on the cover of a literary magazine, the annual omnibus volume of the Gentleman’s Quarterly. Beside a hand holding a bouquet of flowers, e pluribus unum. Imagine: a nation as a jumble of flowers gathered into one bouquet. Might the flowers contradict themselves? Very well, then, it’s a large bouquet; it contains multitudes. Or, to quote Ada in “Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America,” everyone wants “to make their own kind of America, / but still be America, too.”
Contradictions of self that are not acknowledged with grace and forgiveness can fester. By all accounts, our national contradictions are festering and showing themselves in all manner of violence: gun violence, gendered violence, racial violence, and the populism afoot that calls for ideological and sexual purities much like the Red and Lavender scares that led the Librarian of Congress, Luther Evans, to cancel William Carlos Williams’ 1952 appointment to Consultant in Poetry. “How can you not fear humanity?,” Ada asks us in “The Leash.”
Carla Hayden, the current Librarian of Congress, when announcing Ada’s appointment noted she’s a poet who connects—connects us to each other and to nature. And her poems course with the names of the rivers of the nation. They flutter with the wings of myriad birds. They sway and rustle with all manner of trees and grasses. They frolic and prance with horses and colts across our meadows. Her wide-eyed wonder connects us to the natural world, with all its waddle-thieving groundhogs.
We live according to the title of one of Ada’s poems “During the Impossible Age of Everyone.” The great Muriel Rukeyser believes poetry to be “the type of creation in which we may live.” If this is true, if we can live in poetry, it is because poetry lives in the particular. The well-wrought images. The musical phrase. The particularity of individual lives and loves. Poets teach us to be human because they do not shy away from their own vulnerability and shifting emotions. As they answer the question, what does it mean to be human, they provide us with a chorus of contradictory answers. These contradictions exist even within the poets themselves. Yet poets sit with contradictions. They name them and bring them into the light and teach us how to live with them.
A difference in purpose exists between the call of a poet to sing the songs they believe necessary and needful, and the demands of the state. As Eavan Boland’s literary memoir Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in our Time notes, even when the private songs of the individual poet move out and sing of politics —as in, say, calling for a new national anthem, as Ada has— the state wants not the complex individuality and multiplicity of the poet’s voice, but the singular, mythic song that turns citizens into patriots.
Yet we don’t live in myths; we can’t. We dwell in a physical world. We inhabit bodies—beautiful, frail, awkward, aging bodies that need a community of other bodies surrounding and supporting them. Ada’s poetry unapologetically centers the body and its many desires, many beauties and pleasures, many aches, pains, and failings. It names the petty jealousies and the old hurts that rise up and cause personal and interpersonal pain; it sings the joy of getting tipsy or high with friends; it processes the grief of a stepmother’s death and all the multiple griefs a person bears; it delights in the care of parents, grandparents, and friends; it celebrates wonder, love, and curiosity.
The heart of Ada’s poetry pulses with an ethical imagination that transforms the lyric gaze into one that does not take possession or objectify the subject of its gaze. She respects the otherness of the women, men, and animals about whom she sings. Ada lets each be each in their own wild, mystery. Crows on the branch of a linden remain crows. Her lyrical voice rather than take dominion calls us into a community of equals, where we are made whole not by seeing, but by being seen and named by others.
Florilegio is an old Spanish word for a selection of poems. It means a collection of flowers, a gathering of distinct and different songs bundled together. So without further ado, let us attend to the bouquet Ada’s brought us.
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