Let Yourself Rage With Poet Laureate Ada Limón

Summary

Modern Love Podcast: "Let Yourself Rage With Poet Laureate Ada Limón"

Release Date: April 9, 2025 | Host: Anna Martin | Episode Duration: Approximately 36 minutes

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Introduction

In this poignant episode of Modern Love, host Anna Martin engages in an intimate conversation with Ada Limón, America's Poet Laureate, whose term concluded in April 2025. The episode delves deep into the intricate relationship between love and poetry, exploring how poetic expression can navigate the tumultuous waters of human emotions, particularly rage and grief. Limón shares personal anecdotes, discusses her creative processes, and reflects on the emotions that fuel her writing.

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Ada Limón's Legacy as Poet Laureate

Ada Limón’s tenure as Poet Laureate was marked by innovative projects that brought poetry into everyday spaces. Anna Martin highlights Limón's initiative to install poems on picnic tables across national parks, allowing visitors to engage with poetry amidst nature. One standout project includes a poem engraved inside a NASA spacecraft bound for Jupiter, symbolizing poetry's boundless reach.

Notable Quote:

"I would put them everywhere without littering, of course. This might sound like a cheesy thing to say, but I think we'd all be better off if we encountered poetry on a regular basis."
— Ada Limón [02:37]

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Exploring Love Through Poetry

The core of the episode revolves around the intersection of love and poetry. Limón discusses her deep connection with the Modern Love essay she chose to read, which narrates the emotional turmoil of falling for a captivating poet. She emphasizes how poetry serves as a vessel for expressing the most vulnerable and messy feelings, allowing both writers and readers to feel profoundly connected.

Key Discussion Points:

• Vulnerability in Artistic Circles: Limón reflects on how writers and artists often form deep connections through shared vulnerabilities, facilitating intense emotions and sometimes leading to crushes or love.

• The Power of Crushes: She views crushes as both torturous and beneficial, serving as distractions that can provide relief from personal struggles and creative blocks.

Notable Quote:

"I think that if we embrace that kind of anger, we can recognize that there's some insanity in it and that it also is not always telling you the truth."
— Ada Limón [21:46]

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Reading and Reflecting on "An Empty Heart is One that Can Be Filled" by Lilly King

Limón reads Lilly King's essay, a narrative about heartbreak and the transformative power of feeling deeply. The essay recounts King's intense but ultimately unreciprocated relationship with a poet during a writing residency, highlighting the raw emotions of love, loss, and eventual healing.

Notable Passages:

• The depiction of the poet's intimate gestures juxtaposed with his inability to fully commit reflects the complexity of human relationships.
• King's realization that embracing heartbreak allowed her to remain open to genuine love in the future.

Notable Quote:

"I was heartbroken, but I felt less alone than I had in a long while."
— Lilly King (via Ada Limón) [18:38]

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The Therapeutic Role of Rage and Grief

A significant portion of the conversation explores how rage and grief are pivotal in processing pain and fostering emotional growth. Limón shares her personal strategy for dealing with rage—feeling it fully and channeling it into writing, which serves as both a release and a pathway to healing.

Practical Insights:

• Embracing Emotions: Limón advocates for confronting rather than suppressing emotions, allowing oneself to feel rage as a precursor to grief and eventual acceptance.

• Writing as Catharsis: Daily journaling and poetic expression are highlighted as essential tools for managing intense emotions and transforming them into creative energy.

Notable Quote:

"I think that the rage is actually protecting us and it's safer than grief."
— Ada Limón [21:37]

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Personal Anecdotes and Reflections

Limón shares anecdotes from her own experiences, including her first writing residency post-September 11th, where she grappled with balancing love and creative focus. She discusses the challenges of falling in love within artistic communities and how these relationships can both inspire and distract from creative endeavors.

Notable Quote:

"I really focus on him. And how can I make it like this is us? It's not love with a capital L, it's our love, which is, with a little lowercase love that is daily and needy and beautiful in its own way."
— Ada Limón [30:56]

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Crafting Authentic Love Poems

The dialogue transitions to the art of writing love poems. Limón acknowledges the inherent difficulty in capturing genuine emotion without falling into clichés. She emphasizes the importance of specificity and personal truth, striving to depict love as a nuanced, everyday experience rather than grandiose declarations.

