Poetry Centered

Ada Limón: A Way Forward

July 15, 2020 University of Arizona Poetry Center Season 1 Episode 2
Poetry Centered
Ada Limón: A Way Forward
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Ada Limón shares poems that speak to finding a way forward through moments of crisis and struggle. She discusses Lorna Dee Cervantes on being courageous enough to be alone (“Crow”), the enduring relevance of poems written in a particular moment, like Mark Wunderlich’s “Peonies,” and Lucille Clifton’s anthem on need, defiance, and making it up as we go (“won’t you celebrate with me”). Limón closes by reading her poem “The End of Poetry,” published this spring in the New Yorker.

Listen to the full recordings of Cervantes, Wunderlich, and Clifton reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Lorna Dee Cervantes (1991)
Mark Wunderlich (1995)
Lucille Clifton (1998)

Listen to two readings by Ada Limón on Voca, including her most recent, which was given as part of our Art for Justice series in 2020.

Julie Swarstad Johnson:

This is Poetry Centered, featuring guest curated selections from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center's online audiovisual archive of poetry. Our guest host selects three recordings to share and finishes up the episode with a poem of their own. Today we're joined by poet Ada Limón, author of five books of poetry. Her most recent collection is The Carrying, which won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. In this episode, she selects poems by Lorna Dee Cervantes, Mark Wunderlich, and Lucille Clifton, all of which speak to finding a way forward through moments of crisis and struggle. Ada closes by reading her piece"The End of Poetry," published this spring in the New Yorker.

Ada Limón:

Hello, this is Ada Limón, and I am recording this from Lexington, Kentucky, here in my kitchen, and I hope everyone's doing okay. The first poem that I want to talk about and introduce is a poem by the Latinx hero, Lorna Dee Cervantes. And it was such a joy to listen to this reading in the Voca archives, because it was given on March 27th, 1991, which was the day before my 15th birthday. And it was my 15th year that I really discovered poetry and declared it the art form that was closest to me. And for some reason, I love the symmetry of that. This poem, like many of Cervantes's poems, is deeply feminist. Of course, this is a poem about running away, but it's also about what you run away with. And I think so many of us who've made courageous life choices to change our world, to argue for safety, have taken the best of us along that route. And this poem,"Crow," has the ending that will always stick with me, which is"I settled stiff in my mouth with the words women gave me." A deep sense of being alone, being courageous enough to be alone. But also what hums in the body when we are by ourselves and when we do stake our claim in the world. I hope you enjoy it.

Lorna Dee Cervantes:

Moving along now. Going back to this first poem,"Emplumada," it moves through poems about, for example, domestic violence, like I've been talking about, and the sort of random violence that happens. It moves through that and into something else. It begins with a, the book begins with a quote called,"Consider the power of wrassling your ally. His will is to kill you. He has nothing against you." The sense of anonymous violence is what Chicanas and people in the barrio have to face every day. But there is something to be taken from that. Not that, you know, suffering makes you any better or anything. I always like Rickie Lee Jones, she said,"You don't have to suffer to create art. You will suffer, period." You know, but anyway, so the poems move out of that. So, anyway, this is a poem about running away. I read this earlier at the high school. This is a poem about running away called"Crow." Excuse me. She started and shot from the pine, and then brilliantly settled in the west field and sunned herself purple. I saw myself, twig and rasp, dry in breath and ammonia smelling. Women taught me to clean and then build my own house. Before men came, they whispered, know good polished oak. Learn hammer and Phillips, learn socket and rivet. I ran over rocks and gravel they placed by hand, leaving burly arguments to fester the bedrooms. With my best jeans, a twenty, and a shepherd pup, I ran, flushed and shadowed by no one. Alone, I settled stiff in mouth with the words women gave me.

Ada Limón:

The poem I want to talk about here is a poem by Mark Wunderlich that he recorded on November 2nd, 1995. And what struck me when I to the full reading was how deeply encircled we were by the AIDS/HIV crisis and how now in the middle of a pandemic, we've, we're in the middle of it again in a different way, of course. But I was so intensely interested in how some of those parallels were drawn in this poem. One, I think it's just a beautiful, gorgeously written poem. The language is alive, the images are just stunning. And the other is that this poem, I felt like, could have been written today, which is, you know, both sort of heartbreaking and speaks to the everlastingness, the ongoingness of poems. One of the lines that stood out to me is that he says,"I watched the police helicopter menace the neighborhood," and I think, Oh yeah, the police are menacing during this sickness, during this illness while someone is dying. And then also there's this wonderful line,"Even now in the face of this sickening, there is forward movement." And I think of that too, how we are in so much universal grief and rage and agony. And yet there is also forward movement. And how strange it is to have that juxtaposition within us, around us, as we move forward. It's a gorgeous poem, and I hope you appreciate it.

Mark Wunderlich:

It's called"Peonies." In the yard, peonies burst their white hearts, scalloped edges unfolding only for themselves, their simplicity, the blade of it cutting the morning. In this Brooklyn of yards, haloed in razor wire and laundry flapping like flags of surrender, clouds of resin smoke drifting up to these windows, traveled shadows, smoker's lungs. I watched the police helicopter menace the neighborhood, its engine hooking together manifold locks and keys. Even now in the face of this sickening, there is forward movement, American needs forcing my hand, each day, a pearl strung on a weakening line. The last time I saw you, I held my hand over you while you slept, imagining heat rising in green and red, as in a photograph of heat, your body giving up its one treasure. There is such savagery in this neglect. Muscle strain, fluid failure, the flesh receding from bone until we are left with the indelible print and fracture, the cells of us snapping in a survivor's brain like grainy pictures. The only way it will last. I brought you peonies, pink, like a shell, like a heaven, a mouth, an infant, an infinity, a crisis, an end.

