Ada Limón talks forgiveness, ghosts and fertility on 'Wild Card'

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón recently edited and introduced You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a collection of poems by writers like Joy Harjo and Jericho Brown that pays homage to landscapes across the United States. In today's episode, Limón joins NPR's Rachel Martin to play a game for the new podcast Wild Card. They discuss some pivotal moments in Limón's life marked by natural scenery, like a creek she played in growing up and a big realization she had about her fertility while swimming in the Chesapeake Bay — and go beyond that into conversations about grandparents, memory and mortality.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. We've got a new thing for you today.
0:06.8	Empir's Rachel Martin has this new show called Wild Card, where she talks to high-profile guests about,
0:12.5	well, lots of different stuff, really, but she has this way of getting people I've heard tons of interviews from
0:18.6	to open up in new and interesting ways.
0:22.3	So we wanted to play an episode, I think, might be of interest to Book of the Day pod listeners.
0:27.7	It's with poet Laura Ada Limon, and they talk about chocolate, leg warmers, poetry, and death.
0:33.9	Like I said, the podcast hits on a lot of different things.
0:37.1	Give it a listen.
0:38.1	When's the last time you forgave yourself for something? This morning. Great. Top of mind.
0:46.2	The nice thing about being in my mid-too-late 40s, uh, yeah, I forgive myself all the time.
0:59.0	I have to. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard, the game where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest chooses questions
1:07.4	at random. Pick a card one through three. Questions about the memories, insights, and beliefs that have shaped their lives.
1:14.6	I am a very sensitive person, and so either it's sort of all walls or there's no walls, and I have to find that middle ground.
1:21.4	My guest today is a poet, and I'm going to start our episode with an excerpt of one of her poems.
1:27.0	Look, we are not unspectacular things.
1:30.2	We've come this far, survived this much.
1:33.1	What would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?
1:38.5	This is what U.S. Poet Laudette Ada Limon does in so many of her poems.
1:42.8	She acknowledges the hard stuff of living,
1:45.0	but it is embedded in perseverance and optimism. What would happen if we decided to survive more,
1:51.8	to love harder? And I read that and I'm like, yes, Ada, I am all in. Let's at least try, right?
1:58.8	She's just one of those people who can recognize all the ways that we inflict pain on each other,
	...

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