Tippett:I chose a couple of poems that you wrote — again that kind of speak to this. And I think for all of us, kind of mark this, which is important. And one of them — this is also on The Hurting Kind — is “Lover”, which is page 77.
Limón:I remember writing this poem because I really love the word “lover,” and it’s a kind of polarizing word. [laughter] Where some of you were like, “Eww,” as soon as I said it. [Laughter] I feel like I could hear that response, right?
Tippett:I did not hear that response.
Limón:There was a bit of like, “Eww, lover.” [laughter]
Easy light storms in through the window, soft
edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s
nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone
to pick with whoever is in charge. All year,
I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,
Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh
in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend
writes the word lover in a note and I’m strangely
excited for the word lover to come back. Come back,
lover, come back to the five-and-dime. I could
squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover,
what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,
a need to nestle deep into the safekeeping of sky.
I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape
of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after
us, still right now, a softness like a worn fabric of a nightshirt,
and what I do not say is: I trust the world to come back.
Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned
for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sunbeam,
the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.
[Music: “Molerider” by Blue Dot Sessions]
Tippett:So the poem you wrote, “Joint Custody.” You get asked to read it. It’s wonderful. And I want you to read it. I think there are things we all learned also. And I think it’s in that category. But I want you to read it second, because what I found in Bright Dead Things, which was a couple of years before that, certainly pre-pandemic, in the before times, was the way you wrote, a way that you spoke of the same story of yourself. And then what we find in the second poem is a kind of evolution. So would you read, it’s called “Before,” page 46.
Limón:Yeah. I love that you do this. She’s teaching me a lesson. [laughter] But I mean, I’ve listened to every podcast she’s done, so I’m aware. This is amazing.
Tippett:And this is about your childhood, right? And we all have this, our childhood stories.
Limón:Yeah.
“Before”
No shoes and a glossy
red helmet, I rode
on the back of my dad’s
Harley at seven years old.
Before the divorce.
Before the new apartment.
Before the new marriage.
Before the apple tree.
Before the ceramics in the garbage.
Before the dog’s chain.
Before the koi were all eaten
by the crane. Before the road
between us there was the road
beneath us, and I was just
big enough not to let go:
Henno Road, creek just below,
rough wind, chicken legs,
and I never knew survival
was like that. If you live,
you look back and beg
for it again, the hazardous
bliss before you know
what you would miss.
Tippett:And then “Joint Custody” from The Hurting Kind…
Limón:This is amazing.
Tippett: …several years later and a changed world later. Page 40.
Limón:Thank you.
“Joint Custody”
Why did I never see it for what it was:
abundance? Two families, two different
kitchen tables, two sets of rules, two
creeks, two highways, two stepparents
with their fish tanks or eight-tracks or
cigarette smoke or expertise in recipes or
reading skills. I cannot reverse it, the record
scratched and stopped to the original
chaotic track. But let me say, I was taken
back and forth on Sundays and it was not easy
but I was loved each place. And so I have
two brains now. Two entirely different brains.
The one that always misses where I’m not,
and the one that is so relieved to finally be home.
[applause]
Limón:I see what you did there.
Tippett:You see what I did? [laughter] I was so fascinated when I read the earlier poem.
Limón:Yeah. It’s so interesting because I feel like one of the things as you age, as an artist, as a human being, you start to rethink the stories that people have told you and start to wonder what was useful and what was not useful. And there are times where I think people have said as a child, “Oh, you come from a broken home.” And I remember thinking, “It’s not broken, it’s just bigger. [laughs] I get four parents that come to the school nights.” And I felt like I was not brave enough to own that for myself.
And it wasn’t until really, when I was writing that poem that the word came to me. And I was in the backyard by myself, as many of us were by ourselves. And I kept thinking how I missed all my family, and I missed my father and his wife, and I missed my mother and stepfather. And it was this moment of like, “Oh, this is abundance. This is not a problem. This is a gift.” And that reframing was really important to me. And then I kept thinking, “What are the other things I can do that with?” [laughter] Because there are a lot of unhelpful things that have been told to me. And I found it really useful, a really useful tool to go back in and start to think about what was just no longer true, or maybe had never been true.
