In 2023, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Ada Limón discusses her curatorial approach and her own creative work.
Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, senior content editor at the Academy, and I’m here today with our Guest Editor for April, which is National Poetry Month, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. Ada is the author of The Hurting Kind and The Carrying. Ada, it is a great honor, thank you, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today.
Ada Limón: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Poets.org: Great. Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for April?
Limón: You know, it’s always really interesting to try to think about the poems you want to select, the poets that [sic] are writing today. And one of the things that I kept keeping in mind was I wanted poems that felt like they had a life to them; that they were expansive in some way; that they were reaching out towards a reader, whether that reader was one intimate person or a larger readership. I wanted them to feel like they were vibrating. I think of April as an alive month, when we come back to life in some ways. And so I wanted these poems to perform a little resurrection, I think.
Poets.org: Now, if you could direct readers to one poem or more than one poem on Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?
Limón: You have so many incredible poems on the website, and I use them all the time for my own purposes. I was just reading Langston Hughes’s “Poem,” the one about the friend, just that poem always is heartbreaking to me. In fact, a newer poem that I just read this past February by Joy Priest, a wonderful poem called “When I See the Stars in the Night Sky,” and I was really impressed. I had been impressed with her work for a long time, a fellow Kentucky poet, but I think that poem’s incredible.
Poets.org: Just so our readers and listeners know, as Ada mentioned, Patricia Smith is the Guest Editor for February and has taken it, much to our pleasure, upon herself, to curate only sonnets for the month of February, both in honor of Valentine’s Day and Black History Month.
Your work is deeply personal, I think, yet resonant, especially when talking about experiences related to infertility. To me, it reminds me a lot of some work by confessional poets, I think especially of Ruth Stone, Sharon Olds. Would you say that you’ve taken any inspiration from their work?
Limón: Yeah, I mean, I think the deeply personal is always an interesting place to explore. I think for me, I’m always interested in what self- interrogation does, not only to the mind, but to the body and to the art. I find it a risk to go inside the self and ask questions that sometimes aren’t asked in public and sometimes aren’t even asked of ourselves. I studied, of course, with some incredible poets that take those risks. I studied with Sharon Olds. I studied with Marie Howe. And both of those poets were deeply influential, not only on my work, but also as a way of modeling a fierce bravery when it comes to elucidating one’s own story, and perhaps excavating things that you may not feel like you have the right to excavate. And I think their modeling and their mentorship has [sic] been incredibly important to me as I’ve moved forward in my life as a writer.
Poets.org: And whose work are you reading right now?
Limón: I am actually rereading Muriel Rukeyser right now, one of my favorite all-time poets. And I’m going through all of her work, but right now I’m reading The Book of the Dead, and it’s one of my favorite books. And I’m thinking a lot about what it is to write about specific events as the climate crisis is at our door, as we undergo so many different changes and chaotic crises that go on from day to day in our world. I keep thinking about what it is to be not just a poet, but a poet that [sic] reacts to our time. And I think Rukeyser was such a gift to us in that way, and I’m finding a lot of inspiration from her work right now.
Poets.org: I’d like to talk a bit about the projects you’ve been working on as U.S. poet laureate, which have been highly publicized. So our readers and listeners will already be aware of much of what is already in the works from you. But your latest project is with NASA, a poem that will be engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will travel 1.8 billion miles to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. This might be, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but this might be the biggest national project, which weds STEM with the humanities. What has this collaboration meant to you, both personally and professionally?
Limón: Well, thank you for asking about it, because I’m so incredibly honored to be a part of this project, and it feels to me like an exceptional collaboration. I had no idea that they were going to come to me with this invitation. And, of course, I was completely overwhelmed and awestruck by the project itself, and then the prompt to try to write a poem that will go on the Europa Clipper and that won’t reach Europa for six years. So to think about also that longevity and traveling into space and what that means as an artist, has been really an interesting experience, an interesting intellectual and emotional experience. The poem itself is coming together, and I’ve realized, of course, that in looking outward, we’re looking inward. And so the way the poem has worked for me is that it’s come back to the deep, deep love of our own planet, of the Earth. And that’s where I’ve taken most of my inspiration from in composing the poem.
But yeah, I’m very excited about it. It’s overwhelming. And I met with the head scientist on the project as well as the project leader of Europa Clipper when I was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. And one of the things that I love, which may surprise you, is that here I wanted to learn about the science behind it and what they were doing, right? How they were testing for whether or not Europa was going to have all the ingredients for life, whether there were signs of life, all of these things. And guess what they wanted to talk to me about? Poetry. And how beautiful is that, that here you are meeting with these incredible minds and what were they interested in? They were interested in, how does one make a poem? And how wild it is to make poems. And here are these people who are ascending things to space and who are working with some of the most incredible exploration that we’ve done.
And so, that to me, reminded—and I needed to be reminded—of how I think we connect, and that a lot of times our art begins with questions, and exploration begins with questions, and it usually leads to more questions. And in that way, we’re the same.
Poets.org: That is so inspiring. Thank you so much for taking this time with me.
Limón: Oh, it was my pleasure. Always lovely to chat.