Ada Limón says she was swimming in Chesapeake Bay when she had a moment of feeling, “What if my body was only my body?”

Lucas Marquardt

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Lucas Marquardt

Ada Limón says she was swimming in Chesapeake Bay when she had a moment of feeling, “What if my body was only my body?”

Lucas Marquardt

A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I went looking for a few lines that could attempt to represent the whole of U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s work. I don’t think I succeeded because her poems are so full and touch on so much – from the natural world to very personal longing. But I think this gets close:

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?

This is a line from the poem Dead Stars and I love it because here you see her acknowledge the hard stuff of living, but it’s embedded in perseverance and optimism.

“What would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?” I read that and I’m like, “Yes Ada. I’m all in. Let’s at least try, right?” She is urging us to keep going and it’s not a prescription from on high, she’s right here with us reaching for another day.

Ada is one of those people who can recognize all the ways we inflict pain on one another, not to mention our planet, without getting consumed by it. She writes in that space between grief and joy, and I love that space.

Writing from that space is one thing — talking from there is quite another, which is why I was moved when Ada used one of the questions in our game to talk about something incredibly personal. And in her story you’ll hear echoes of that same line of poetry: “What would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?”

I spoke to Ada just before the publication of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a collection of poems she edited and introduced, featuring the work of Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Jericho Brown and more.

This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly-selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.

Question 1: What’s a smell that brings back a vivid memory for you?

Ada Limón: My grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side made dueling types of fudge. My grandfather’s was a hard sort of old-fashioned kind of fudge and my grandmother’s was a soft fudge like See’s Candy.

My favorite thing was to go into their walk-in cupboard, and they would have all of their Tupperware full of their different kinds of fudge for guests and things. And you could smell it. You couldn’t reach it, unfortunately, but you could smell it.

Rachel Martin: Did you spend a lot of time with them growing up?

Limón: I did, yes. And my grandmother just died last August and she’s been on my mind a lot. So I think that she’s with me in my heart.

Martin: Was she a lover of poetry?

Limón: She did like poetry, although she was very confused that not all my poems rhymed. I told her that some of them do. And when my grandfather passed away, she asked me to write a poem for him and I made it rhyme.

Question 2: When’s the last time you forgave yourself for something?

Limón: This morning. I’ve been traveling a lot and it’s been beautiful. And this morning I was doing yoga, which I try to do every morning, and I was just very stiff. I felt like I hadn’t been moving as much as I should and I was very hard on myself. And then I told myself, “You were doing amazing things. You were doing other things that mattered and it’s OK.”

I think it’s very important because early on I thought all of self care was really more self punishing.

Martin: What does that mean?

Limón: Oh, I just felt like if I miss a day of working out, or if I feast too much and enjoy too much, I’ll have to go into…

Martin: Deprivation mode.

Limón:. Yes, exactly. And I just don’t do that anymore. I think that’s been really healthy for me because I feel like you spend a lot of your twenties and thirties, at least for me, trying to do everything right. And the nice thing about being in my mid-to-late forties is that I forgive myself all the time. I have to.

Question 3: Have you ever had a premonition about something that came true?

Limón: I think that I knew that we weren’t going to be able to conceive a child before we decided to give up on fertility treatments. I think I knew that. And I think it actually helped me to make some decisions to not move forward with any more of the treatments.

It felt like my body knew something and it was able to offer me another option and another future. And it felt like, OK, now what else is possible? Because I think as women in our culture, the only possibility oftentimes offered to us is motherhood.

Martin: That’s right.

Limón: I felt very bound by that and letting that go was really freeing. And I love my life and I love being child-free. And I think that premonition offered that.

Martin: Did you have a specific dream, or was it just a knowing in your bones?

Limón: I was floating in the Chesapeake Bay and I just had this moment of feeling, “What if my body was only my body?” And it felt really powerful. What if it didn’t belong to anyone else? And it was just mine.

Martin: We never talk about it that way.

Limón: I had never felt it that way. All I wanted was to carry something in me — a baby, a child. And then it was so freeing. And I got out of the ocean, I remember thinking, “That was beautiful.” Like, what if I’m enough? What if just my body, what if these boundaries and these borders of my skin touching the water, was enough?