Poet: ‘The ‘I’ in these poems is ‘ME’
Ada Limón to share stage with Gregory Pardlo at Inprint reading
“I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet,” Ada Limón writes in her poem “The Quiet Machine.”
“… There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock.”
The frankness is what makes her most recent collection, “Bright Dead Things,” so fresh and immediate. Limón isn’t hiding from anyone in these poems, which are full of grief and regret, overwhelming love and the discomfort that love sometimes demands.
“The ‘I’ in these poems is ‘ME,’ ” she wrote in 2015, when “Bright Dead Things” was published. Claiming the “I” in her poetry might have felt like a risk, but it made her work more powerful. And that paid off: Limón’s collection was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Limón will share some of those personal poems Monday at the Alley Theatre, where she’ll share the stage with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo as part of Inprint’s Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
Deciding to “own” her poems, not to hide behind an ambiguous narrative voice, felt like the right way to offer “Bright Dead Things” to the world.
“It was sort of entering into a different kind of contract with the reader: ‘Here I am, fully on the page for you,’ ” Limón said. “I was asking people to intimately engage with a work; I had to tell them why.”
“I used to pretend to believe in God,” she writes in “Miracle Fish.” “Mainly, I liked so much to talk to someone in the dark.”
Poems that address the death of her stepmother offer intimate, painful detail: “Sometimes I would have dreams / that she was still alive, and I couldn’t find / enough washcloths to help her, / to clean her face, / the tumor’s foul, black spit-up.”
And in “Remember the Carrots,” Limón recalls a moment in childhood, when she ripped the carrots out of her father’s garden, killing the whole crop: “I loved them: my own bright dead things.” As an adult, she strives more often to be “agreeable,” but she wonders: “Why must we practice / this surrender? What I mean is: there are days / I still want to kill the carrots because I can.”
All that openness on the page, Limón said, made her feel vulnerable. She confessed in her blog that her poems contained “things I might not say in person to a good friend, and yet here it is in the world where anyone could pick it up.” But after a while, that transparency turned into a more courageous way of living.
“When the book first came out, it really did make (readings) hard because I felt like I no longer had any of the tricks I could rely on to put a border between me and the audience,” she said. “And then, sort of with time, I thought: ‘You know what, why don’t I just try to be totally present in this moment, too?’ ” That presence, Limón said, has “changed the way I read and the way I want to interact in the world.”
Limón is not immune to current events, and her writing doesn’t look only within. “A New National Anthem,” a poem published on Buzzfeed in December, begins with a statement that is sure to provoke: “The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem.” (Limón goes on to discuss the lines “we never sing” now because they mention slavery, suggesting that “Perhaps, / the truth is, every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal / snaking underneath us … .”)
“That poem is a pretty political poem, but I’m always very scared to write anything that feels like a polemic,” she said. “One of the things that happens when we move toward the political is we claim we have answers. And poems are not a place for answers; they’re a place for questions.”
Limón, who turned 41 last week, is working on poems for a future collection; she plans to read some of them Monday night.
Pardlo, by the way, is a friend; they met at New York University, where they both earned graduate degrees in 2001. The two poets have done readings together before, Limón said.
“Getting to do this always feels like it’s honoring the time we spent together as graduate students,” she said, “way back when we couldn’t afford cab fare and didn’t think anyone would ever read our poems.”