Practical Advice:

• Focus on the Ordinary: Incorporating mundane details to create relatable and heartfelt poetry.

• Authenticity Over Perfection: Prioritizing genuine emotion over poetic perfection to resonate deeply with readers.

Notable Quote:

"I want the love poem to be really for him. That's how I stay in the moment, is I really focus on him."
— Ada Limón [31:56]

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Conclusion: Embracing the Emotional Spectrum

As the conversation wraps up, Limón underscores the significance of embracing the full spectrum of human emotions. She advocates for allowing oneself to feel deeply—whether it's rage, grief, love, or joy—as a means of connecting more profoundly with oneself and others. Limón’s insights illuminate how poetry can be a powerful tool for navigating and expressing the complexities of love and loss.

Final Notable Quote:

"I think heartbreak makes you feel that way. I think it protects us and it's safer than grief."
— Ada Limón [22:38]

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Additional Resources

• Books Mentioned:

  • You Are Poetry in the Natural World edited by Ada Limón
  • New and Selected Poems by Ada Limón
  • Heart the Lover by Lilly King

• Listen and Subscribe:

  • Full access to Modern Love and other New York Times podcasts available at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
  • New York Times Audio app for iOS users available at nytimes.com/audioapp.

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This episode of Modern Love offers a heartfelt exploration of how embracing our deepest emotions through poetry can lead to personal transformation and a greater connection to the world around us. Ada Limón’s candid reflections provide listeners with both inspiration and practical guidance on navigating love’s challenges through the written word.

Transcript

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[Anna Martin]

Hey, everyone, it's Anna. Before we start the show today, I want to share a fun update with you. We've decided to offer a little something extra for New York Times subscribers who are also fans of the Modern Love column starting very soon. In addition to our regular episodes of the show, which we'll keep publishing every Wednesday, New York Times subscribers will also get the latest Modern Love essay read aloud in our podcast feed every Friday. This is something you've been reaching out and asking us for, and we've been listening to you. So this is our way of saying thanks for listening to us. Okay, on with the show.

[Ada Limon]

Love now. And did you fall in love last fella? I love them love but stronger than anything for the love love can I love you more than anything there's to love. Foreign.

[Anna Martin]

From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin. This is Modern Love. As you probably know, our show is inspired by the Modern Love column, where it's all about the personal essay. But today we're talking about how poetry can also help us express our messiest feelings. My guest today is America's official poet, our poet laureate, Ada Limon. During her time in the job, which comes to an end this month, Limon has shown us poems aren't just words we read in a quiet room somewhere. One of her big projects was having poems installed on picnic tables in several national parks. So this summer you could be eating a sandwich on the shores of Cape Cod, enjoying a poem by Mary Oliver, or if you're going to the California Redwoods or. Or the Smoky Mountains, you can find poems there, too. And I have to tell you this because it's out of this world, literally. Limone wrote a poem that's engraved inside a NASA spacecraft that's on its way to Jupiter. She spoke with me from her home in Sonoma, California, and it was clear that if her term wasn't ending, she would just keep spreading poetry all over the place as a way to soothe the turmoil she sees in the present moment.

[Ada Limon]

I would put them everywhere without littering, of course. This might sound like a cheesy thing to say, but I think we'd all be better off if we encountered poetry on a regular basis. Because it reminds us to feel that we're not supposed to numb out, that the weeping and the rage and the grief leads to feeling alive.

[Anna Martin]

Limon's work as poet laureate has been vast and far reaching, but I wanted to talk to her about something much more intimate, being a writer in love. When we come back, Adali Mone tells me why poems about love are often the scariest for her to write, and she reads a modern love essay about a writer who catches feelings for a very sexy poet and can barely get herself to write at all. Stay with us.

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[Dane Brugler]

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[Anna Martin]

Adalymon welcome to Modern Love.

[Ada Limon]

Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here.

[Anna Martin]

So I love that the essay you chose to read today is about crushing on a hot poet.

[Ada Limon]

Sometimes it happens.

