A Conversation With Ada Limón, in Six Poems

​​“One of the biggest things about poetry is that it holds all of humanity,” the poet Ada Limón tells me. “It holds the huge and enormous and tumbling sphere of human emotions.” When the news feels sodden with violence and division, it can be hard to know where to put the difficult emotions it provokes. Poetry may seem an unlikely destination for those emotions, especially to those who don’t read it regularly. But Limón’s poems are unique for the deep attention they pay to both the world’s wounds and its redemptive beauty. In otherwise dark times, they have the power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires. Limón’s books of poetry — like her 2018 collection, “The Carrying,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her 2015 collection, “Bright Dead Things” — are filled with meditations on grief and infertility, as well as striking moments of insight about friendship, lust and our fellowship with animals. Her most recent book, “The Hurting Kind,” explores what it means to share the planet with nonhuman beings like birds and trees. Limón describes the marvels of Kentucky’s rural landscape and the dusky beauty of a New York City bar with equal care. Her writing is highly acclaimed by fellow poets and also delightfully accessible to those who have never before picked up a book of poetry. Limón is a lively reader of her own poetry, so to structure this conversation, I asked her to read a varied selection of her work. We use those readings to discuss what poetry gives us that the news doesn’t, the importance of slowing down in a world that demands speed, how the grief of infertility differs from that of losing a loved one, how to be “in community” with ancestors and animals in lonely times, why Limón loves “chatty” and humorous poems as much as serious ones, why we often have our best thoughts in cars and on planes, how Instagram and Twitter affect our relationship to the world, why Limón meditates every day, how our relationship to excitement changes as we age and more. Book Recommendations: Stones by Kevin Young Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Haylee Millikan; original music by Isaac Jones and Jeff Geld; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski, Rebecca Elise Foote and Jahan Ramazani.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  I can hear those loud pages. That's the sign of a good book is when you can hear the pages turning.

• 0:12Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is The Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:26Ezra Klein?

  Here's something, I believe, in a way, it's a quiet thesis of this show. In dark times, when so much in the news is so unrelentingly horrible, it is a political act. It is a political act to open yourself to the awe and joy and beauty the world still provides. To sit with a poem or take a walk in the woods isn't an abdication or a kind of quietism. It's a reminder of what this is all for. It's an opportunity to muster the strength to continue and to see just a little bit more clearly and maybe respond just a little more compassionately. Edel Limone is an award-winning poet and host of the podcast The Slowdown, where she offers a poem and a short meditative thought every weekday.

• 1:11Ezra Klein?

  And I love Limone's work. I have two copies of her earlier collection, Bright Dead Things. Something about her work, sometimes poetry feels to me like it is outside of lives like mine looking in. And hers always feels very inside, the warp and woof of life, that she's here to laughing and watching and worrying and using poetry to storytell about it. Her new collection of poems is called The Hurting Kind. And reading it, it put me in a different space. I was noticing this. I really did feel like I slowed down. And I needed to slow down right then. And so I wanted to have a different kind of conversation with her, one that remained true to that experience, one organized around her poems.

• 1:55Ezra Klein?

  And it tries a little bit to recreate that altered sense of time and perspective that poetry can provide, even now, especially now. As always, my email, [email protected] if you've got guest suggestions, feedback, recommendations of things we should hear or listen to. [email protected].

• 2:21Ezra Klein?

  Ada Limone, welcome to the show.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:26Ezra Klein?

  So there's a line from a William, Carlos Williams poem that you quoted recently on your podcast, The Slowdown, which is, quote, "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." What's found there?

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Hmm, one of the reasons I love that quote is because it just ends in "there," right? What is found there? One of the biggest things about poetry is that it holds all of humanity. It holds everything. It holds the huge and enormous and tumbling sphere of human emotions. And there's not a lot of places where we can go to really feel that and to sit with our feelings. In fact, for the most part, most of us are taught to compartmentalize and to avoid them. And sometimes we have to in order to do our jobs and to work and to live and take care of kids and take care of parents and all of those things. But I think it's

• 3:23Speaker 00

  a place to really feel, to really feel the whole human spectrum of emotions. And I think that's really important.

• 3:32Ezra Klein?

  I'm always struck, too, by the question of speed. When I think about the news I read, the social media I consume, and then the name of your show, which I know predates you as host, The Slowdown, every poet I know talks more slowly than everybody else I know. What is the relationship between poetry and speed, and then maybe speed and humanity?