Ada Limón:

The last poem that I want to introduce is surely a poem that you've heard before. And it means so much to me and so many others. In fact, at one point I was in the opening circle of the wonderful congregation that is Canto Mundo, and we were asked to share a favorite poem. And I cannot tell you how many young Latinx folks recited this poem from memory. And of course, it's Lucille Clifton's"won't you celebrate with me." Now, I could just go on and on about Clifton's work for numerous reasons, but I will say on a very personal note, my brother brought home the VHS tapes of Bill Moyers' Power of the Word, and Lucille Clifton was on there reading. And it was the first time I was mesmerized by a poet reading. And that day I went into my little room and sat at my desk and tried to compose my first serious poem, not one that rhymed, not one that was, you know, sort of goofy, but a serious poem because I wanted to be just like Lucille Clifton. And so this poem means a great deal to me. But I also think of how universal it is and how many people need this poem, because there's this level of making it up as we go and defiance, right? That we had no models. There's nothing before us. I once asked my mother who her models were when she was growing up, and she said, Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo. And I thought, Oh right. She didn't have those models to tell her how to be as a woman artist, you know, growing up in the sixties, fifties and sixties. And I think of that a lot. And I think this poem addresses that. I also think that this poem really addresses what microaggressions can do and how that sense of defiance comes back here in a way that is so celebratory, so utterly engaged with the self as not necessarily a personal identity, but an identity that's even larger. And, I don't know, this poem brings me to tears. And to hear her read it, and her introduction, was just, felt like a lucky, lucky, lucky thing. I hope you enjoy it.

Lucille Clifton:

This poem is a poem written long before cancer and kidneys and all of that. It was written one day, I'm distinguished professor of humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland. And right now I'm Blackburn Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University. And everybody in the world, I think, knows that I did not graduate from college. I have a, it wasn't funny at the time, but it later became amusing. It's fun because I teach grad students, and I think that's fun. But anyway, it's at St. Mary's College of Maryland. I have a colleague who thinks of herself as really smart, and she is, she's pretty smart. Not that nice, but she's doggone smart. And I was, I keep my door open, my office door open because I wish, I am there for students. I wish to be friendly for students. I should add that I'm Distinguished Professor of Humanities, but we have no Humanities Department. So I'm the Department. And I can overhear, you know, I hear pretty well. I don't see that well, but I hear. And, one day she was saying, I don't understand why she's here anyway. And it hurt my feelings. I was being vulnerable on that day. And I thought, She should be happy for me. Why isn't she happy for me? But then later I found this poem applies to so many people, so many things, in a way to the Poetry Center even, to all of us in our lives, when we have struggled and some of us even struggle every day to try to be better than we are, you know. Anyway, this is my other anthem of a poem. Won't you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life. I had no models. Born in Babylon, both non-white and woman, what did I see to be except myself? I made it up, here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand. Come celebrate with me that every day, something has tried to kill me and has failed.

Ada Limón:

The poem of mine that I'm choosing to read is a poem, it's recent poem. And it's written out of sort of a desperation and a great silencing that I felt happening all around me and within me. And I cannot tell you what a gift it was to go through these archives and listen to so many wonderful poets, because it really inspired me to write again. And I thought, Oh, maybe I should read this poem because it came at a time when I didn't feel like I could write and everything had lost its meaning. And for those of you that are writers out there, maybe you feel that same way when things are really hard, how silencing it can be and how flattening it can be. And how nothing makes sense, that language kind of falls apart and doesn't work anymore. And then of course the most wonderful thing about poetry is right when language falls apart, poetry is there saying, That's fine. I can be right here when things fall apart, you can make a poem out of that, out of that falling apart. So this is a poem called"The End of Poetry." Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot. Enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy and the stoic farmer and faith, and our father and tis of thee. Enough of bosom and bud, skin and God not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds. Enough of the will to go on and not go on, or how a certain light does a certain thing. Enough of the kneeling and the rising, and the looking inward, and the looking up. Enough of the gun, the drama, and the acquaintance's suicide, the long lost letter on the dresser. Enough of the longing and the ego and the obliteration of ego. Enough of the mother and the child and the father and the child, and enough of the pointing to the world, weary and desperate. Enough of the brutal and the border, enough of, can you see me, can you hear me. Enough I am human. Enough I am alone and I am desperate. Enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease. I am asking you to touch me. I don't think I could have written that poem without some of the poets that I mentioned earlier. And I think it's always important to think of our legacies. There are so many amazing writers that are writing today, and I wanted to look backwards a little and appreciate some of those folks that have paved the way, or at least graveled the way for us to come. So, thank you so much for this opportunity. It's been wonderful to speak with you.

Julie Swarstad Johnson:

Thank you, Ada, and thanks to you out there for listening. Join us next time for an episode hosted by Hanif Abdurraqib. You can subscribe on your favorite podcast app or listen on the Poetry Center's website. Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham people. Poetry Centered is supported by the work of

Diana Marie Delgado:

Diana Marie Delgado

Tyler Meier:

Tyler Meier

Julie Swarstad Johnson:

And I'm your producer, Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audiovisual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.

Introduction
Lorna Dee Cervantes' "Crow"
Mark Wunderlich's "Peonies"
Lucille Clifton's "won't you celebrate with me"
Ada Limón reads "The End of Poetry"