[Anna Martin]

Sometimes it happens. I was gonna say, have you found it easy to fall in love with other writers?

[Ada Limon]

Oh yes. I think one of the reasons I love this essay was because I Think going to a writer's residency or being around other artists in general, there's something that's so visceral about that experience. And I was talking to my husband earlier this morning about this essay, and we were joking about how it's sort of unlike any other experience at a writing residency or an artist residency. And it's partly because people sit down and. Whereas you might be, you know, at a bar in Brooklyn, and people make small talk. Oh, what do you do? What do you know? I don't do this. I did that at an artist's residency. What often happens is that people sit down next to each other and say, what are you working on? And someone says, oh, you know, I just lost my stepmother and I'm working on this novel. That's all about what it is to lose someone of cancer at a young age and loss and how it makes you more impermanent and permanent in the world at the same time.

[Anna Martin]

And this is like your first conversation with the person, right?

[Ada Limon]

And then that person says, oh, I'm working on sculptures of the body that deal with the male torso and the vulnerability of the heart chakra. I'm just making this all up.

[Anna Martin]

No, I love it. I feel like I'm there.

[Ada Limon]

And meanwhile, you know, you're having drinks, you're having, you know, intellectually stimulating conversation, and you start at this moment of vulnerable rawness that you just don't have in other places. So I think it's very easy. I've watched people fall in love. I've watched primarily great crushes happen.

[Anna Martin]

Oh, my God, I can only imagine.

[Ada Limon]

I'm a big fan of crushes. I think crushes are good for people, even though they can be torturous.

[Anna Martin]

This essay has a pretty epic crush. Is there anything else you want to say to tee up the essay before you read it for us?

[Ada Limon]

No, I think I'll just add that I really related to the idea of crushes, or desire as a way out of writing.

[Anna Martin]

Great, we're gonna talk about that.

[Ada Limon]

Yes. I think that as a writer and anyone who makes things and creates things understands procrastination. And I think that there is a level in which sometimes we distract ourselves in order to prevent us from maybe finishing a project.

[Anna Martin]

Cannot wait to hear you speak on that. Ada, whenever you are ready, I would love for you to read this essay.

[Ada Limon]

