The crux of the power portrayed in Ursula K. Le Guin’s legendary Earthsea series is summed up by one character as “the true naming of a thing.” Each living being has an innate “true name,” and to speak a thing’s name is to control it; to say the true name of a hawk, for instance, is to call the hawk down from the sky. Beyond the realm of fantasy, suspended just a bit above reality, is poetry—a magic thing itself. Like Le Guin, though with a poet’s gaze, Ada Limón assesses the world through the names it holds. To Limón, naming brings more than control. She describes the cold limbo of namelessness in “The Echo Sounder”:
the original object
the thing before it is named, the fish before she
knew it was a fish, when it was just another
lost thing, individual and shadowy, working
its way toward its own end.
To name a thing is to hold it, to understand it, even to love it—and her insistence on finding names pervades her work. In a musing on nature in the poem “Calling Things What They Are,” Limón says it succinctly: “And I began / to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are.”
Startlement: New and Selected Poems is the name of her newest book, a collection of collections, an anthology of older work with a sprinkle of the new. In the 19 years since the publication of her first book, Limón, the 24th poet laureate of the United States, has tirelessly worked with the honest homiletics of a sage. Startlement, containing poetry from six of her previous books, reveals both the questions that plague her and the mantras she returns to. Often, she is concerned with topics like womanhood and death, and it is in this fervent examination of intersecting experiences that naming becomes vital. How can she, as a poet, put concrete words to the vastness of abstraction? “Once, I thought / if I knew all the words / I would say the right thing / in the right way,” she writes in “Literary Theory,” but “instead language becomes / more brutish.”
In “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” she admits to “lik[ing] lady horses best,” explaining, “let’s be honest, I like / that they’re ladies. As if this big / dangerous animal is also a part of me.” Biologically, the similarities between a human woman and a female horse are few, but if a woman is a woman because that’s the title she’s given, then the lexicality of gender equals gender itself. Thus, a lady human can have the same “8-pound female horse heart” as a lady horse. Thus, when discussing the passing of her mother in “Open Water,” Limón notes, “you were no one’s mother, and no one’s wife, / but you in your original skin; right before you died.” In death, that wordless landscape, names are shed. In an equally moving poem, “The Last Drop,” she reckons with her father-in-law’s dementia and how it strips him of language, limiting not only his capacity to communicate but his ability to understand communication altogether. The power Startlement unearths in its namings sometimes comes from negative space, the inability to name things at all. For Limón, as for all writers, death is a difficult thing to put words to. Momentarily, in “The Riveter,” she rationalizes it in mechanical terms—
Her job,
her work, was to let the machine
of survival break down,
make the factory fail
—whereas earlier, in “Cower,” death is a person real enough to imagine becoming:
How scared I would be
if I were death. How could I
come to this house, come
to this loved being, see
the mountain’s power
and dare blast you down.
The poet’s quest is to give language to experiences, to braid the conceptual with the physical, to see “clouds in simple animal shapes we could name / though we knew they were really just clouds,” as in “What It Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use.” Still, just as she oscillates between opposing death metaphors, the ups and downs of Limón’s relationship with words is clear in Startlement’s yearslong timeline. She does love them—she proclaims as much plenty of times—but language, she says, “is of the air / and we are of the earth.” In bouts of frustration, worship turns to exasperation. Speaking of a third-person self in “The Echo Sounder,” she says that she “comes with a language restricted / by its own inability to name things / as she sees them.” When the mage calls the hawk by the wrong name and the hawk does not descend—what then? These moments when Limón is at her wit’s end show a refreshing frankness many other writers would hide. In “The End of Poetry,” a lovely rant of a poem, she writes,
Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and ’tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud
...
I am asking you to touch me.
The work of Ada Limón deals with beauty, or, rather, finds itself spontaneously amid it. Within her writings are swaths of nature, sun-bright moments of love, and bittersweet flickers of joy. In these spaces, where the beauty is so beautiful and the body (as described in “A Good Story”) “is so body,” ascribing a word to a thing could be a whittling away of the thing itself. Limón knows this. When she, in “The Magnificent Frigatebird,” learns the name of the eponymous bird, she remarks, “It sounded like that enormity of a bird had named itself.” In Startlement, as in Earthsea, each creature and concept has its own true name. Limón takes care to show that she does not create the names she calls; she searches tirelessly and, if and when she finds them, holds them tight.•
Join us on November 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Limón will sit down with a special guest and host John Freeman to discuss Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
