CAN POETRY HEAL A BROKEN WORLD?

Ada Limón, the first Latina poet laureate, believes that the power of words can help us navigate this time of crisis.

- CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

Ada Limón told her speaking agent she couldn’t take the mysterious late-morning phone call. She had physical therapy. Her agent suggested, gently, that she reschedule. She did. And hopped onto a Zoom call with seven people, including Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, PhD (Limón calls her “the hero of librarians”), who told her that she was being invited to be the 24th poet laureate of the United States. It was, Limón says, “like I was outside, watching this happen to someone else. I was a child, watching it happen to big Ada. I was an older Ada watching it happen to middle-aged Ada.”

It is fun to imagine these Adas. Little Ada, not knowing that one day she’d be the author of six critically acclaimed poetry collections, a rare breed of artist supporting herself entirely through her work, and newly knighted to a position the late Librarian of Congress James H. Billington once called “the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans.” And older Ada, from some point in the unknowable future, looking back at the moment she became tasked with the enduring and at times difficult-to-articulate job of being America’s poet.

Limón speaks to me over Zoom from her cheery, butter-yellow, sun-soaked office in Lexington, Kentucky, surrounded by shelves of books and thriving houseplants. She’s also just two weeks past her first bout with COVID, after managing to elude it for two and a half years.