Okay. An Empty Heart is One that Can Be Filled. By Lilly king. I was 31 before I got my heart broken. It was spring, and I had quit my job and driven across country to an artist Colony in New England. The kind of place that provides you with a cabin in the woods that is not within sight of any of the other cabins. My residency was for eight weeks. I hoped to finish my first novel there. The poet arrived a week after I did. He was too skinny, but his eyes were very blue. My first joke with the poet was about Lolita. We were sitting at dinner and another writer was waxing on about the novel. The poet and I both said that the disturbing pedophilia canceled out the luscious prosecution and we could not worship it the way we would like. Actually, we may have just caught eyes. Not having to explain love means never having to explain the misogynistic pedophilia of Lolita. And the other writer fought back. So the poet held up his napkin as a screen between the Lolita fans and us. Everyone laughed. I swooned. A few nights later we watched short films made by other residents. There were no seats left, so we stood in the back. He was just behind me, breathing into my hair, our bodies seeming to speak to each other in the dark. When it was over, with hardly a word, we got into my car and drove out of town. We ended up in a small village that had been Transported back to 1969 by a film crew with thick wooden signs for the soda shop and beauty parlor and a huge advertisement for old fashioned men's shoes. Painted onto a brick building on the village green was a gazebo. We weren't sure if it was real or for the movie. We climbed its steps and played with cards that I had found in my glove compartment. On the way home, he pressed his lips to my neck. The memory of it made my stomach flip. All night long the spring unfurled like the fat ferns along the road to my cabin. May turned to June. I had grown up in New England, and so had the poet. The humid heat at noon, the cold rains on the roof, his accent, his humor, and his hands on my skin all felt like a home. I had nearly forgotten he was writing poems about bees. Sex poems with pollen and stamens and pistils. Bees sexing their flowers, sexing their queen jelly and nectar and death in midair. He'd read them to me in his truck in the parking lot of the lake where we swam. Later he wrote a poem about that, too. How the water turned our arms to amber. We fooled around in his cabin, careful to time it right so the guy delivering lunch to the doorstep wouldn't catch us. I came away giddy, barely able to walk in a straight line. I fell for him so fast and as if through space, no planet in sight, he had said, or at least I thought he had said, that he and his girlfriend in New York had broken up, but later he said they were taking a break, which was not at all the same thing, and not at all like my recent breakup with a man in California, which had been clean and permanent. He began saying that our strong physical connection was too intense, maybe even unnatural, he said, as if trying to translate his concern into fiction writer language, I would understand that our connection might be like an unreliable narrator. Stay away from him, my mother said to me when we spoke on the phone. You're there to write, so write. I had been revising the same short chapter for weeks. The stress I felt at the Colony had begun to transform the place for me from writer's retreat to fitness camp. To keep all the anxiety at bay, I embraced a brutal workout regiment, running a 12 mile loop, swimming across the lake, and playing tennis in the late afternoon. This athletic schedule didn't leave me much time to write. The poet left a week before I did. We said goodbye in the parking lot. He got into his truck and as I leaned in the window, he touched his chest and said, you are deep in here. I tried to believe this was the way a poet says, I love you, but I know it was more like the way someone who is not in love dodges those words at the moment they are expected. After that, I wanted to leave, too. Finally I did. My sister in Massachusetts took me in. She lived in a carriage house with her boyfriend, who had a friend who got me a job waiting tables at a fancy restaurant in Cambridge. In August the poet came to visit, but he stayed with friends in Boston. We drove out to Walden Pond three days in a row. We talked and swam and pretended our arms were still amber, but they were not. On the last of those days he dropped me off at the Sunoco station on Memorial Drive, where I had left my bike that morning. It was over. There were chrysanthemums planted along one edge of the parking lot, and every time I drove past those flowers that fall, I would sob and wail in my car. I was crying in public, too, crying as I wrote in my journal at Dunkin Donuts, crying as I put the heavy napkins and silverware on the tables at the fancy restaurant, crying as I biked home across the river at midnight. But I marveled, too. I marveled at the feeling of being heartbroken. I had loved and lost plenty of times, most of the time, really, because I Seemed to fall for men who couldn't love me back. But I had never let myself feel it. I numbed up, moved on. But this time, perhaps because it had happened so fast, I didn't numb up. And I found this feeling, even through my tears, interesting. I ran on the paths along the Charles river, and I thought, this is what people and books and movies are talking about when they talk about losing love. People's hearts break. And it feels like this. It feels like someone has beaten you up with brass knuckles. But it also felt at the same time like the universe was welcoming me in. I was heartbroken, but I felt less alone than I had in a long while. In November, I met a man I liked. He asked me out, then canceled on the morning of our first date, saying on my sister's machine that he had to leave town unexpectedly. He wrote me a letter saying he would be back before New Year's. The letter was postmarked New Mexico. He said I could write him there at his aunt's, but I didn't. I wrote him off. Another man who isn't ready, I thought. Not even ready for a first date. The poet came back on a cold night. We walked my sister's dog. He played me a video of his father, who was mentally ill, that he had recorded that day. I watched and felt terrible for him. When I walked him to his truck that night, there was a defeated, restless charge between us, and I punched him in the stomach lightly. But he looked alarmed by something he saw in me, perhaps everything I wanted that he couldn't give. A week later, the man in New Mexico came back east. We had our first date and many more, and I married him. My heart was ready for him, for his kindness and honesty, his easy, steady love for me, for that kind of love, the mutual kind. My heart was open because I had finally let it break.

[Anna Martin]

Thank you for that. While it's fresh in your mind, what are your first reactions, your first thoughts? What is this essay bringing up for you?

[Ada Limon]

Oh, there's so many things that I love about this poem, but this poem about this essay.

[Anna Martin]

Bit of a Freudian slip.

[Ada Limon]

Yes. I really love how when the world makes us vulnerable, whether it's through loss or some kind of transformational event, it opens us up to the world again if we let it. If we let it. Every time I've been hurt, I rage against it. I deny it. And then eventually I soften and soften, and it feels like, oh, right, this is the world I'm supposed to be living in. The world where I am paying attention. The world where I feel connected, where I feel. The world where I feel. And I think when we're in that state of receiving, we are more connected and more human, especially as artists. But really for all of us.