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a beautiful question. I feel like there is so much in poetry that is asking us to sit back and listen, or even, you know, if you're a writer of poetry, to watch and observe and to listen as well, even to the world. And I think a lot of that is that poetry has the breadth built into it because of its line breaks, its stanza breaks, its securas. Any part of its prosody is really telling you, as the reader or the listener, when to pause, when to break. And it actually has a moment in which you are supposed to breathe. And I keep thinking, you know, for all of us who are so...

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Intent on moving forward at the fast pace that the world often requires, I think it's important to remember to breathe. Mary Oliver has that quote, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life? And I think about that a lot in that sense of what is it that we need? And so much of that is the breath and so much of that is to sit back and realize that we've been living shoved forward as if, you know, the wind's at our back and we're just being pulled and shoved in a direction without so much as a moment to even recognize where we are.

• 5:17Ezra Klein?

  I feel a little personally called out by that Mary Oliver quote. I'm gonna, I'm gonna admit. One other question about poetry and speed. It's always an interesting experience for me, reading a book of poems, because there's some part of me that can, in a technical way, read them quickly. There's fewer words on the page. There tend to not be that many pages in the book. Can really blitz through a book of poems. And it feels completely wrong to do that. And you don't really get much out of it if you do, because they don't have that linearity. There, there's something about letting them settle, trying to puzzle them out. I'm curious how speed and reading poetry work for you. Like, how do you advise others to read poetry?

• 6:02Ezra Klein?

  How do you work with that learned tendency to just try to get to the end of the piece?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:08Ezra Klein?

  That we bring to so much else in our lives. Can you give me a, a fast clinic or insight into your own way of doing that?

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course, because I think everyone reads differently. And I know different people will read full books of poems. You know, they sit down and they'll read a book of poems from start to finish. And I, I've always thought that's sort of the currency of poetry is one poem. It's one poem at a time. And I love putting together books. I love reading full books. But I do think it's really important to remember that poets, as artists, really start by writing one poem, one line. We start small. And so I think if you are receiving the poem as a reader or a listener, it's okay to just experience one poem, because it is its whole world. I think for me,

• 6:56Speaker 00

  I'm really interested in how, for the most part, when we read prose, any kind of, if we're reading news, if we're reading fiction or nonfiction, whatever it is, we're reading for sense, right? We're always reading for sense, so we're looking for the structure of the sentence, and we're looking for the period, right? We see where it starts, and we see where it ends. And poetry is going to confound you a little bit and kind of play on your senses with that because we don't work in the sentences, you know? As poets, we work in the line. We start really small. We start with the syllable. We start with the sound. And then we go into the space between the words. And then we go into the clause. And then we go into the line break. And then we go into the sentence. And then we go into the stanza.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  It's much smaller unit that we're working with. And so when you're seeing something complete on the page, and let's say it's only 14 lines, right? Those lines, each one of them is doing something as important as you might say a full sentence, and maybe even more so. And that's because it's sort of working in those spaces between the sentences, in the spaces between the lines. It's got that sense of silence. It's got that heightened musicality. And so, first of all, I would advise that you read just one poem at a time, not to stress out about it, not to see a full book or a full collection, not to pull down the Norton Anthology and think, "Okay, I'm just gonna read this, and then I'll know poetry." Just start with one poem at a time. And then, start with one line at a time,

• 8:26Speaker 00

  as opposed to trying to really read through it fast. I think the other thing that slows us down when we're reading poetry and can help us really appreciate it, at least for me, is to read it out loud. Poetry is meant to be read out loud. It's both a written word, but it's also song. And to remember that if you're struggling with a poem, or if you're like, "Oh, this really doesn't, you know, I'm not getting it," or whatever it is that is feeling frustrating to you, to be able to sort of sit down and read it out loud is gonna slow you down enough that you may start to see some of its beauty and hear some of its music.

• 9:30Ezra Klein?

  That's a lovely segue into how I want to structure our conversation, which is rather than just talking about poems, have you read some and then we can explore them. And I was hoping we could start with a poem from your book, The Carrying, called "The Raincoat."

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd be happy to. Thank you. This is a poem I wrote for my mother. I have moderate scoliosis and it has caused me lots of work that I have to do to make sure I can move without pain as much as possible and all those wonderful things that we would like to do in the world. And this is a poem for my mother. "The Raincoat."

• 10:15Speaker 00

  "When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy. And soon my crooked spine unspooled a bit. I could breathe again and move more in a body unclouded by pain. My mom would tell me to sing songs to her, the whole 45-minute drive to Middle Two Rock Road and 45 minutes back from physical therapy. She'd say that even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang because I thought she liked it. I never asked her what she gave up to drive me

• 10:59Speaker 00

  or how her day was before this chore. Today, at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin but solid song on the radio. And I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My God, I thought. My whole life, I've been under her raincoat, thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet."

