US poet laureate Ada Limón: ‘Things can grow here, and I can grow here.’

Award-winning poet Ada Limón begins her term as the 24th poet laureate of the United States on Sept. 29 with a reading of her work at the Library of Congress. Ms. Limón, who is of Mexican American descent, is the first Chicana to hold the post. She succeeds Joy Harjo, the first Native American poet laureate, who served three terms in the position (2019-2022). 

Ms. Limón has published six acclaimed collections, most recently “The Hurting Kind,” and hosts the podcast series “The Slowdown” from American Public Media, which was launched as part of Tracy K. Smith’s poet laureateship in 2019. She also teaches in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program of Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.

In a recent interview, Ms. Limón said she feels privileged to be named poet laureate because the position will allow her “to help people connect with poetry on a larger scale, something that has always been really important to me, both as an artist and as a person.”

Ms. Limón, whose poems often focus on the natural world, intends to use poetry to help people reclaim their humanity and to repair our relationship with the earth.

“At a time like this, it feels like we need so many things that aren’t art,” she says. “We need an end to war and we need a solution for the climate crisis. But to become disillusioned about what poetry and art can do is in some ways to forget that, yes, we need to survive as a people, but we also need to flourish. We’ve been living very much in survival mode since March of 2020. I think poetry can remind us that there is a way to live that is wholehearted, that recognizes our wholeness.”

Poetry helps us do that, she says, by “allowing us to walk into the room of ourselves” and reconsider who we are. “It’s been very easy in the past two years to go numb, to kind of guard ourselves, to be brave and strong and resilient. But I think there is power in recognizing that we are emotional beings and that sometimes we need to be hit by a poem and maybe even weep a little,” she says. “Poetry can help us feel tenderness or vulnerability, and then you can also leave it.”

Reconnecting with nature can happen anywhere, says Ms. Limón, who grew up in Sonoma, California. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in drama from the University of Washington and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from New York University, before working in marketing for several years in New York. 

“I’ve lived in urban settings most of my life, so I understand that ‘nature’ is not just preserved spaces that we go to. It’s not the drive to Yosemite or Yellowstone. It’s also the pocket parks that we pass underneath the freeways and the overpasses. It’s the green spaces that we notice on our way to work or school.”

Ms. Limón remembers feeling particularly disheartened when she was working a temp job, was going to graduate school, had hardly any money, and was trying to figure out how to be a writer. “As I saw the new grass come up during the spring and watched it flourish during the summer, all during that temp job, I thought, ‘OK, things can grow here, and I can grow here.’” 

During her time living in the Brooklyn borough of New York, she learned to identify and name the trees in her neighborhood. “I suddenly felt much more connected to the world, not just the community of people around me, but the community of trees, the community of animals.”

As poet laureate, Ms. Limón wants to bring poetry into pocket parks and other public spaces, much like the Poetry in Motion project brought poems to transit systems in several major cities. “Those poems always meant so much to me because poems hit you in an unexpected way when you’re not looking for them, but instead you’re going about your day and then suddenly you’re surprised by language,” she says.

She also hopes to encourage a greater appreciation for the “golden age of poetry” the United States is experiencing now, with a rich diversity of voices. 

Her own background includes rich diversity as well. Her paternal grandfather, Francisco Carlos Limón, immigrated to the United States from Mexico in 1917. After spending time in the foster care system, he earned a college degree and worked his entire career at Con Edison, a power company. Other forebears were of Indigenous ancestry, and on her mother’s side there’s “a lot” of Scottish and Irish.

Ms. Limón learned important early lessons about the natural world from her mother. “One of the biggest things that she taught me was to pay attention. My mother is a painter, and she looks at the world with a deep intention. It was really interesting to me to watch her watch things, to pull apart, say, the way the sticky monkey flower was made. Or to look at rattlesnake grass and hold it up to your ear and shake it. And it will actually rattle.”

All those experiences enrich her writing and her life, says Ms. Limón, who has lived since 2011 in Kentucky, where her husband owns a video marketing company in the thoroughbred industry.

“I’m very proud of my Mexican heritage, of being a woman, of the places I’ve lived, and of my lineage as a poet in terms of who I studied with,” she says. 

What she doesn’t like is being defined by ethnicity or labels. 

“I like to focus on possibilities. I want all those possibilities, and I want young people to know that you don’t have to just choose who you are and then live in that box forever. You get to change. You get to change your mind. And you get to choose who you want to be every day. Every day is a choice.”