[Anna Martin]

More with Ada Limon in just a moment. We'll be right back.

[Ada Limon]

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[Anna Martin]

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[Ada Limon]

So it's simple. Pick up a pack today. Angel Soft, Soft and strong. Simple.

[Anna Martin]

Hi, it's Alexa Weibel from New York Times Cooking. We've got tons of easy weeknight recipes and today I'm making my five ingredient creamy miso pasta. You just take your starchy pasta water, whisk it together with a little bit of miso and butter until it's creamy, add your noodles and a little bit of cheese. It's like a grown up box of Mac and cheese that feels like a restaurant quality dish. New York Times Cooking has you covered with easy dishes for busy weeknights. You can find [e-mail] you're talking about rage as a knee jerk kind of instinct. When something doesn't go our way, when there's loss experienced and you say that has to soften and soften and soften. Can you give me advice on that softening? Because it's really difficult to do.

[Ada Limon]

Yeah. I mean, I can only speak from my personal experience, but I think the first thing you have to do is feel it. I think you have to feel the rage.

[Anna Martin]

Yeah.

[Ada Limon]

And sometimes I have to write. I write in my journal every single day. And sometimes I have to write terrible things. Really rageful, horrible poems. Really rageful, horrible things. I wish for people. And I think there is a level in which if we embrace that kind of anger, we can recognize that there's some insanity in it and that it also is not always telling you the truth. And I think we have to feel that rage because I think on the other side of that rage is grief. And even in this wonderful essay, that's where she's crying all the time. I think the rage is actually protecting us and it's safer than grief.

[Anna Martin]

I love the scene in the essay where the author Lilly King is running by the river and she's feeling heartbroken, but she's also feeling so connected to humanity because of it. She's like, oh, my gosh, this is it.

[Ada Limon]

This is it.

[Anna Martin]

I remember feeling that way. My first, my first Heartbreak. There was such a pain in it. And also, like, a wow, I've arrived. People since the dawn of time have been feeling so sad. Like me.

[Ada Limon]

Yes.

[Anna Martin]

That is the moment where I felt tapped into, like, the whole history. This is gonna sound insane, but of, like, human feeling. And it was in a moment of sadness and in a moment of loss. And I guess I. I wonder, like, is it easier to access that kind of connectedness in a moment of pain? I wonder.

[Ada Limon]

Through grief.

[Anna Martin]

Yeah.

[Ada Limon]

Yeah. And I think that's a really astute point, because I think that oftentimes poetry does that, is that we write poems about grief and about pain more often than we do about gratitude and joy and contentedness. And partly because I think that when we're happy, we're not driven to the page.

[Anna Martin]

Huh. Yeah.

[Ada Limon]

And when we're heartbroken, there's this, oh, my gosh, we need to write about this. We need to. It's also a way of clinging to it. Right. There's that great meditation which I find very useful, which is just recognizing that every single one of us will die. The human experience of being born and dying is not exceptional. We will all have that. And when I think about that, I can then widen my appreciation for this time in my body, this time on the planet. And I think heartbreak makes you feel that way. I think there's a level in which, like, I remember exactly where I was when I realized that, oh, everyone's gonna die. I was on this New York City subway. My stepmother had just died about a month earlier, and I was looking at all these faces, and I thought, oh, I'm sure half the people here have already lost someone dear to them.

[Anna Martin]

Yeah.

[Ada Limon]

And then they still are going to work.

[Anna Martin]

Yeah.

[Ada Limon]

And some people have packed their lunches. Like, what, they got up at 5am and they packed their lunches, and even though their mother's dead, they're still doing that.

[Anna Martin]

They're combing their hair. They're putting mascara on. Yeah.

[Ada Limon]

Of course I was weeping. I was like, this is incredible. Like, how. How brave.

[Anna Martin]

Yeah.

[Ada Limon]

How courageous to go on in the world when your heart is broken or you've lost the person that you love the most. You know, this is life.

