My guest today is Ada Limón. She served two historic terms as the 24th poet laureate in the United States. She has brought poetry to public parks across the US, and her words have traveled through deep space, engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft. In over 20 years of writing in celebrated collections like Bright Dead Things and The Carrying and her new book, Startlement: New and Selected Poems, Ada has brought a sincerity to American poetry rooted in connection to the natural world.
She’s written with inspiring honesty about the death of loved ones, trying to conceive and also the unexpected liberation of deciding to step away from societal expectations of motherhood and embrace a life happily childfree. Her latest book on craft, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, asks how a poem can hold our heaviest grief without letting the human spirit fracture.
After years living in Kentucky and New York, she bought back her childhood home in Sonoma Valley, stepping back into the rooms where her poetic imagination first took root. We’ll talk about the discipline of paying attention and why poetry remains an essential act of human survival.
(1:45) Silence as the Music of the World
(9:17) The Deepening of Roots
(13:19) 'On Earth As It Is on Earth'
(18:08) Bearing Witness Without Surrendering to Grief
(21:02) Singing Back the Wounded World and the Case for Beauty
(28:22) Love as an Active Daily Choice
(30:38) The Practice of Loving-Kindness Meditation
(37:34) Writing Without Music, Listening to the Landscape
(40:04) Dreams as Archetypes of Consciousness
(42:51) The Creative Toll of AI
(51:29) Embracing the Liberation of a Childfree Life
(1:01:06) Listening to Trees as an Act of Reciprocity
(1:06:44) Interconnectedness of Living Beings
Episode Website
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