When Ada Limón became the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2022, she took that moment she used that moment to reflect on poetry's power to connect — or to reconnect — people to the world around them and to their sense of love, grief and healing.
Her signature project placed poetry in National Parks around the country. The idea is to praise both what she calls "our sacred and natural wonders" and also speak to "the complex truths of this urgent time."
Limón's tenure has drawn to a close, and she joined All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly to talk about what this time has meant to her.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Mary Louise Kelly: You crisscrossed the country as poet laureate. I don't usually think of a poet as a road warrior job where you have to get up and get on planes. But tell me what you've seen, what people have told you about how poetry fits into their lives right now?
Ada Limón: One of the misconceptions I had when I first took on the role was this idea that I was supposed to somehow bring poetry to the people, when in reality it was much more common for me to sit and receive the stories of people having an intimate connection with poetry already or having poetry readings in libraries or in schools and people really fostering the connection with poetry on a very human, intimate level.
Kelly: This is poems they had written and wanted to share with you?
Limón: Yeah. Sometimes they were poems that they had written and sometimes they were poems that they had memorized and loved and put on the walls of hospitals. There's one place I went to where there were poetry installations on the walls of bathroom stalls.
So, it was always, for me, an act of receiving all these wonderful stories. And it was really heartening to know that there were so many people in the world that were not just writing sometimes secret poems, but also gathering for the sake of poetry.
Kelly: Well, heartening and maybe a little surprising, because it seems Americans are reading less and less for pleasure. I saw that the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts', latest reporting is fewer than half of adults report reading one book in the last year. You're telling me poetry is alive and well in America?
Limón: I think that there is some idea that poetry only exists in the academic world or in the ivory tower, if you will. But I always grew up in a community where poetry was being read, where at the local bookstore there were always poetry readings, at the local bars there were poetry slams. And I think sometimes we forget about that, there are many different ways to experience a poem. And poems travel one poem at a time. It's not always about reading a book. It is reading one poem. They move through the world individually. And I think that's a real beauty and a real power to poetry, is that it can often only take 2 minutes to read it and yet it can transform that moment, that hour and sometimes that life.
Kelly: Your signature project is called You Are Here. Part of this was actually doing something very small and specific, like you actually put poems on picnic tables. Tell me what it looked like.
Limón: Oh, yeah. Thank you so much for bringing it up. I worked with the Poetry Society of America to choose poems that would fit for each of the seven parks that we had the beautiful opportunity to work with. And those poems are on those picnic tables.
So you sit at the picnic table, you read the poem and then you're in this really wondrous, beautiful area. And then each of the tables also includes a prompt that just says, "What would you write to the landscape around you?" So, that it's not just the experience of reading the poem and gathering around the poem and gathering in a beautiful area, but also thinking about how you might write something back to the world. And I wanted to do that so that we could remember that the relationship with our landscapes is reciprocal.
Kelly: I want to ask about creating poetry in this moment. We are living in a moment where President Trump has taken on some of the great cultural pillars of our country. He has installed himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center. He has issued executive orders to force changes at the Smithsonian. How do you think about creating art, about creating poetry in this moment?
Limón: You know, I was just speaking to a former poet laureate and I was thinking about how in the role, a lot of what you do is talk about poetry and the importance of poetry. And then there's a moment where you're in your kitchen, you're listening to the news and you think, "Does it matter? ...
Does it really matter to write a poem?" When what we need is so huge, what we need is so monumental. The collective action that is required in this moment.
And then you think, "What if poetry can bring you back to wonder, to kindness, to care, to sensitivity, to tenderness?" And even in that small moment, isn't that a radical act? Isn't that saving yourself so that you can become stronger? So that you can become braver? And that's where I am right now. I'm writing toward bravery. I'm writing toward courage. And I think that there's a lot of us that are doing that right now. And I think it's the way we are preparing ourselves for what's next, in many ways, not only what is coming, but what we will bring to the future.
This story was adapted for the web by Manuela López Restrepo and edited by Karen Zamora.
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