Tippett:As we turn the corner from pandemic, although we will not completely turn the corner, I just wanted to read something you wrote on Twitter, which was hilarious. I never go there very much anymore. But you said — I don’t know, I just happened to be — I saw you again today. “I just set my wash settings to who I’d like to be in 2023: ‘Casual, Warm, Normal.’”
[laughter]
Limón:Yeah, that was true. The poet’s brain is always like that, but there’s a little — I was just doing the wash, and I was like, “Casual, warm, and normal.” And I was like, “Ooh, I could really go for that.”
[laughter]
Tippett:Something that you reflect on a lot that I would love to just draw you out on a bit is I think people who love language the most, and work with language, also are most intensely aware of the limits of language, and that’s partly why you’re working so hard. Talk about any of the limits of language, the failure of language.
Limón:I think the failure of language is what really draws me to poetry in general. And I think most poets are drawn to that because it feels like what we’re always trying to do is say something that can’t always entirely be said, even in the poem, even in the completed poem.
Tippett:It’s that Buddhist, the finger pointing at the moon, right? Sometimes you’re, and so much of it’s…
Limón:Exactly.
Tippett:…pointing, pointing. Yeah.
Limón:Exactly. And I feel like there’s a level of mystery that’s allowed in the poem that feels like, “Okay, I can maybe read this into it, I can put myself into it,” and it becomes sort of its own thing. And that feels like it’s an active thing as opposed to a finished thing, a closed thing.
And so it’s giving room to have those failures be a breaking open and for someone else to stand in it and bring whatever they want to it. But when we talk about the limitations of language in general, I find language is so strange. And it often falls apart from me. And I’m sure it does for many of you, where you start to think about a phrase or a word comes to you and you’re like, “Is that a word?” You’re like, “With. With.” It suddenly just falls apart… [laughter]
Tippett:Right. Yes.
Limón:…and I feel like there are moments that — I travel a lot in South America, with my husband, and by the end of the second week, my brain has gone. It’s Spanish and English, and I’m trying, and I’ll look at him and be like, “How much degrees is it?”
Tippett:[laughter] Right.
Limón:And he’s like, “Are you trying to ask me what the weather is?” [laughter] I’m like, “Yes. Yes I am.” But I trust those moments. I trust those moments where it feels like, “Oh, right, this is a weird.” Language is strange, and it’s evolving.
Tippett:Yeah.
Limón:And I love it, but I think that you go to it, as a poet, in an awareness of not only its limitations and its failures, but also very curious about where you can push it in order to make it into a new thing.
Tippett:Would you read this poem, “The End of Poetry,” which I feel speaks to that a bit. That’s page 95.
Limón:Yeah. This definitely speaks to that. Sometimes it feels like language and poetry, I often start with sounds. Poems all come to me differently. Sometimes it sounds, sometimes it’s image, sometimes it’s a note from a friend with the word lover. [laughter] Sometimes it’s just staring out the window. And this poem was basically a list of all the poems I didn’t think I could write, because it was the early days of the pandemic, and I kept thinking, just that poetry had kind of given up on me, I guess. And so I gave up on it. And then what happened was the list that was in my head of poems I wasn’t going to write became this poem.
[laughter]
Tippett:A poem. Yeah.
Limón: “The End of Poetry”
Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and ‘tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.
[applause]
Tippett:So at this point in my notes, I have three words in bold with exclamation points. All right. No, question marks. “God,” which I don’t think we’re going to get to talk about today. So we have to do this another time. “Tacos.” Because you did write a great essay called “Taco Truck Saved my Marriage.”
[laughter]
Limón:Yeah, that’s true.
Tippett:Maybe that speaks for itself. And actually, it seemed to me that your marriage was in fine shape.
Limón:It’s fine. It’s beautiful.
Tippett:And you were just using that…
Limón:But tacos help.
Tippett:…”napping,” we both love.
Limón:Yes.
Tippett:But we don’t need to belabor that. Okay. There’s this poem which I’ve never heard anybody ask you to read called “Where the Circles Overlap”…
Limón:Oh yes.
Tippett:…In The Hurting Kind. And honestly, this feels to me like if I were teaching a college class, I would have somebody read this poem and say, “Discuss.”
[laughter]
Limón:Yeah.
Tippett:So can we just engage in this intellectual exercise with you because it’s completely fascinating and I’m not sure what’s going on, and I’d like you to tell me.
Limón:I’m so glad that you asked this.
