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Interview with Poet Ada Limón
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Ada Limon Photo by Alexa Vachon.
Ada Limón is quickly becoming a rising star in the world of poetry. Her work has been published by the Iowa Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and was recently featured in the The New Yorker.
I recently had the opportunity to ask Ada about inspiration, writing, and how poetry finds her. Her responses--in true poet fashion--were lyrical,fascinating, and mesmerizing.
--Alegría García
Examiner: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview Ada—first off,congratulations on your poem in the New Yorker.That is a place where many writers would like to end up. Can you talk a little bit about the poem Crush and how it came to be? What were some of the main elements that you wanted to work with in the poem?
Ada Limón: I was very humbled when the New Yorker accepted Crush. I still am quite overwhelmed by the whole thing. It’s always been a dream, a poet’s dream, so yes, it feels big and it certainly feels much bigger than me.
When I wrote Crush (not long ago), I wanted to include an image of the persimmon, but not the persimmon delicately arranged in a bowl, rather the persimmon on its tree. I had just come back from Sonoma (my hometown), and was struck by the beauty, drama, and contrast of that tree. Those dark, leafless branches that almost break under the weight of the heavy orange fruit. It felt desperate, it felt like need, desire, and want all sprouting up from the cold earth. It was to me, very much what it is to have a deep, wounding crush. There was something very human about it, those look-at-me fruit begging to be taken.
Examiner: I was particularly affected by the first and last lines of the poem: Maybe my limbs are made mostly for decoration/like the way I feel about persimmons….There is one low, leaning heart-shaped globe left and dearest, can you tell, I am trying to love you less.Particularly because of the title of the poem and the last line—would you call this a love poem?
Yes, it is very much a love poem. It is, however, not a traditional love poem. I wanted to convey desire, physicality, sensuality, but then I also wanted the poem to have a sense of denial of touch, of distance. In the final lines, I wanted the poem to move beyond the great uncomfortable “want” of love and move more into the love of letting go, the love that goes beyond desire and opens into that universal hum. I wanted the tree/speaker to start to move on, to move away, but with that one last offering always remaining.
Examiner: You got your MFA from NYU and currently you teach a master class at Columbia—what was the most valuable part of your time in the MFA program? Were there things that you didn’t learn (can’t learn?) in school, but just in the daily process of being a writer?
Ada Limón: I loved all my time at NYU and still think receiving my MFA was the right decision. I had amazing teachers: Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, Agha Shahid Ali, Tom Sleigh, Galway Kinnell, and Eamon Grennan to name a few. They were smart, funny, and tough guides that taught me the discipline of writing, the courage it takes to keep doing it despite the agony of it, the intensity in which you must review your own work. But perhaps the greatest gift of graduate school was meeting my fellow students, a few of whom have become my main readers, and dearest friends, to this day. I believe the discipline of writing can be taught, I also believe the skill can be honed and crafted. Though, I do think it would be very difficult to be taught your unique song, your individuality, or your love for the art of poetry in such an academic setting. I think those things come naturally, come as part of you regardless of schooling.
Examiner: Tell us a little about your writing process—how do you come to find a poem? (or how does it find you?) Also, more specifically, what is your process of working on a poem, do you start with a phrase, an image, or is it a process that changes from one poem to the next?
Ada Limón: Well, first off, I do try and write every day. It’s something I believe in very vehemently so I am constantly taking notes and working on recording the bits and pieces of my good and messed-up mind. A poem starts for me in many different ways, sometimes it is an image, other times it is a phrase. More often than not it is some obsession that wants to be released, some gnawing thing that keeps returning to live in my chest. A buzzing thing that wants to be listened to, heard, coaxed out into the open.
Examiner: I’m always very interested in the cross-pollination of the arts and how inevitably one art form seems to influence another. Your mother is a painter, her paintings grace the entrance to your website—are there any mediums that influence your writing.
Ada Limón: Yes, I am influenced a great deal by the visual arts, in particular my mother’s work. I find what she is doing in her paintings to be remarkably close to an energy that I try and foster in my own work. That’s why I have so many of her paintings in my home, it’s also why I ask her to do the covers of my books. I grew up around artists, and now if I’m stuck in a writing rut, it’s always good to visit a gallery. That’s also my favorite part of traveling; visiting museums in different cities, seeing their legends, their new art stars.
I am also very much influenced by music. I grew up writing songs and I still write them sometimes, but mainly I am a music- lover, music-obsesser. It makes me shake, and cry, and laugh, and want to make-out, and all those things good poetry should make you do, too. In fact, I was just listening to the new album by The High Strung and the song, “Rope” gave me inspiration for a new poem. Also fiction. Great novels and short stories are forever teasing my insides. Also, films. Also, trees, trees really influence me. And creeks, and fish. Also, silence. And sky.
You can learn more about Ada and her work here.
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