10 More Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Ada Limón

“Poetry isn’t a place of answers and easy solutions. It’s a place where we can admit to an unknowing, own our private despair, and still, sometimes, practice beauty.”

“When I began as a poet, I thought it was all about knowing. I thought it was about truth, and beauty. And every poem I read, felt wise to me. I could read Anne Sexton, Philip Levine, Lucille Clifton and I would find this deep wisdom. So I thought that’s what I should work towards, a knowingness. And then, the old cliché – and it is a cliché because it’s true – that the more you learn, the more you witness, the more you realize you don’t know. And I think I’m very scared now of certainty. Even when someone says, what’s your opinion about this? Often, I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t 100% know. And that’s because the world is changing so fast. And I can have a sense of morality, of course, and right and wrong, and goodness, but beyond that, I hope I can remain porous and open enough to not think that I know all the answers. And I think a lot of harm comes from that false certainty, that is so attached to our egos, when not only are we completely convinced that we’re right, but to be proven wrong would be almost deadly. And I don’t ever want to be in that position.”

“It’s very easy for me to expound on the power of poetry. But I’m not naïve enough to think that it can fix the climate crisis. Or that it can save all of our souls. But I do believe that it does have the power to reconnect us with ourselves, and I think it has the power to reconnect ourselves with the earth. I think it’s also important for us to recognize that in its power to just be—it’s just a poem, one poem at a time, as we say—it can actually move around the world in a way that it’s not asking too much.”

“I think any writer worth their salt is always trying to get better, trying to push out of their own comfort zones. I know that we are told we write the same poems over and over, but I am always trying to make those poems exciting for me as the writer.”

“Part of what makes poetry an art form that’s growing is that the currency of poetry is the single poem. You can send one poem, share one poem on a social media platform and people will immediately interact with those words. It’s a powerful experience and something that’s more difficult to do with long-form writing.”

“I tend not to think about readership. Instead, I think about a reader, the person I am trying to communicate with, but I don’t have the idea that a lot of people are ever going to read anything.”

“I always want to make work that matters, even if it’s just to myself. I didn’t know how to really process what I was going through in my own personal life without just writing about it. Writing is how I make sense of the world, so it would be hard not to write the poems.”

“I’ll sometimes go months without writing, which is not something I used to do. I used to write every day. I still take a lot of notes, but I think I allow myself more time to be receptive to the world, as opposed to always worrying about saying something.”

“I always think poets actually tend to switch over genres better than other kinds of writers. We start out so little. Right? We start with a sound and a syllable. So, that attention to language is there, which I think is the hardest part to teach. The musicality of language. But musicality of language can only take you so far. Turns out there’s other things, too. Like plot.”

“You must love to write poems and read poems because if you’re a poet, you’re going to have to have another job. And that job, whatever it is, is going to be your main job. And it’s going to be the thing that puts food on the table and pays your rent and makes sure you have healthcare occasionally. You know? Hopefully you’ll be writing all along, and doing things and creating. And that is going to bring joy into every part of your life. If it’s just about what you can get published, then I think that’s when it kind of falls apart.”

—Ada Limón