[Anna Martin]

Of course it happened on the New York City subway. These moments always happen right on the. How old were you when that happened? I'm. I'm curious. Just like, when was it?

[Ada Limon]

30, 34.

[Anna Martin]

Another thing that I'm curious about that you said before you read this essay was you resonate with the experience of distracting yourself from work through love or through crushes, Is there a moment that you're able to share where the stuff of life got in the way?

[Ada Limon]

Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the. I mean, I love love. It's one of my favorite topics. I can talk about love all the time, and I also think it can serve as this way to not be in the self.

[Anna Martin]

Huh? Yeah.

[Ada Limon]

And I remember my first writing residency. It was right after September 11th, and I went out to Cape Cod to the Fine Arts Work center in Provincetown. And I remember getting advice from this wonderful poet, Marie Howe, who said, have a wonderful time. Try not to fall in love with anyone because it'll just distract you. And of course, like, you know, day one, I was like, oh, I'm kind of interested in this person. And it was true. She was completely right. But I did write at the same time, and I. You know, I do feel like I got a lot of beautiful work done, but I don't know if it was beautiful. It was probably pretty sloppy at the time. But I do think there's something about artists that's like, how do we get out of this moment that isn't through the page? You know, we kind of look around and go, oh, that person.

[Anna Martin]

Can we do here? Yeah.

[Ada Limon]

We used to have this phrase that we used when I lived in Brooklyn with my dear girlfriends who are still my closest best friends. If we were going through a hard time, let's say we were going through something with our parents, or we were going through something with our work, or we would say, you know what? I think I need a shiny object. And a shiny object would be a crutch.

[Anna Martin]

Yeah, I'm needing a lot of those.

[Ada Limon]

We would kind of. We even had. We. In. In text, we would say, s O S O Possible S O S O Signing. Yeah. And so I really believe in the power of, like, a crush to bring us out sometimes just to give us a little. A little fun thing to think about. That's not the agony of our own failure.

[Anna Martin]

I have to circle back just because I have to know what happened to this writing retreat or this retreat crush. Did you ultimately confess your feelings? Was it a thing that you kept inside? What was. What was the deal with that crush?

[Ada Limon]

Oh, no. Yeah. No, we ended up dating until the residency was over.

[Anna Martin]

Oh, wow. Okay. So it's very similar to this essay, really? And you were okay. And you were able to write through it as much as you. I mean, did you find it distracting in the way that Lily King outlines and in the way your poet Friend warned you about.

[Ada Limon]

Yeah, I think that it was a friendship too. So I think that it was different. I don't think it had the level of extreme desire that has. That's in this essay where you can almost feel that sort of obsession.

[Anna Martin]

Yeah.

[Ada Limon]

So it allowed for a little bit more space to think when the retreat.

[Anna Martin]

Came to an end. Was it sort of like, and this crush will remain here and we will go our separate ways, or was it like a, you know, with Lily King? In this essay, there's a multiple sort of stutter stops in terms at the end. What was your experience?

[Ada Limon]

We wrote letters.

[Anna Martin]

Oh, my gosh, of course you did.

[Ada Limon]

We love letters. You know, poets, love letters. We just, you know, it's. It's like the best thing. Write us a letter. We're like, oh, well, I was going.

[Anna Martin]

To say it makes me think of the. Lily King talks about the poetry of the poet, the object of her desire in the essay. And he's writing those sex poems about bees and pollen. And it's a bit sounding cliche to me. It's like, you know, birds and the bees, you know, tells oldest time, I guess. I wonder, like, when you are writing love poems or love letters. I don't know, like, how do you write a good one? How do you write one that. That sticks?

[Ada Limon]

Yeah. I do think that the hardest poems I've ever written have been love poems. And I think there's a risk to it. If you write a love poem to someone you are in love with at the moment, there is this fear, right, that, oh my God, I'm admitting this love. What if, God forbid, right, Something happens and then someday I'm gonna have to read this poem and think that doesn't exist anymore.

[Anna Martin]

Yeah. How do you keep yourself in the moment then? When you're writing a love poem that you want to resonate to someone you're in love with now?

