Ada Limón on the Comfort of Eternity

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 the new collection she edited, You Are Here—Poetry in the Natural World.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I felt throughout the collection the idea of eternity, in the sense that our life here might be ephemeral, but our bodies will become food for the earth, and the hands that planted a tree long ago are still part of us now.

Ada Limón: Yeah, I feel like that’s very true. And I feel like there’s a level in which, without planning it, and without knowing it, I think time is very present in this book; time, and the fact that time and simultaneity are happening all at once, right? And that feels very true, history is present in this book. The future is present in this book. What we think of as a linear process, is not linear in this book.  And as someone, as a poet who often laughs that time doesn’t exist in my own head, it feels very true to honor that here.  That there is a sense of ongoingness, of all things, of both trouble and of peace, and that’s happening in this book.

Mitzi Rapkin: I think when you think about like geologic time, and this can go both ways politically, there are people who think we might really trash this planet, but it’s going to go on without us, it will survive in a way that we will not. And I think there’s both fatalism in that, and also, for some people, it could be a reason to give up. And for some people, it’s like, no, we’re stewards of this place. And I think that’s very important.

Ada Limón: Yeah, I think that’s very true. I think that there can be comfort in the idea that the planet will continue, you know, that the planet will find its way, to heal itself, something new will come. I can’t remember if it’s in the book or if it’s in something she said, but the great thinker and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer talking about the idea of if the redwoods are no longer here what it might look like is that those redwoods are replaced by enormous dandelions, you know, because they can survive in really toxic atmospheres, and they could feed off of it, right? And maybe there will be dandelions as big as redwoods someday, and, you know, there can be a sort of delight and creative thinking in that idea of what will evolve out of this new climate. And at the same time, you wouldn’t want to turn that into, oh, yeah, it’s all sort of going to heal itself. So, can do whatever we want. And there’s absolutely something in me that fears, like anyone, what happens when we surrender to that idea? What happens when we just think there’s nothing we can do? What happens, you know, to a hotel room when you’re like, Oh, you know that the hotel is going to be torn down after you leave. You know, how do you treat it? And I think we really have to rethink our relationship. And when I was meeting with climate scientist about a year ago, when I was writing a poem for the National Climate Assessment, and they wanted a poem to go on the front manner, and I wrote a poem called Startlement. I hadn’t written the poem yet, and there was an amazing young scientist that came out and said, Listen, please don’t make the poem nostalgic. It can’t be about going back. And I think that that’s such a good lesson for me, because I think it is easy sometimes to think like, oh, let’s go back to this time before the climate crisis. And in reality, it wasn’t before the climate crisis. It was before we knew a lot about the climate crisis. And really that National Climate Assessment is so powerful because it deals with mitigation and adaptation that we are where we are, and we need to figure out how to move forward. And it’s not about reversal. It is about adaptation and mitigation, and what we as human animals can do together to take care of one another and to make sure that those of us that have less are not on the front lines of the crisis.

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Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. As the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world.