Tag: Ada Limón

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

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 22 Comments
Photo by Paul Szlosek

“Poetry does millions of things, but if there’s one thing it does is that it helps you feel things. Poetry reminds us that we’re full human beings with thoughts and feelings … and that might be enough.” 

“Really great poems can surprise us and move us in unexpected ways. A great poem often has the perfect combination of music, story and emotional content. So it’s matching all three of those things all at once, and they come together in a harmonious way that feels sort of indescribable. You can’t figure out what it is that you love about it, but somehow you’re moved to tears or you’re moved to laugh or you’re suddenly, like, “Oh, I feel more in my body,” or, “I feel more connected to the world.” There’s some sort of indescribable moment or experience that the reader goes through, and it’s usually because those three things are working together, and in ways that are surprising. I feel like the best poems can really change a whole day. And sometimes they can change your whole life.” 

“I used to think I wrote poems in order to help readers recommit to the world. I wanted to believe I was using my intense attention to nature, to beauty, to language in order to offer proof that we should keep surviving. But through the years, I’ve realized the person I am writing for the most is myself. I am the one who needs to be reminded that this life holds all sorts of goodness even when it is often shoved to the edges by the enormity of ugliness or fear. The poems I write, the ones that offer shreds of hope or gratitude, are written because I need that hope or gratitude desperately in that moment—I need it the way plants need light.” 

“All writing to me, the act of writing, feels like a way of connecting.” 

“I wish poems came out fully formed. Sometimes I think they do come out more done than I expect. Usually, that’s because it’s something that’s been moving in my body for a long time before I put it down on the page; either if it’s the language, the music, or the image, so that by the time it comes out, and I’m actually writing, it’s somewhat complete. Those are the days where you have to go play the lottery or something because it’s so rare. But it does happen.” 

Poetry doesn’t have answers, it just has questions — they have endless possibilities. That’s what I love…poetry carries complexity, mystery, and clarity all at once.” 

“There has been a push over the last 10 years to make poetry accessible. It’s not always in the classroom. Sometimes it’s on the subway. Sometimes it’s on social media—Twitter, Instagram. That kind of access has ignited a passion, not only to read poetry, but to write it.” 

“I think as a younger poet, there was always this focus on what was right in front of me, you know, it was always about that next good bright thing, the reading and this and that. And I think now it’s really about what is it to live as long as possible, to survive in this world, that is very hard. And I’m going to experience losses, right, as they come.”  

“If you love poetry and making poems, you’ll find a way to make them no matter what. They’ll be knocking on your chest to get out, and when you’re ready, when you’ve cried enough, and slept enough, you’ll open your mouth and those poems will come flying out.” 

“I work at it [writing poetry], I edit for months, years sometimes, I throw away hundreds of drafts poems that just don’t seem to want to come to life yet, but at the core of me, making poems, writing poems is not hard. Writing poems is the good part, it’s the gift, it’s the part that doesn’t require tenacity. Poems come when I am not gritting my teeth; they come when I make myself available. So if there was one thing I could offer about how to keep going is to follow your joys when you can, follow the bright edges, let yourself be drawn to what you love and then make poems from that place. What we pay attention to is how we show our love. If it feels too hard to write, don’t write for awhile, take time off, take a nap, call a friend, work at something else, weep. Poems will come. Time will pass.”

—Ada Limón

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

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 11 Comments
Photo by Paul Szlosek

“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

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

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 6 Comments
Digital Image by Paul Szlosek

“Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.”

“One question that I often get asked is how to overcome writer’s block. And the funny thing is, I overcome it, by not overcoming it. I think it’s okay to not write. I think it’s okay not to talk, not to make, not to create, not to produce, produce, produce. How can we listen to the world if we are always talking to the world?”

