There’s no shortage of poems about nature — pastorals that capture the beauty of landscapes, odes that pay tribute to the passage of the seasons. Less common, however, are poems that embody the dark heart of the wilderness, leading us toward both what blossoms and what decays.

In “Thorns,” a poem from Ada Limón’s newest collection, The Hurting Kind, the speaker encounters death and abruptly turns away. It’s a memory from early childhood, yet it has none of the dusty quality of remembrance; the narrative is as sharp as any fresh jolt of pain. It’s the kind of poem for which Limón has become famous, with clear storytelling, vivid visuals, and a final turn that snaps you like a twig.

On July 12, 2022, Limón was named the twenty-fourth poet laureate of the United States. When I spoke with her over the phone a few weeks earlier, she was sitting at home in Lexington, Kentucky. It was the start of spring, and perennials had begun sprouting from the soil. Looking out the window, she described to me what was already growing, though it was early in the season and, she noted, there was still much to come.

— Ben Purkert for Guernica

Guernica: What does the process of starting a poem look like for you?

Ada Limón: Typically it begins with an obsession. Something that keeps returning to me, whether it’s a sound, or an image, or an idea, or even just one word. Then I’ll start to unravel it, or simply pull at the thread and see what happens. In this case, it was the image of the dead goose, and the fact that we walked away after seeing it, going about our day — that decision to carry on and pick blackberries, in spite of what we’d just observed.

When my friend’s mother found us later, she admonished us. Not about the goose, just for picking too many berries. She kept saying, “What am I going to do with them all?” And so we made a bunch of pies, so the berries wouldn’t go to waste. But those two threads, and their intersection, that’s what interested me — the singular death of the goose, contrasted with the plentitude of the berries.

Guernica: What led you to change the poem’s title? Why “Thorns”?

Limón: Well, originally I’d thought about the poem in terms of a kind of plundering. But then I realized, through revision, that the poem is making a statement about throwing yourself wildly into abundance, into joy. That need to survive, to taste, to witness, to experience pleasure. To resist the fact of your own mortality. And it seemed to me that the thorns on berries function somewhat like armor. They keep us aware of pain and death, but at the same time, they sharpen our attention to our own living.

It’s a poem about youth, ultimately. We were so young at the time. We didn’t know. We thought to ourselves, There’s been a death, so let’s celebrate. Let’s live even harder. And we don’t care if we get pricked or hurt or come home bloody.

Guernica: It’s interesting to me that you don’t return to the goose at the end, though there’s a subtle allusion with that last word, “good.” An echo, almost.

Limón: Yes. And I wanted the double meaning of “for good” there — as in good intentions, but also perpetuity.

Guernica: One part of the poem that you edited significantly is the description of the berry-picking. Can you speak to that decision?

Limón: That was a suggestion from my stepfather, Brady. I send almost all my first drafts to him. He’s been helping me edit since I was nine. Anyway, we worked together on this revision, and he felt there was a bit of redundancy in there. So I heard his feedback and then I looked at it. And he was right.

Guernica: How did your stepfather become one of your early readers?

Limón: He was someone who took my creativity really seriously, even when I was a child. I’d walk into his office and say, “Do you want to read this?” And he’d stop what he was doing and say, “Yeah, sure.” I think that’s rare, to be taken seriously as an artist at that age. It was our bond. It is our bond. And I’ve always trusted him with the work. I will say, however, that he’s the kind of editor who leans toward spareness. He was a short-story writer, and he’s always had an interest in being clean and concise. I push against that, and I get weird, and I love that about myself; I can be abundant and generous in my lyrics. Sometimes he can rein me in when I’m going too far, and sometimes I don’t listen to him at all. We’re a good balance.

Guernica: I love that. I feel like we writers often think that the perfect editor is one who shares our sensibility when, in fact, what we really need is a smart reader who reads in a different way from us.

Limón: That’s very true. And another common misconception, I think, is that we writers work alone. That’s one of the reasons I was excited to talk about this poem specifically — because this is what revision looks like. It’s collaborative. We send drafts to friends. We send drafts to readers, and they nudge us and carry us toward completion. I think this idea of the totally isolated artist is a false one. Especially for poets.

Guernica: Where does this emphasis on isolation come from? Why do we fetishize the singular artist in this way?

Limón: I think it’s related to the myth of individualism, this notion that we’re not all connected — that some people are unique, and because of their uniqueness they do incredible things. Our interconnectedness is really important. If we think about our writing teachers and workshops, it’s all about community. And when you bring work to a workshop and people don’t really understand it, there’s still something communal that’s taking place, even if it causes you to double down and say to yourself, “You know what? I’m going to make my work even weirder.” I’m just very suspicious of the idea of writing poems in a lonely tower.

Guernica: This makes me think of the project you did with poet Natalie Díaz a few years ago. I remember reading it at the time, thinking to myself that there really aren’t many poets doing collaborative work like this. But in fact, poets are doing it; it’s simply harder to get published, to make visible, etc.

Limón: Right. And, to be clear, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with valuing an artist as an individual. But I do think there’s something off-center about not giving credence to the community of artists that surrounds the artist, or the community of people and non-artists and family and friends who are helping them live — the people you call when you want to grab a cocktail or sip tea together one afternoon. That’s part of what makes poetry possible, too.

Guernica: How fitting, then, that this poem features friendship, among other things.

Limón: Yes! The other girl in the poem was actually my best friend growing up. I have so many memories of her from childhood. But in this poem, I knew I couldn’t go too deep into all that.

Guernica: Why not?