[Ada Limon]

Yeah. I mean, I've written lots of love poems to my husband and I just have to go with the joy of it. I. And really trying to get that love right and not to be hokey about it. Right. Like I. I want the love poem to be really for him. That's how I stay in the moment, is I really focus on him. And how can I make it like this is us? It's not love with a capital L, it's our love, which is, with a little lowercase love that is daily and needy and beautiful in its own way. It's epic in its own way, but it's not shouting on a mountaintop it's whispering and it's the breeze in the curtains. As opposed to the storms.

[Anna Martin]

Yeah. I mean, this is really making me think of one of my favorite poems of yours. It's called Love Poem With Apologies for my Appearance.

[Ada Limon]

I actually marked that.

[Anna Martin]

Oh, can you read it?

[Ada Limon]

Yes.

[Anna Martin]

I love this one.

[Ada Limon]

It resonates with this essay too, because of the moment where she talks about. It's a different. The different kind of love, the mutual love at the very end when she marries her husband. And this is very much for Lucas, my husband. Love poem with apologies for my appearance. Sometimes I think you get the worst of me. The much loved loose forest green sweatpants. The long braless days, hair knotted and uncivilized. A shadowed brow where the devilish thoughts do their hoofed dance on the brain. I'd like to say this means I love you. The stained white cotton T shirt, the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange peels on my desk. But it's different than that. I move in this house with you the way I move in my mind, unencumbered by beauty's cage. I do like I do in the tall grass. More animal me than much else. I'm wrong. It is that I love you. But it's more that when you say it back. Lights out, a cold wind through curtains. For maybe the first time in my life, I believe it.

[Anna Martin]

I love that a love poem can have stained sweatpants in it. It feels so deeply real.

[Ada Limon]

Thank you.

[Anna Martin]

How does your husband Lucas, react to a poem like this?

[Ada Limon]

So often he'll be, you know, this became a true story, which was. I would do all of these events and dress up and, you know, wear these suits and dresses and, you know, get your hair done and your nails done. You know, the whole thing that you do for all of this crowd. And he would see these pictures of me on Facebook or on Instagram and he'd say, wow, you look really beautiful out there. And I sort of had this moment where I thought, oh, he hasn't seen that meme. You know, he gets the writer meme. And he loved it. He loves his poem.

[Anna Martin]

You said that love poems are the hardest to write, maybe the scariest to write. There's so much at stake. But it sounds like you're not as interested in writing safe poems right now. Is that fair to say?

[Ada Limon]

I think that's true. I think that's true. And I think that trying to write towards a happiness or towards gratitude or, you know, I think it's really hard. It is easier to plummet into the bottomless pit of despair. And it is easier to write poems from there. It is harder to choose life. You know, it is harder to say, I am going to fling my body back into the uncertain tornado of the world like this is. I'm gonna do it again. Here I go. Here I go again.

[Anna Martin]

Do I hear birds? Beautiful birds in your background. That is so nice.

[Ada Limon]

The rain just stopped, so the birds are coming out.

[Anna Martin]

Oh, there's a metaphor there. A poet could plum.

[Ada Limon]

Yeah, yeah.

[Anna Martin]

Ada Limon, thank you so much for this conversation.

[Ada Limon]

Thank you. Thank you. It was a real pleasure to talk to you.

[Anna Martin]

As Poet Laureate, Ada Limon edited a collection called you Are Poetry in the Natural World. We'll link to it in our show notes. Limon also has a new book called New and Selected Poems coming out in September. Today's essayist Lilly King is a celebrated fiction writer whose latest novel is called Heart the Lover. It's out in October. This episode was produced by Reeva Goldberg. It was edited by Gianna Palmer and our executive producer, Jen Poyant. Production management by Christina Josa. The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music in this episode by Alicia Be Itup, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Dan Powell, Roman Nimisto and Carol Savaro. This episode was mixed by Sonia Herrero with studio support from Maddie Masiello and Nick Pittman. Special thanks to Mahima Chablani, Nell Gillogli and Jeffrey Miranda. And to our video team, Brooke Minters, Felice Leone, Michael Cordero and Sawyer Roquet. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Mia Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects. If you want to submit an essay or a tiny love story to the New York Times, we have the instructions in our show notes. I'm Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.