Shawn Miller
Photo by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress. Note: Privacy and publicity rights for individuals depicted may apply.
Twenty-four men and women have served as Poet Laureate of the United States since the post was created in 1936. It is the nation’s highest honor for a poet, and it comes with a beautiful office in the Library of Congress that has a view of the Capitol.
Three poets laureate have been Kentuckians. The first two, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, were white men who were born in Kentucky but moved away to advance their literary careers. The third, and current, poet laureate from Kentucky has a much different story.
Ada Limón, 46, was born and raised in Sonoma, California, and is of Mexican ancestry. She graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she was a theater major. Limón planned to study acting in graduate school, too, until she took an advanced poetry class her senior year from Colleen McElroy, who suggested she pursue writing instead.
After graduation, Limón took a year to write enough poems to get into the Master of Fine Arts program at New York University, where she studied under poets Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, Mark Doty and Agha Shahid Ali. During a dozen years in New York, Limón also worked for several magazines and published her first three poetry collections: Lucky Wreck (2006), This Big Fake World (2006) and Sharks in the Rivers (2010).
Then Limón moved to Kentucky, and her literary career blossomed.
At first, Limón didn’t want to live in Kentucky. She even wrote a poem about it that was published in The New Yorker. But she followed her boyfriend (now husband) Lucas Marquardt to Lexington in 2011. A former award-winning journalist for the Thoroughbred Daily News, Marquardt was starting his own company, ThoroStride, which makes inspection videos of Thoroughbred racehorses going to auction.
“His business brought us here, and it’s been a really wonderful place for me to explore my art,” Limón said in one of two interviews I have done with her for WEKU-FM’s weekly program Eastern Standard. “I was surprised that Kentucky gave me two of the things I didn’t know I needed to flourish as an artist … time and space.”
It didn’t take long for Limón to fall in love with Kentucky, especially the landscape and slower pace of life. She has a passion for the natural world, which often is reflected in her poetry. She was mesmerized by Kentucky’s fireflies, which she had never seen before. She wrote a poem about them titled “Field Bling.”
“Kentucky is gorgeous!” Limón said while taking questions after a reading last November at Transylvania University. “I don’t think people talk about that enough. I always take my family out to the Red River Gorge when they come to visit, and they’re blown away by it.”
Then she added: “I think the other thing that surprised me, and has sustained me, is the incredible community of writers and artists that live in this city. There are just so many amazing writers here and art-makers, and I don’t think that is talked about enough.”
Three of Limón’s six poetry collections were written after she moved to Kentucky: Bright Dead Things (2015), a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; The Carrying (2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; and The Hurting Kind (2022), which The New York Times and NPR included on their lists of best poetry books of the year.
Also last year, Limón produced Shelter: A Love Letter to Trees, an e-book and audiobook she narrated, published by Scribd. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. Her next book will be Beast: An Anthology of Animal Poems, a collection of work from major poets. “I am obsessed about animals,” she said. “My dog is snoring at my feet as I say this.”
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If poet laureate is the most visible job an American poet can have, perhaps the second-most visible is as host of The Slowdown, a daily podcast produced by American Public Media and the Poetry Foundation. Tracy K. Smith started the show in 2019 when she was the U.S. poet laureate. When Smith decided to step down as host, the producers reached out to Limón, who took over in September 2021.
The Slowdown is a 5- to 7-minute podcast in which Limón reads a brief essay she has written, then reads a poem by another poet that she and the producers have chosen. The podcast’s goal is to give poetry a more visible and influential place in American culture. Limón said her essays aren’t intended to describe each day’s poem but rather to put listeners in a frame of mind to absorb it.
The Slowdown has turned out to be the perfect forum for Limón, a trained actor with a mesmerizing voice. Her essays, like her poetry, are beautiful and often deeply personal. She has revealed her struggles with scoliosis and infertility, and sometimes mentions her beloved pug, Lily Bean. She occasionally refers to her life in Kentucky and places where she likes to be with nature, such as the Red River Gorge and McConnell Springs.
“I was surprised, to be honest, how much I enjoyed writing those brief essays,” she said. “What I’d love is for the podcast to reach people who aren’t necessarily thinking about poetry on a daily basis ... but can be welcomed into the world of poetry and the sound of poetry and have a moment when they’re not just sort of reflecting on their own life but feel connected to the lives of other people.”
Limón announced in January that, after 250 episodes and the poet laureate appointment, she was turning The Slowdown’s hosting duties over to poet Major Jackson.
Our relationships with nature and community are at the core of Limón’s poetry, and she finds writing to be therapeutic.
“I think it’s very easy to get bogged down by the sorrow and trauma and real issues of today,” she said. “And at the same time, if we don’t recommit to the world and we just give up, oh what a horrible consequence. So, I want my poems to help me recommit to the world. And I hope—I really hope—that they will help others do the same. To sign up again, to sign up to life.”
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It’s not surprising that Limón attracted the attention of the Librarian of Congress, who appoints the poet laureate. But Limón was surprised. Flabbergasted, actually.
She said Vaughan Ashlie Fielder, a close friend who represents her and several other major poets through her Lexington-based agency The Field Office, told her she needed to take a mysterious Zoom call on June 1, 2022, at exactly 9:35 a.m.
“She wouldn’t tell me what it was about, but she said, ‘You might want to get dressed up for this one,’ ” Limón recalled. “I logged on, and there, in the center of the Zoom call, in the grid of Zoom, was Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. She was with her team, and she just said, ‘I would like to invite you to be the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States.’ The shock of the news sort of sent me out of my body.”
Poet laureate is a public job that is privately funded through an endowment left by the late scholar and philanthropist Archer M. Huntington. Poets laureate are appointed annually but often serve two terms. The last poet laureate, Joy Harjo, got a rare third year.
“Ada Limón is a poet who connects,” Hayden said in announcing the appointment. “Her accessible, engaging poems ground us in where we are and who we share our world with. They speak of intimate truths, of the beauty and heartbreak that is living, in ways that help us move forward.”
While the poet laureate has a few official speaking duties, most of the work involves promoting poetry to a wider audience. Limón has eagerly embraced the role, saying she believes poetry can help heal us after tumultuous years of pandemic, political division and culture wars.
“I think one of the ways that poetry helps people reclaim their humanity is through deep attention,” she said. “Poetry is that way of spending a moment remembering that you are a thinking, feeling, alive human being living in the world.”