Limón: I’m the kind of poet who’s easily distracted. I’m basically a magpie for sounds and images. As soon as something comes up that interests me, I think to myself, “Ooh! Let’s go there.” But, at times, I need to resist that impulse. I remember, I once received this wonderful piece of advice from the poet Catherine Esposito Prescott in a workshop at New York University. She said, “You always want to get off the porch really fast. Maybe you should try staying on the porch?” And I think about that all the time because it’s true. I do need to stay put sometimes. Of course, I love to wander and be expansive and all that, but focus is important.

Guernica: It’s funny that you mention magpies, because I wanted to touch on the subject of animals. Your poems are so often suffused with wildlife. In The Hurting Kind, as opposed to your other collections, it feels like the balance has shifted more toward flora than fauna. Do you agree?

Limón: While writing these poems, I was very focused on the trees around me. I think that was a function of the pandemic: being off the road, spending more time in my neighborhood. I would walk the dog and notice how the trees changed from month to month, and it made me feel like I was part of a community, or even a sense of belonging. Anyway, the trees became as present in my poems as animals, or at least they appeared at the same horizon, so that everything came in the same light.

Guernica: I’ve heard that you’re a gardener. When you’re working in the yard with your hands in the soil, are you seeking this sense of belonging?

Limón: I’m more of a planter than a gardener. I just like to throw seeds in the ground and see what happens. For me, it’s really connected to the idea of appreciating the movement of time. So often, we think about time in terms of a week or a semester. We choose to value it in a certain way, then we anchor it in increments. But the passage of time, as seen in a garden, is so much more real. Like, right now, as I’m talking to you, I’m looking out my window. There are hollyhocks coming up that weren’t there yesterday. Columbine just started coming up, too. This is the only kind of time I trust. Do I sound unhinged?

Guernica: Not at all! I live in Jersey City, and there’s very little green space here. I really miss seeing things grow in the way you describe.

It’s sad, but as you were talking about nature and time, I started thinking about the Jorie Graham poem “Embodies” (“Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms”), and that really chilling way in which climate change wreaks havoc on certain growing seasons. Maybe I shouldn’t go there —

Limón: It’s not a question of going there. We already are there.

Writing this book, I had the climate crisis on my mind a lot, and I’m sure it’s on yours as well. I don’t know how we live without thinking about it. But what I most worry about is giving up. Sometimes it seems like we resign ourselves to apocalypse. This idea of hellfire, and everything being in collapse. But then I look around, as I’m looking right now, and I see that a house finch is making a nest in one of my hanging ferns. What I’m saying is, I’m going to appreciate this time. And I intend to fight for this Earth, and will vote for officials who fight for it. If we become too despairing about this crisis, we start to feel alienated from our own planet. That’s where the real danger lies.

Guernica: You were talking earlier about the passage of time, and I was struck by how powerfully you write about aging in this book. One of the most vulnerable lines in The Hurting Kind is, “I will never be a mother.” It’s remarkable how you, or rather the speaker of the poem —

Limón: It’s me. In this book, it’s all me.

Guernica: Can you talk about the book within the context of aging? By aging, I simply mean moving through time.

Limón: Aging meaning living.

Guernica: Exactly.

Limón: One of the reasons for the book’s organization is that I’m really interested in ongoingness. I didn’t want to create a book that had a narrative arc. I’ve done that before, and it can be a beautiful way to shape a book, but I needed something that felt less self-contained. The kind of book where, when you finish, it feels like you could begin again — like spring turns to summer, then to fall, then to winter, then back to spring. No beginning, middle, and end. Rather, a cycle.

Guernica: Do you think we poets have invested too much in this idea of shaping a poetry collection around an arc?

Limón: No, I don’t think so. There was a thread on Twitter the other day in which someone was lamenting that there aren’t just collections of random poems anymore. As someone who reads many poetry books, I wanted to say, “Excuse me, but that is still happening!” Everything is still happening. So many artists are out there doing so many different things.

When I’m organizing a poetry book, I always want two things to happen. First, I really need to love it, regardless of current trends or chatter. Second, I want the book to really highlight each individual poem. I want to make sure that, whatever the order is, whatever the organizing principle is, that each poem gets enough light, so that it can be seen.

Guernica: I often think about the fact that workshops tend not to prepare poets for ordering a manuscript. Workshops are geared at developing and polishing an individual poem. But when it comes to placing that polished poem in community with other poems, it’s a foreign process.

Limón: Yes. And there’s another issue: we often talk about manuscript ordering only in terms of cutting. You should give yourself permission to add! If you just wrote your very favorite poem, it should go in the book, even if you only wrote it yesterday. Sometimes we’re afraid to fill out a book, when that’s exactly what it needs.

Guernica: Can I ask — logistically speaking, what does ordering look like for you? Sometimes you’ll see photos of poets in residencies printing out their poems and then taping them to the wall, rearranging them that way, anything to move them physically around. Do you do something similar?

Limón: I don’t always print them out. Sometimes I do. Typically I’ll start with a list of twenty poems that are the core. With that, I then think about what goes around those poems. That’s how it gets built — from the inside out. The core poems are the skeleton. Then I beautify the skeleton.

Guernica: What constitutes a core poem?

Limón: It’s a poem that’s taught me something, something that surprised me — the kind of poem where, if an editor asked for a submission tonight, it would be included. Or that I would choose if I was asked to give a reading, and I had to choose immediately what to bring to the podium. It’s the poem that most excites me, but also scares me a little. Those are the core poems, because they’re really alive.

Read more interviews from our Back Draft archive.