Tippett:I feel like it brings us back to wholeness somehow.
Limón:Because I love this poem, and no one has ever asked me to read this poem.
[laughter]
Tippett:Okay. You’ll see why in a minute.
Limón:Yeah. Yeah. You’re going to be like, “huh.” Or you’ll just be like, “That makes total sense to me.”
“Where the Circles Overlap”
We burrow.
We hunch.
We beg and beg.
The thesis is still a river.
At the top of the mountain
is a murderous light, so strong
it’s like staring into an original
joy, foundational,
that brief kinship of hold
and hand, the space between
teeth right before they break
into an expansion, a heat.
We hurry.
We hanker.
We beg and beg.
When should we mourn?
We think time is always time.
And place is always place.
Bottlebrush trees attract
the nectar lovers, and we
capture, capture, capture.
The thesis is still the wind.
The thesis has never been exile.
We have never been exiled.
We have been in the sun,
strong and between sleep,
no hot gates, no house decayed,
just the bottlebrush alive
on all sides with want.
Tippett:The thesis. What was it? “The thesis is still the wind.” “The thesis is still a river.” “The thesis has never been exile.”
Limón:Yeah. I think this poem, for me, is very much about learning to find a home and a sense of belonging in a world where being at peace is actually frowned upon. Where being at ease is not okay. We prioritize busyness. “Oh, I’m stressed.” “Oh, if you want to know about stress, let me tell you, I’m stressed.”
[laughter]
Tippett:That’s right.
Limón:I like to tell my friends when they say they’re really stressed, I’ll be like, “Oh, I took the most wonderful nap. You should take a nap.” [laughter] I know it’s cruel. [laughter]
But I think there’s so much in this poem that’s about that idea that the thesis that’s returned to the river. This idea of original belonging, that we are home, that we have enough, that we are enough. And the title comes from when you’re planting a tree and you’re looking for where the sun is the right space, you can draw where the circles are, and they’ll tell you to plant where the circles overlap. So it’s actually about fostering yourself in the sun, in the right place, creating the right habitat. And the right habitat for that, for all human flourishing, is for us to begin with a sense of belonging, with a sense of ease, with a sense that even though we are desirous and even though we want all of these things, right now, being alive, being human is enough. That’s really hard.
Tippett:And when you say — I know one shouldn’t take poems apart like this, but “The thesis is the river.” What does that mean? What is the “thesis” word — or the “wind”?
Limón:Yeah. The original idea, when we say like our, “thesis statement,” or even when we say like…
Tippett:This is how vitality looks…
Limón:Right.
Tippett:…this is how vitality looks like.
Limón:It is still the wind. It is still the river. It’s still the elements.
Tippett:Yeah.
Limón:That’s still it.
Tippett:We’re back at the natural world of metaphors and belonging.
Limón:Yeah.
Tippett:You hosted this, The Slowdown podcast, this great poetry podcast for a while and…
[applause]
Limón:Thank you.
Tippett:I guess maybe you had to quit doing that since you had this new job. You said there in a place, “…as I’ve aged, I have more time for tenderness, for the poems that are so earnest they melt your spine a little. I have decided that I’m here in this world to be moved by love and [to] let myself be moved by beauty.” Which is such a wonderful mission statement. And also that phrase, “as I’ve aged.” You say that a lot and I would like to tell you that you have a lot more aging to do.
[laughter]
Limón:I hope so. I hope so.
Tippett:I’m really glad you’re enjoying it because there’s many more decades. You’re very young.
Limón:I love it. My grandmother is 98. I just saw her. So I’m hoping.
Tippett:I also think aging is underrated. The bright side is not talked about. But I do think you’re a bit of a — So the thing is, we have this phrase, “old and wise.” But the truth is that a lot of people just grow old, it doesn’t necessarily come with it. [laughter] But I think you are a prodigy for growing older and wiser.
Limón:I do think I enjoy it. I think I enjoy getting older. I mean, I do right now. My mother says, “Oh yeah, you say that now.”
[laughter]
Tippett:No, there’s so much to enjoy. But I love it. I love it that you’re already thinking that. I’m so excited for your tenure representing poetry and representing all of us, and I’m excited that you have so many more years of aging and writing and getting wiser ahead, and we got to be here at this early stage. [laughs] And I think I’d just like to end with a few more poems.