• 11:33Ezra Klein?

  Are those ideas that you're somebody who's able to express them in your life and your mother and they come out later in a poem? Or do they come out in a poem uniquely?

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Hmm. That's a wonderful question. I think I am the person who can say these things to the people I love in my life. But I think I'm also the person, the poet, that has the realization. And in this case, all of this was true. I was driving home from another physical therapy appointment and feeling, you know, more open as one does after you've gotten spine work done. And I saw this image of this woman covering her small child with her own raincoat and I had this moment of thinking, how often do we think, boy, this is something I've been dealing with my whole life?

• 12:27Speaker 00

  You know, even as a kid, I used to have to go to these appointments and now I still have to go to them. And then I thought, I didn't go to these appointments. You know, my mother and my stepfather and my father all dropped everything and drove me to those appointments. And there really was a moment where I thought, oh, how funny it is that we spend so much time myopically looking at our own experience and forgetting sometimes about our caretakers and the people who've looked out for us, whether it's family or friends or chosen family. And it was for me an actual realization. And so I started with the image at the end of the poem. And then I was trying to figure out if I could write the beginning.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  And the only way I could write it was to think about the drive and the drive back and forth and how she would tell me to sing. And then, of course, when the poem came together and I was editing it and draft after draft, I realized, oh, right, the singing is also the poem itself. And for me, this poem is an offering for her.

• 13:36Ezra Klein?

  It's really interesting to me to know that you began with the image of the end. Because that poem's structure, which is true, I think, for a lot of your poems, is that the beginning is fairly literal. It's a poetic recounting of a very normal story, it sounds like, in your life. And at the end, it switches gears into this much more generalizable metaphor, right? I didn't go with my mother to scoliosis appointments, but my parents took me to speech therapy appointments, far away, twice a week, because I developed unexpectedly, I think when I was four, a terrible stutter. And so I didn't have the same experience you did, but right there at the end, that

• 14:18Ezra Klein?

  feeling of the raincoat is very, very similar, which I think is one reason that that poem has touched so many people. But I'd be curious about how you you think about those structures that move from storytelling, not to a conclusion, but to a window or something less literal.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think about that a lot because I do work with the material of my own life, as many artists do. But for the most part, when I say the speaker, I'm talking about myself. And I think that when we talk about biography, or when we start to put something together artistically, there is that moment in which you're like, am I transforming it enough beyond its storytelling, right? Beyond a narrative. And I think for me, what's important is to make sure that the compression is there in the music and the images, so that each word has the weight that you want it to have, and that it doesn't feel, even in chatty poems, I like a conversational poem, I like a chatty poem, I like a humorous

• 15:20Speaker 00

  poem, even in those kind of poems, I want to make sure that every single word that I'm using is a word that belongs in the poem, and that its musicality and its syntax is working for the poem as a whole.

• 15:34Ezra Klein?

  That's a poem, The Raincoat, that has had a life far beyond the page of the book it's in. It's a very, very popular poem on Instagram, on Twitter. And Instagram and Twitter, and probably not only them, but those are the ones I know better, have become really remarkable spaces for poetry. I mean, it's weird to say that poems go viral a lot. And and I guess in ways they did in other eras, too, but but they now have this capacity. To be removed from context and ricochet into new contexts. Do you think that social media has changed the way people read or encounter poetry? Or as a poet who I think bridges the sort of pre-social media and post-social media worlds,

• 16:17Ezra Klein?

  how does it feel like it's changed to the way your poems are seen and understood? Or how you write them?

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that, you know, social media is so complicated, complex. And I have my own issues with it, as many people do, especially with the toxicity of spaces created in ethereal, ethereal worlds. I think for me, it is actually really amazing how poems are shared online. And I think it's maybe one of the things that will make me stay on social media. And I believe it, like every time I think, oh, I'm gonna get off, you know? Someone will tweet a poem I've never read before. And, you know, it could just be a Merwin poem or someone I know well, but I hadn't read that particular poem. And I just can be moved to tears.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  And it feels sort of otherworldly that a space that can be so interested in toxicity can also be this space for this wonderful way of sharing poetry and helping it flourish. And I think it goes back to that idea of sharing one poem at a time, that it's not always about the artist, it's not always about the book, it's not always about the larger ideas behind everything. It's just the poem. And then the poem kind of gets to do its work on its own, which is wonderful. Like you talked about the raincoat. And it does feel like that poem is beyond me now. It's out in the world, it's doing its thing. It's, you know, it's kind of looking back at me going like, oh, yeah, remember when we used to hang together? You know, but it's, it's gone.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  You know, I still have my connection to it, I always will. But it's a little overwhelming to see how many folks have their own connection to it. But it's really beautiful.

