Ada Limón on Opening Awareness

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Ada Limón about her new poetry collection, Startlement.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: It sounds like you had an awareness very young – and some of the poems in here do go back to very young childhood, to memories of being in a tree, watching your family in the house – but there are also some poems about you in high school being stoned, and I’m wondering if psychedelics, whether it was marijuana or something else, opened a door for you to maybe see that idea of, is this real or not?  I mean, it did for me, so I’m just curious.

Ada Limón: I think plant medicine, if used in the right way, can really provide that for a lot of people.  What happened to me was that I always saw things that way, and plant medicine gave me an excuse to talk about it.  And it put other people in the same place as I was most of the time, and that was a gift, because you’re not really supposed to walk around and touch leaves and talk about their incredible, intricate patterns that offer so much beauty in this small world. But if you’re having a psychedelic experience, that becomes everything. And so, I think that for me, it was, in many ways, a way of giving myself permission to have the conversation I was already having with the world.

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Ada Limón is the author of seven books of poetry, including Startlement: New & Selected Poems; The Hurting Kind, which was a finalist for the Griffin Prize; The Carrying, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. She is the author of two picture books and was the editor of the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. She served as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States.