Early in the book club conversation about Ada Limón’s Startlement: New and Selected Poems, host John Freeman asked Limón about the title of the collection. Limón commented on how hard it was to name an entire collection that spanned her life’s work so far.
She said, “I kept thinking about the word wonder and bewilderment and being in a relationship—also the idea of the world piercing you.” She noted that there’s a Shakespearean word, startlement, that she’d used as the title for a poem that she wrote for the National Climate Assessment while serving as United States poet laureate. While thinking about potential titles for the collection, she kept returning to the word, eventually concluding, “This is what my life is about, which is allowing myself to be touched and moved by what I witnessed in the world.”
Freeman asked when Limón first felt struck with an awareness of her own sense of wonder. Limón explained that she has always felt that way but wasn’t sure if she knew what words could be attached to that feeling. “I think that I always felt in awe of the world, and I still feel it,” she mused. “But I think that there are times where we say—even as poets—that language fails…. You have to figure out the way to describe that feeling when the world is moving through you, and you feel yourself moving through the world, and that’s a particular way of living, where you’re noticing the action of living.”
Freeman asked if Limón had any tricks for bringing herself back into the state of mind in which she had a feeling of immensity or whether that was something to which she had easy access as she walked around.
Limón responded that she often still feels that way. “I think that’s why I’m so drawn to poetry as an art form, which is that it makes room for language, but also the failure of language—that it gives place for the silence, the weight of being.” She said that she’s always “trying to figure out a way to witness the world that’s not always naming it, and yet naming it feels like at least a good relational way to be in the world.”
Matthew Zapruder, a fellow poet and a longtime friend of Limón’s, joined the conversation. He explained that they had talked a little bit previously about editing and choosing poems for a selected-poems book. The purpose of a new-and-selected-poems collection, he noted, was that it’s a form that, in some ways, is vestigial. Prior to the internet, there was less access to people’s work. “But the nice thing about the selected poems [collection] is that it tells a story,” he said. “And it’s like the poet gets a chance, in a way, to tell their story about their work.” He asked if that rings true to Limón.
Limón said that every time she puts together a book, she’s trying to make a long poem out of it. She wanted to have a new-and-selected collection that still made a narrative arc, that made a longer not-just-prose poem, but a poem that felt alive, like all the pieces worked together. While putting together Startlement, there were poems that didn’t fit because they were their own worlds, or they were poems that were part of bigger worlds that would require her to put in a bunch of poems along with them—and so she had to let them go.
Freeman returned to the conversation and asked if there was anything Limón had learned from being the child of an artist (her mother is a painter whose work appears on Limón’s book covers). Limón said, “I think one of the most beautiful things about being raised by an artist is that there’s an acceptance of your strangeness of point of view, right? The blurriness, the way that you may not be able to see things the way that other people see things—that that’s OK.”
Zapruder noted that one way to go into Limón’s poems is to watch the ways in which she observes herself and wonders about her behavior and is confused by her behavior and is interested in both herself and other people. Limón said that many people can figure out who they are and announce it, but she has that moment for only a minute, and then the next minute, she’s forgotten it. “I’m all these things, you know.” She pointed out that she loves her Mexican heritage and being someone in California who was raised by an artist, but that none of that is really who she is “as the sort of slippery, you know, soul that moves through the world and is somehow in relationship with other living and breathing things. That is something that will always be a mystery and always be indescribable.” She noted that she loves that her brain works differently from those of Zapruder and Freeman. “This, to me, is a fascinating experience: that we’re all these souls and bodies moving in the world, trying to function as best we can.”•
Join us on December 18 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Lisa See will sit down with a special guest and host John Freeman to discuss On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