“I love poetry for numerous reasons, but one very essential reason is that poetry is the only creative writing art form that builds breath into it. It makes you breathe. It not only allows for silence, it demands it. We enter the poem with our own breath. For me, it’s also very simply about the units, the building blocks, of poems. The units of poetry begin with just the syllable, and then the phrase, then the line, then the stanza. It’s as much about the ear as it is the eye and it’s as much about the images and narrative as it is about pacing and rhythm. No other art form quite has that same mix of chaos and control. I love writing essays and I even write fiction from time to time, but the musicality of poetry, the breath and mystery and exactness of poetry, always wins.”

“I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it’s also a way of putting it somewhere so I don’t always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more I am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky.”

“It’s as important to infuse my poetry with joy as it is to infuse my life with joy. They are the same thing. My life. My poems. I lose joy sometimes. It makes me feel hopeless and it’s not a livable space. I need to point out the things that are good, that are worth living for, that make me laugh, the dog sleeping on my face in the morning, the smell of garlic and onions on the stove, the friend’s text that makes you laugh, the robin poking his head into the sprinkler, food and shelter, safety.”

“Some of my all-time favorite experiences of my life are staying up too late and talking about poetry with other poets or other poetry lovers. It’s like a drug. One person mentions a line of poem and then we have to look up another poem that goes along with it and soon we’re talking about books and meetings with older poets we admire and it’s addictive. I am grateful all the time for the community of writers that I call friends. I get to read their new poems and they do the honor of reading mine. I love it when a friends sends me a poem. I stop everything and read it immediately. I think poetry is something that really can only take place in the silence and isolation of the self, but we need to be reminded we aren’t alone. We need to have that friend that helps us to keep going.”

“Poetry is so vital and flourishing right now. People are getting turned on by poetry every day. I can feel it and I can see it first-hand. I think there’s an essential need for stories that aren’t easy or simple or solved. There’s a need for an art form that allows someone to stand inside of it, that lets people lean in and see into a person’s life without having to commodify suffering or personal pain for someone else’s pleasure. I love memoirs and novels, but we often want something big to happen in those forms, at least the market does. We desire a great trauma and then a recovery, a massive fight and then a solution, but poetry, poetry doesn’t do that. Thankfully. What it does is live in the liminal spaces. It’s not interested in showing off wounds for coins, it’s interested in living, day to day, breathing moment by moment and staring out into the sea and noticing the small thing and saying the real thing and because of that, I believe it’s the most human type of art form. It is messy and complex and real and doesn’t have any answers for us, for that reason, I think it’s something we can trust.”

“I think of poetry as the compression of language. A pressure cooker. Something distilled. And so whether or not the poem is lineated, what I am most interested in is the way the language is holding its truth. Have you ever been in a room with a couple you don’t know very well, but suddenly, by witnessing only one interaction you are able to discern so much about their entire relationship? That’s poetry to me, the moments in life where everything is revealed. A poem doesn’t have to have line breaks to do the work of revealing; what it does have to do is expose life in a new way, unearth a larger thing through one small moment. A reader only needs to know that the biggest difference between a lineated poem and a prose poem is pacing. The prose poem moves faster. It doesn’t have the line breaks to slow it down so it’s supposed to read like you’d read any piece of prose. The speed allows for a sort of surreality to take place, for the pressure cooker to get turned up.”

“Most poets I know, at one point or another, get asked the question, “What are your poems about?” And the truth is… all of the subjects are the same. We are all writing about the same things: grief, death, love, sex, desire, dreams, being alive, loneliness, nature, gratitude, pain, mortality, mortality, mortality, and so forth. How do we have answers to those big ticket topics? We don’t. We can only return to them again and again and dig our finger in the wound again. It seems after we surrender to that, there’s a way in which the poems are saying: I am here, I am here. That’s their great gift: we are simply shouting or whispering that we exist, and in doing so someone else might open a book or read a singular poem and think, “Oh wow, I exist too.” Sometimes that is all it is, and sometimes that is exactly enough.”

“One of the biggest things about poetry is that it holds all of humanity. It holds the huge and enormous and tumbling sphere of human emotions.”

—Ada Limón