When Ada Limón read Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art at the age of 15, she was caught in shade of its making. She opened the leaves of that gift, and gasped: “…I really remember thinking, I wanna know how this is possible, and I wanna know how it is made… I was immediately drawn to not just to the music and the meaning of the poem, but also the craft of the poem… It also made place for the nuance of human emotions…”. (You can read Aswin Vijayan’s commentary, along with the poem here). I have heard other poets speak about the impact that the poem had on them. As Aswin points out, it takes a form (the villanelle), that, by nature, resists flux, and infuses it with a sense of “momentum”, turning repetitions into springs. But it is not easy to do this, to craft language in the image of thought.
I think of Limón as always being lost in a quest - not in a way that is unnerving. She is searching for a language, with the acute awareness that it has seeped out of conversation. There is a gentleness in her framing, that, with uncharacteristic patience, and little fuss, ruptures the pace of the everyday. Her writing, and her persona, exude an energy that slows down experience with the quiet attention of observation. What is written, then, lives, and breathes. It has a life of its own, outside of the page:
Yeah. It’s got breath, it’s got all those spaces. The caesura and the line breaks, it’s breath. And then that’s also the space for us to sort of walk in as a reader being like, “What’s happening here? Why are all these blank spaces?” It has silence built all around it. Silence, which we don’t get enough of. When you open the page, there’s already silence. And we think, “Well, what are we supposed to do with that silence?” And we read naturally for meaning. I mean, that’s how we read. We read for sense. And poetry doesn’t really allow you to do that because it’s working in the smallest units of sound and syllable and clause and line break and then the sentence. So you get to have this experience with language that feels somewhat disjointed, and in that way almost feels like, “Oh, this makes more sense as the language for our human experience than, let’s say, a news report.”
(From the On Being podcast, ‘To be Made Whole’ with Ada Limón)
Consider that the real is covered with a thin skein of perceptive glow; more froth than cling-wrap. This invisible layer holds the world in the image of the seer. What is seen, with attention, is sieved slowly in the layer of language. It takes a tremendous awareness to acknowledge the presence of that layer. But unhook it gently, with poetry, and the words reach that other place - beyond self and world, outside of the relationship of artist with subject. There is a romance in this assertion. “I could be both an I/ and the world. The great eye/ of the world is both gaze/ and gloss. To be swallowed/ by being seen”.
We are not born in the privileging of the gaze, or the vantage of perspective. The act of seeing casts the viewer in an elaborate play of relationship with the seen. There is transformation even in this sensual engagement with the world. We need poetry, because it lives outside us. Through sense, something deeper is awoken, and we feel that lightness of spirit that is essential to kindness.
The miracle of that last volta does the work of a bird perched on the tip of a statue, balancing on a beam of sunlight. That moment is sublime, only because it is momentary. Some things are immortal in their transience. This is Limón’s practiced intuition. The poetry is simply a double qualification, of that which is orphaned by language and world. The felt unity of objects in the body is not a narcissistic act of self announcement. By calling awareness to the fact of being one at the centre of a divine chorus, also implicates the reader in that dance. She has managed to dislodge that subtle space of being flawed, but more beautiful, in congress with the world. This is a movement from the “poet as voyeur” or the “artist as witness” to something far more deeper, far more familiar.
To be made whole
by being not a witness,
but witnessed.
I am a few hours late on this post. It was Limón’s birthday yesterday. Poetly loves her and this is a belated wish. In the past I have shared commentaries of her poems from different collections: The Leash, A collaborative series of poems between Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz. The end of Poetry is one of my favourite Ars Poeticas. Finally, 2 poems from her collection, The Carrying. The poem shared today is from The Hurting Kind, her 2022 collection.
It is almost the cruellest month. Hope you are finding space to write.
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