The ‘Safe and Sacred Space’ of Poetry
Poet Laureate Ada Limón shares her words, and love of the natural world, with Colby
During Ada Limón’s tenure as the 24th U.S. poet laureate, she’s spoken all over the country, brought a signature poetry project to national parks, and, if all goes well, will see one of her poems launched into space next month on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft.
Fair to say, she’s been busy thinking about both this world and the universe beyond. But Limón, the nation’s first Latina poet laureate and a 2023 recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant, has her feet planted firmly on the ground.
The poet read from her work Wednesday evening to a receptive crowd at the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts. When a Colby student taking his first-ever poetry class asked her for a little advice on how to start writing a poem, she didn’t hesitate.
“I think that I always begin with silence. I have to be quiet for 10 minutes, at least, and then I start to look around me and start to describe something that’s right in front of me,” she said. “If I start with that description and start to interrogate, ‘Oh, why did my eyes actually go to that space? Why is it that I’m looking there? What is it that I like about it? What is it that I dislike about it?’ And suddenly, as I’m writing just that, my whole world goes into that poem.”
Documenting human experience
Poet laureates serve as the official poets of the nation and spend their time in office seeking to raise the national consciousness and appreciation of poetry. The position has existed for almost 90 years, with most poets serving just one year. Last April, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden appointed Limón to a historic two-year second term as poet laureate, which will conclude in April 2025. Hayden described her as a “poet who connects. Her accessible, engaging poems ground us in where we are and who we share our world with.”
For Limón, who was also named a TIME magazine Woman of the Year in February, the worlds and words that she puts into her poems may start small but they always expand outward. She speaks to universal human experiences through language and images that invite the reader and listener in and ask them to stay awhile.
“Through Ada Limón’s poetry, we are witness to the intimate ecologies of living vulnerably, of tending to the earth and heart, and to a mind that finds resemblances with aphoristic clarity,” Associate Professor of English Arisa White said in her introduction to the poet. “Her voice is lyrical and is a necessary breath and an equalizing touch of sunlight just before the arrival of the fall equinox, where we slip into a gold skin and wait for a breaking, a breaking open, a breaking out.”
Limón’s love of the natural world shines through all her poems, perhaps especially the one engraved in her own handwriting on the metal vault plate of the spacecraft that will spend six years traveling 1.8 billion miles to an icy moon in the Jupiter system.
When she accepted NASA’s commission she was initially terrified. How to write a poem with such a monumental and unusual destiny? Although Limón almost never writes from the “we” voice, it seemed necessary here.
“I decided that ‘we’ had to be every living being on earth—and in that way, I could write the poem,” she said. “Also, even though it was going into this expansive space, I needed the poem to do what all my poems do, which was to praise this Earth, which is the best planet.”
In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.
Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.
What poetry can do
It was the poet laureate’s first visit to Colby, where she shared poems, answered questions, and spent an hour in a lunchtime conversation about writing and more with a small group of students and faculty. Limón told the group that she has no time for what she called “preciousness about comprehension” when it comes to poetry or academic debates over what counts as a poem.
“I think craft is beautiful, and I want to write my poems with an excellence and integrity that lets them stand up to time,” she said. “But I also feel like the secret, private poem that will save your life is way more worthy than anyone saying, ‘Oh, these line breaks are fire.’ If you wrote a secret poem and you feel better, then the poem worked.”
As poet laureate, her signature project, “You Are Here,” features installations of poetry as public art in national parks as well as the publication of a new anthology of nature poems. Through it, she has seized the opportunity to share her passion for the world around us and her concerns about the climate crisis.
“There’s a level at which poetry can speak back to power,” she said.
It can do more than that, too, Limón said, responding eloquently to a student’s question about what writing poetry does for her.
“When I am writing poetry, I feel my most free,” she said. “I’m creating a space for myself that doesn’t really even exist. But it is the safe and sacred space of the page, and I can be my most vulnerable, most unhoused, unskinned self, and trust that I am safe there. And so it is the most free that I can possibly be.”
