By Patricia Thrushart, Cofounder, Poets Against Racism USA
On July 12, 2022, the Library of Congress announced the country’s new Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry: Ada Limón. She’s the twenty-fourth poet, and eighth female, to hold this position since the program was revamped in 1986. She follows two-term laureate Joy Harjo, who was the first poet to come from our native peoples.
Those of us who turn to poetry as a means for confronting racism, hate, and bigotry have much to care about when a new U.S. poet laureate is selected. This person becomes the official face of poetry in the nation—expected to raise awareness of this art form we’ve embraced and, importantly, to use it to comment on national events. The laureate’s voice becomes amplified and, in turn, raises the profile of poetry as a commentary on our national life.
What can we expect from the pen of Ada Limón, then, when it comes to supporting social justice causes? She takes on the role in the face of a discernibly divided country, one suffering from ongoing inequality, violence, and malaise. In an interview on National Public Radio recorded just after her appointment, she commented on the role poetry can play in this painful time: “I think that it’s really important to remember that even in this particularly hard moment, divided moment, poetry can really help us reclaim our humanity. And I think it’s important right now at a time when so many of us have been numbed to trauma, to grief, to chaos. …”
In an interview from 2019 recorded by Rachel Zucker in Episode 76 of her podcast Commonplace, Ada spoke about paying attention: “It’s the act of attention, that I get to spend my life attending to the world, the deep observation, the looking, the seeing, the hearing, the feeling…that’s the biggest gift…I get to be present.”
To be present today, to observe and to feel, leads inevitably to the issues galvanizing national attention: systemic racism, gun violence, climate change, economic inequality. Our newest poet laureate will most likely tackle these themes. Doing so won’t be new to her, as is clear from these lines in her poem “A New National Anthem,” published in 2018 in her book The Carrying:
…And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps,
the truth is, every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again…
(For the complete poem, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147506/a-new-national-anthem.)
Ada Limón’s tenure as poet laureate holds such promise, and I for one look forward to the inspiration her work will spark for the poets who write on social justice themes.