Limón:Yeah.
Tippett:Because I couldn’t decide which ones I wanted you to read. We haven’t read much from The Carrying, which is a wonderful book. Okay, I’m going to give you some choices. Why don’t you read “The Quiet Machine”? Actually, that’s in Bright Dead Things. This is like a self-care poem. I almost think that this poem could be used as a meditation.
Limón:I think it’s definitely a writing prompt too, right? There’s a lot of different… People…
Tippett:It’s page 13, sorry.
Limón:Oh, thank you. People will ask me a lot about my process and it is, like I said, silence. But then I just examine all the different ways of being quiet. It’s a prose poem.
“The Quiet Machine”
I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet. There’s how I stand in the lawn, that’s one way. There’s also how I stand in the field across from the street, that’s another way because I’m farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock. There’s daytime silent when I stare, and nighttime silent when I do things. There’s shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there’s a silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore. That’s how this machine works.
[applause]
Tippett:I love that. So in The Carrying, there are these two poems on facing pages, that both have fire in the title. These are heavier, page 86 and page 87. I feel like the short poem, maybe read that one, the “After the Fire” poem is such a wonderful example of so much of what we’ve been talking about, how poetry can speak to something that is impossible to speak about. Page 87.
Limón:“After the Fire”
You ever think you could cry so hard
that there’d be nothing left in you, like
how the wind shakes a tree in a storm
until every part of it is run through with
wind? I live in the low parts now, most
days a little hazy with fever and waiting
for the water to stop shivering out of the
body. Funny thing about grief, its hold
is so bright and determined like a flame,
like something almost worth living for.
Tippett:I think grief is something that is very — We have so much to grieve even as we have so much to walk towards. And so, it’s so hard to speak of, to honor, to mark in this culture. I really love —
Limón:Yeah, I think there’s so much value in grief. And it’s continual and that it hits you sometimes. You’re never like, “Oh, I’m just done grieving.” I mean, you can pretend you are, right, but we aren’t. And then it hits you or something you, like you touch a doorknob, and it reminds you of your mother’s doorknob. Or there’s just something happens and you get all of a sudden for it to come flooding back.
And this particular poem was written after the 2017 fires in my home valley of Sonoma. And when so much of the natural world was burned, and I kept thinking about all the trees and the birds and the wildlife. And I think there was this moment where I was like, “Oh, I’m just sort of living to see what happens next.” And the grief is also giving me a reason to get up.
Tippett:And that is so much more present with us all the time. So I want to do two more, also from The Carrying. And the next one is “Dead Stars.” Which follows a little bit in terms of how do we live in this time of catastrophe that also calls us to rise and to learn and to evolve.
Limón:I think it’s very dangerous not to have hope. And if you can’t have hope, I think we need a little awe, or a little wonder, or at least a little curiosity.
Tippett:I wrote in my notes, just my little note about what this was about, “recycling and the meaning of it all.” I don’t think that’s — [laughter]
Limón:Kind of true. You boiled it down. I will say this poem began — I was telling you how poems begin and sometimes with sounds, sometimes with images — This was a sound of, you know when everyone rolls out their recycling at the same time. And it sounds like thunder?
[laughter]
Limón:And then you go, “Oh no, no, that’s just recycling.” So that’s in the poem. But it’s about more than that. [laughter]
“Dead Stars”
Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.
I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.
It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.
And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.
But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—
to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
[applause]
Tippett:So I feel like the last one I’d like for you to read for us is “A New National Anthem,” which you read at your inauguration as Poet Laureate. And you mentioned that when you wrote this, when was it that you wrote it?
Limón:2016.
Tippett:2016.
Limón:Do you remember that?
[laughter]
Tippett:If you had thought about it — And you said that this would be the poem that would mean that you would never be Poet Laureate.
Limón:Yeah, I was convinced. I wrote it and then I immediately sent it to an editor who’s a friend of mine and said, “I don’t know if you want this.” And it was up the next day on the website. I was like, “Oh.” Then I came downstairs and I was like, “Lucas, I’m never going to get to be Poet Laureate.”
Tippett:The mystery of it all.
Limón:And then I’ll say this, that the Library of Congress, they’re amazing, and the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, had me read this poem, so.
“A New National Anthem”
The truth is,
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