Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the US, shares her thoughts on writing and the power of poetry in a slim volume, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry (Scribner).
When she begins writing, Limón notes, she wants to make something true and asks herself questions:
"Do I want to break something, or do I want to mend something? Or simply try to carve out a small place to breathe?"
And if she's lucky, she says, "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."
Limón suggests that one of the secret powers of poetry is the way a poem connects us to other voices.
"This is the secret power of poetry. Little engines of sound urging us on, telling us we are not alone, because we can't be; we are connected to the readers and writers of poetry."
Is any poem ever a failure, she asks, because it goes unpublished or unshared?
"No, because didn't it make you pay attention, the act of writing? Didn't you, even briefly, feel as if you inhabited the world? Didn't it, for a moment, make you feel connected to language? Didn't you find a container for your heart?"
Is there a way to learn how to write a poem?
"While there are ways to teach poetry," Limón says, "mostly we learn by reading and writing, writing and reading, and then going out into the terrifying world and feeling so much that those feelings threaten to collapse us onto the concrete, facedown and forever ruined by human cruelty or even love. And then something happens; there's some moment when you think, a little gravel on your cheek, 'This suffering might make for a good poem.' Or, 'This wonder might make for a good poem.'"
One of the other secret powers of poetry, she writes, is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to make money writing poems, which allows poetry to remain subversive. "Poetry has the benefit of being outside economic systems."
"Is that a fancy way of saying that poetry doesn't make money? Yes. But it's more than that: Poetry is meant to be free, it's meant to be given, it's meant to travel one poem at a time, like pollen from a tree floating through the air to make more trees. Poems travel that same way. And because of that, they remain sacred, unbothered by trappings of the usual oppressive systems."
Another reason why poetry is powerful, according to Limón, is because of its existence in questions without forcing answers.
"It's the opposite of a polemic, or a prescription; instead, it's an interrogation of the world and one's place within it. That said, even though it doesn't hold answers, perhaps it is an answer."
Why write or read poetry?
"At this very moment we need to gather strength and resilience and compassion in any way that we can," Limón writes. "Perhaps poetry, for you, is the secret place where you can get to be as free and as safe as you can; perhaps you can make that blank page a place where you can lay down everything you need to lay down. Maybe it's where you go to get stronger; maybe it's where you go to become softer. But know there is a place that you can make on the page that no one controls but you. In that, right there, is a mighty power."
To learn more about Ada Limón and her work, visit: https://adalimon.com/
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