Fresh off being the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States and the publishing of her new book “Startlement,” Ada Limón brought several people to tears while also craving churros at her reading on Nov. 4 in the Ira Allen Chapel.
I cried reading “The Hurting Kind” at my kitchen table the night before, preparing my questions for the small colloquium she held in the Waterman Memorial Lounge.
The morning of Nov. 4, myself, about 15 other students and a handful of professors gathered with Ada Limón prior to her reading.
Limón is a smiling, charismatic, lovely person, describing her poet self as a bright ball of light and sadness.
“I love everything,” Limón said. “And we live at a time where that’s not the easiest thing to do.”
This open love Limón has towards the world and humanity becomes the perhaps most touching quality of her poetry. She seamlessly blends the sadness and hope inspired by the human experience.
“Its hard for me to talk about poetry without talking about light,” Limón said.
As UVM professor and poet Noah Warren mentioned at the colloquium, light is a necessary part of what poetry does.
“Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?” Limón writes in “The Hurting Kind.”
That line, for me, is the crying line. The words create a feeling of pre-eminent nostalgia for all endings — specifically death — alongside the devastatingly human desire to keep loving.
In awe of the power of these seven words, I asked Limón how she was able to tame such deep, complex emotion — she quoted “Anne of Green Gables” earlier, calling this feeling the “depths of her despair” — into a language so tangible.
“It’s not just the language, it’s the space between, it’s the breath, it’s the musicality,” Limón said. “Sometimes, it’s that you are trying to capture not just what is, not just pure description, but also where the music and the language and the image are all colliding.”
“Startlement” showcases Limón’s poetic prowess over the 25-year span of her career. It contains a selection from her past books, as well as a collection of new poems.
Limón hesitated about doing a selection, joking that she felt only older poets do selection books. However, she decided to view her 10th book as an honoring and launching off point for her career post-Poet Laureate.
A real hurdle the book presented for Limón was the process of picking which poems should be featured.
“Selection is hard because the poems are meant to talk to each other,” Limón said.
Creating a powerful new and selected book of poetry requires finding a way to incorporate poems with one another that maintains their interlaced meaning, despite being written to go with other works.
In the process of selection, Limón was surprised and overwhelmed to discover that the themes and questions that her poetry explores have remained the same over 25 years.
“I am who I always was … my own internal language sings back to what I see,” Limón said.
“Startlement” is more than just a tracing of Limón’s development over the past 25 years. The new poems push for togetherness, for noticing and for embracing Mother Earth.
The word “startlement” is a Shakespearean word, according to Limón, and she envisioned it as depicting a collective murmuring — the image she used being a “startlement” of birds.
“Startlement,” the poem for which the book is named, speaks about the value of noticing and of togetherness.
The poem opens, “It is a forgotten pleasure, the pleasure / of the unexpected blue-bellied lizard,” and ends with, “The world says, Once we were separate / and now we must move in unison.”
Limón calls the reader to take stock of the little gems of connection everywhere in our environments.
During her time as Poet Laureate, many of her projects focused on bringing poetry into National Parks. “The Origin Revisited,” from the new collection, she wrote after visiting Yaak Valley in Kootenai National Forest, Montana. In her notes on her new poems, she highlights that the U.S. Forest Service recently announced the “Black Ram” logging project in that same forest.
At the reading, Limón mentioned her affinity for nature, saying that she has close relationships with trees, birds and all flora and fauna. She poked fun at herself for being the person who will introduce visitors to her favorite trees.
She read to the crowd poems such as “The Geography of Mountains,” “On Earth as it is on Earth,” “A New National Anthem,” “Dead Stars” and “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europe,” which Limón wrote for NASA.
“NASA doesn’t like when you talk about aliens or if you touch things,” Limón joked with the crowd.
The reading ended with Ada Limón tearing up at the raucous standing ovation she received.
“I’m going to cry,” she said.
The emotional response from both Limón and the audience goes to show the power that poetry holds to bring individuals together in feeling, especially when the poet writes so endearingly about our humanity.
“We, too, are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark,” Limón writes in “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.”
She signed my book “For Love, For Hope, For Wonder,” a reminder to all to approach life, the world and art as she does — in a constant state of awe and appreciation, even in sadness.
