To Witness, to Listen, to Receive the World: An Interview with Ada Limón

By Jenny O’Connell

Photo by Lucas Marquardt

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, includ­ing The Car­ry­ing, which won the Nation­al Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Limón is also the host of the crit­i­cal­ly-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slow­down. In this inter­view with Stonecoast MFA, Limón talks about ongo­ing­ness, decen­ter­ing the self, and her new book of poems, The Hurting Kind. On March 10, Limón appeared in an online reading as part of the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Maine’s Katharine O’Brien Poetry Series.

JO: Tell me about your new book, The Hurting Kind. What is it about, for you? What runs through its core?

AL: It’s so brand-new to me that I’m fig­ur­ing out how to put words to it. It’s my sixth book of poetry, and I think it’s the book that I’ve been waiting to write for a long time. It’s not so much that I couldn’t write it, or didn’t have per­mis­sion to write it pre­vi­ous­ly, but I didn’t have the tools yet, or the spir­i­tu­al fortitude.

It’s a book about the inter­con­nect­ed­ness of the world, but it’s also about hon­or­ing the ances­tors and the natural ele­ments of the world—the plants, the animals, and the trees. And, in some ways, it’s about decen­ter­ing the self. It’s a book that looks outward and praises instead of con­stant­ly turning inward to the self.

It’s also a book of sur­ren­der. I think in some ways it sur­ren­ders to the idea of ongo­ing­ness, and to the idea of being part of some­thing instead of the center of some­thing. It’s a little hard to do with poetry, because we’re trained to be the nar­ra­tive “I.” We are the through-thread. You are the writer. You are the maker. But I think it’s a book where I’m trying to leave more space to be recep­tive to the world. It’s working against epiphany, which is the first time I’ve done that in my work.

JO: We’ve all been through a chal­leng­ing few years. I don’t know anyone who isn’t strug­gling somehow right now, in this second pan­dem­ic winter. I know at least some of The Hurting Kind was written during the pan­dem­ic. How did this moment make it into your work? And what about writing got you out of bed in the morning? What helped you show up to the page again and again?

AL: As bored and as com­plete­ly wrung empty by the pan­dem­ic as we all are, I think it’s really good to talk about and acknowl­edge it, because I think it’s weird when we just move forward. It’s impor­tant to talk about what we’ve gone through and are still going through—this ter­ri­fy­ing expe­ri­ence where so many people are dying, where our fear and anxiety have been ratch­eted up to the next level.

I don’t know how to write in fear. I know how to write in grief, but I don’t know how to write in fear. Anxiety is the biggest thing that silences me. It took me a while to start to write because I was over­whelmed by anxiety, like almost every­one. And even­tu­al­ly what I was able to see, or hold onto, was that the world is going to go on. And the world is going to go on without me, and without you. And the trees are going to keep living, and when they die, there will be more trees that are going to come. And that ongo­ing­ness of the world was really, in some ways, a relief.

When I say the word “sur­ren­der,” I mean giving into that time­less­ness. Time is real, yes, and it’s also a cycle. Sur­ren­der means not cling­ing to my own iden­ti­ty, to my own attach­ments, but finding some way to release my grip on the world. And of course when you release your grip you notice what you’re attached to, you notice the things you miss, and the things you love. I was writing those poems out of really missing, and hon­or­ing, and wanting to bear witness to this life in a way that isn’t, perhaps, as trou­bled. And I wanted to praise, as opposed to always working in the land­scape of grief.

JO: So much of your earlier work looks straight at the world—examining iden­ti­ty, chal­leng­ing assump­tions. I love that about it, and it’s also won­der­ful to see your poems taking up room in this way, carving out space for joy, for praise. That feels expan­sive and important.

AL: Yes. Thank you. It is impor­tant. The title is intim­i­dat­ing because it has the word “hurting” in it, but the idea behind The Hurting Kind is that there are so many of us that are tender to the world and recep­tive to wonder. We’re porous. Beauty hurts. Attach­ment hurts. And it’s not a bad thing. It’s a way that we are moved, and pierced by the world. And I wanted to pay homage to those of us who are willing to be tender, and sen­si­tive to the universe.

We have to live in a world where we have to protect our­selves all the time. Now even more so. We wear layers. We add a mask to it, we add iso­la­tion to it. There are so many ways we protect our­selves, even from our­selves. And I think it’s impor­tant to rec­og­nize that the self under­neath the self needs witnessing.

JO: To me, that’s really the job of the writer—to help other people touch the heart of things. Stonecoast launched an ini­tia­tive a few years ago called WISE—Writing for Inclu­siv­i­ty and Social Equity. What we’re trying to do on a pro­gram­mat­ic level is to give writers the tools to address the issues of our time. A lot of this revolves around lit­er­ary cit­i­zen­ship, advo­ca­cy, rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and the power of story. What do you see as the writer’s role in the world?

AL: I think that it’s impor­tant to allow our­selves per­mis­sion to write our true iden­ti­ties. For me as a Latinx writer, it’s really impor­tant to be sure I’m embrac­ing all parts of myself and not pan­der­ing to any audi­ence that requires a certain iden­ti­ty from me. I think some­times that happens, where you get pushed into direc­tions based on what people want from you or expect from you. I think it’s really impor­tant for writers to under­stand that you need to grant your­self per­mis­sion to be truly and wholly who you are on the page, and to let go of other peoples’ per­cep­tions of you when you write.

JO: Our Stonecoast direc­tor, Justin Tussing, said that when he knew you, you made a habit of going on a long walk—the same walk—every day.

AL: I still find walking in nature incred­i­bly impor­tant. That walk was almost eight miles, and I did it every day. One of the things the walk did for me was to decen­ter the self. At a certain point the mind opens and you start to watch, you get to witness, you get to listen, you get to receive the world instead of putting your­self into the world. I think I am someone who is inher­ent­ly selfish, and I can turn any­thing into some­thing about me. I think most people can. The more I walk, the more I can dis­solve. The process of dis­solv­ing and being recep­tive to the world is where the poetry comes from. Some­times it takes a lot of miles for that to happen.

JO: I needed the reminder that the walking is also the writing. I’m always telling myself I don’t have time, but the walking, the dis­solv­ing, these things we do to get there—this, too, is writing. Thank you.

Is there any­thing else you’d like to say?

AL: I do think it’s impor­tant to remem­ber, as we move forward in our next steps, as we reemerge into the world, that the grief and silence and iso­la­tion of this time are going to stay with us. I’m wit­ness­ing a lot of very fast-paced, moving-forward, future-future-future kind of talk in the cre­ative writing world, and I just want to make sure that we are remem­ber­ing care­ful­ly this time, and really taking care of our­selves as the world tries to reopen. Because I think we may have a hard time reemerg­ing if we don’t rec­og­nize what we’ve been through.

This inter­view orig­i­nal­ly appeared on the offi­cial Stonecoast MFA website in Feb­ru­ary 2022.