Ada Limón Lives in 'Vertical Time' in Her Childhood Home

Anna Sale (0:00)

Through the start of last year, Ada Limón was our poet laureate in the US. During her three years of service, she toured around the country, meeting fellow Americans and talking with them about place, poetry, nature, and human participation in it. Those intense years of travel and talking and meeting and reading led to two can't miss books. The first is a collection that Ada pulled together and edited called, You Are Here, Poetry In the Natural World. It includes 50 previously unpublished poems by Americans about nature.

You Are Here is also the name of an initiative from Ada's time during her poet laureateship. It was a project that put poetry installations on picnic tables in national parks.

As Ada was leaving the laureateship, she delivered a lecture on the meaning and power of poetry for individual survival and flourishing. And also as a place for us to return to as we consider our collective national identity. That lecture became a book that she published earlier this year. It's called Against Breaking, On the Power of Poetry.

Ada Limón (1:17)

When clarity is hard to come by, when language has morphed into a tool for confusion, I put my faith in poetry.

Then, if I'm lucky, if I'm quiet enough, lines of poems I love start to move through me. They come to me as if through a necessary beckoning.

The lines of poetry that come to me first when I am at the beginning of anything are from Yates. I must lie down where all the ladders start. In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. And so, yes, let me begin there. In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Anna Sale (2:05)

The audio book is about 50 minutes long. There's a link to it in our show notes. I highly recommend you listen. It's a gift that she gave us.

Ada Limón now is 50 years old. She grew up in Sonoma County, California. She lived in New York City for a time, where she fell in love with her husband Lucas, whose work as a videographer of horse racing took them to Kentucky where they lived for 14 years. She's recently moved back home to the community where she grew up, to the creeks and landscapes that first inspired a poet's gift for noticing. Ada is actually living in her childhood home, not because it was something she inherited. She and her husband found it on the market when they were daydreaming about moving back to California. Now, it's theirs.

Ada Limón and I talked about that when we sat down together at a picnic table at the Sonoma Botanical Garden, not far from where she lives and has been able to return to the focused work of writing new poems. Your office is your childhood bedroom?

Ada Limón (3:12)

Yes.

Anna Sale (3:12)

Is that right?

Ada Limón (3:13)

Yes.

Anna Sale (3:13)

I mean, I'm just imagining if I were in my child, like the ways that I would look at certain corners of the wall, like I can remember trying to fall asleep as a kid, what I would look at in the room, and now you're in that room as an adult, making your work for the world. What's it feel like?

Ada Limón (3:30)

It's great. I've never experienced vertical time quite like this. It's just like we're just stacked on top of each other.

She's picking out her first book. I'm writing a book. It's just like, oh, right, you're here. Oh, I knew you were here. Like we both are like, you were always here. And I'm like, you were always here.

Anna Sale (3:56)

This is Death, Sex & Money. The show from Slate about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. I'm Anna Sale.

I want to start just by situating us in place. So we're here at the Sonoma Botanical Garden. Is this a place that's familiar to you?

Ada Limón (4:32)

Yes. I love the botanical gardens. I come here quite often. And right now, what I'm noticing is that last night we had, yesterday actually, we had quite a bit of rain. We weren't expecting this much rain.

And so everything feels incredibly vibrant. All the greens are glowing.

Anna Sale (4:52)

It was a luscious summer afternoon when Ada Limón and I met up at the Sonoma Botanical Garden.

As we were just getting going, a woman wandered by and wondered why we were sitting with microphones. Were we singers? She asked.

SPEAKER_3 (5:06)

They're talking. She thinks you're singing.

Ada Limón (5:17)

Ada Limón.

Anna Sale (5:19)

I've been listening to Ada a lot before meeting her in person. Against Breaking, her latest release, became an audiobook that I texted to friends a lot this summer, telling them they had to listen. Even before she was the US Poet Laureate, Ada Limón shared a lot of herself with the public in her writing. There's Lucky Wreck from 2006, poems about a woman in New York City hungry and making moves to build a life. In The Carrying from 2018, we hear about fertility treatments and physical pain and vertigo linked back to scoliosis. In The Hurting Kind from 2022, about family and being porous emotionally. And Startlement from last year about returning home.