When I bought three tickets to Ada Limon’s presentation at the Virginia Festival of the Book, I couldn’t wait to hear a famous poet speak and to share the experience with two of my poetry loving children. What I didn’t realize until I was sitting in the plush seats in the gorgeous Paramount Theater in Charlottesville is that Limon recently was named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States! My fan girl factor shot up three levels. And Ada Limon did not disappoint.
Limon read from her latest poetry collection, The Hurting Kind, and shared her signature project as Poet Laureate: “You Are Here.” Nature inspires much of Limon’s writing, and her project has two initiatives. First, Limon curated a collection of poems called You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. Second, as part of Poetry in Parks, Limon will visit seven national parks during 2024 to commemorate the installation of an historic American poem on a picnic table in each park. Limon hopes the poems will serve as public works of art to inspire park visitors to better enjoy their surroundings.
Among her many accolades, including a Mac Arthur Genius Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Limon has earned a special honor. With a huge smile, she told the audience, “I sound like a pathological liar when I say this, but I was chosen to write a poem that will be engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper Spacecraft that will be launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024.” NASA imposed just a few requirements. The poem had to be about water, it had to be short (you know, to fit on the side of a space ship), and it had to be written at the 4th grade level. “I asked if they thought aliens read at the fourth grade level,” she joked. To the crowd’s delight, she read that poem to us. At the end, I had tears in my eyes. I don’t think it’s published anywhere yet, but when it is, I will find it and share it.
Poetry is in love with language.
Ava Limon, US Poet Laureate, 2024
Poetry is in love with the failure of language
Limon encouraged the audience to make time for writing and to take part in National Poetry Month, which happens each April. In fact, her “You Are Here” project launches this month. “Write one poem a day, even if it’s junk. At the end of the month, you’ll have a collection of poems to edit,” she told the audience.
Limon also had this advice:
In this world filled with violent rhetoric, endless clickbait, reports of violence, and tales of loss, I found this advice particularly profound. Limon gave me permission to do what I’ve been craving for a while now.
As a related aside, I’m reading the essay collection Inciting Joy by Ross Gay, who I saw at the 2023 Virginia Festival of the Book. (They get some talented authors!) In his essay, Gay ponders why people so often get offended by W.H. Auden’s famous line from his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”:
…poetry makes nothing happen.
W.H. Auden
Gay asserts that too often, people assume the line means poetry is ineffective. Instead, he counters, what if the line asserts that poetry does make something happen, and that happening is nothing? He says, in his endearing, verbose way, “In other words, a poem, or poetry, can stop time, or so-called time at least… This is one of the suite of poems Auden write in the late thirties and early forties, a period when one might have wanted so-called time – the clock, the airplanes, the trains, the perfectly diabolical synchronous goosestep rhythm of time itself- to stop.”
That’s two poets (Gay also writes poetry) telling me within the span of two weeks to find and embrace the nothing, the quiet. I will take that advice. And, write a few poems. How about you?
Happy National Poetry Month! To learn more, visit Poets.org. Check out their ideas for celebrating and teaching poems, as well as poems to share for Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 18.
I also like listening to The Slowdown Podcast, hosted by poet Major Jackson. It helps me wind down and find the silence after a busy day.
Thanks for getting nerdy with me!
Just to have something original by you ending up at a moon of Jupiter’s is something that could not even have been conceived as a possibility back when I was growing up. Back when we thought Jupiter only had eleven moons, Pluto was a planet, and only Saturn had rings.
It’s amazing, isn’t it! That’s why it was so funny when she said, “I sound like a pathological liar when I tell people this…” She said NASA showed her the panel which the poem is engraved on. They laser printed it from her handwritten copy. She kept asking to touch it. They kept telling her no. 🙂