• 18:02Ezra Klein?

  I'd like to have you read another poem, this one out of the new book, The Hurting Kind, called Foling Season.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Fowling Season One In the dew-saturated, foot-high blades of grass, we stand amongst a sea of foals, mare and foal, mare and foal. All over the soft hillside, there are twos, small duos ringing harmoniously in the cold, swallows diving in and out, their fabled forked tail wear. The story says, "The fireball hit it as it flew to bring fire to humanity." Our friend, the Irishman, drives us in the gator to sit amongst them, everywhere doubles of horses, still leaning on each other,

• 18:58Speaker 00

  still nuzzling and curious with each new image. Two Two female horses, retired mares separated by a sliding barn door, knows each other. Neither of them will get pregnant again. Their job is just to be a horse. Sometimes, though, they cling to one another, find a friend, and will whine all night for the friend to be released. Through the gate, the noses touch, and you can almost hear, "Are you okay? Are you okay?"

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Three "I will never be a mother." That's all. That's the whole thought. I could say it returns to me, watching the horses, which is true. But also, I could say that it came to me as the swallows circled us over and over, something about that myth of their tale, how generosity is punished by the gods. But isn't that going too far? I saw a mare with her foal, and then many mares with many foals, and I thought simply, "I will never be a mother."

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Four.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  One fool is a biter, and you must watch him as he bares his teeth and goes for the soft spot. He's brilliant, leggy, and comes right at me as if directed by some greater gravity. And I stand firm and put my hand out first, rub the long, white marking on his forehead, silence his need for biting with affection. I love his selfishness, our selfishness, the two of us testing each other swallows all around us. Every now and then, his teeth come at me once again. He wants to teach me something, to get me where it hurts.

• 21:03Ezra Klein?

  I think of you in this over the last couple of years. And the first of your books I read was Bright Dead Things, but is one of the great poets of loss, of an era when a lot of people feel a lot of loss. And this poem is about a very particular kind of loss, I think, which is a loss of something we don't have, something that maybe one will never have. How do you write about that? How do you think about writing about that?

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Hmm, I don't know how you not write about it. I would love to sometimes not write about things, but it honestly helps me heal. It helps me figure out where I am, where I want to be, where I want to go. Sometimes it just helps me figure out what's happening. And I write those poems, this poem in particular, I wrote really just for myself. I had that moment in the field and I thought, I want to write that down. And I think it was very important for me to stay true, to not have all of the attachments around it, to not have...

• 22:16Speaker 00

  A drama of that statement around it. But just to say it to myself and to own it and to know it. I will never be a mother. And let that be okay and let that sit there and let it sort of ring out in me. It was important for me to experience that moment. And then it was just as important for me to recount it as I wrote it down. And then to transform it into an actual poem in those four parts, each of them doing something else. And it became both personal and mythic in that moment. And that was really essential to figuring out how that particular day or particular morning was an interesting kind of awakening for me.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  And it was actually beautiful. Because I think there is that sense that we all have sometimes of letting go of a future that you may have wished for or longed for. And we have to grieve and we have to really work hard at trying to figure out what's next. But then there's also this idea that there are so many possibilities. We don't just have one. And I think that poem holds that in there at the very end.

• 23:28Ezra Klein?

  You'd said there was a moment on the field for you that you needed to capture. What was the moment?

• 23:34Speaker 00

  The thought, I will never be a mother while watching all of these mares and all of their foals. It's a very interesting place. You know, Kentucky is a beautiful state. And one of the things, of course, at its core is the thoroughbred world and horses, the horse capital of the world, as they call it. And it's a very strange place to be a person that is not going to have a child and could not have a child. When in foaling season, there's literally, all you see are mares and foals. So it's just mother and child, mother and child. And I remember laughing to myself that the metaphor, that the image almost felt too much.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  I can't even write this down because it's almost too obvious. Like, the world is just showing me, showing me this. And for me, at least, I had the realization that the world was showing it to me because it was a moment of acceptance.

• 24:32Ezra Klein?

  In that poem, only one of the stanzas centers on you.

• 24:38Ezra Klein?

  And throughout The Hurting Kind, the new book, I think that's broadly true. I would, I would say, and I could be wrong, this is impressionistic, but compared to your, your previous books, animals and plants, but particularly, I think, animals are often what the poems are about. And it's noted, the way they look at you without caring, right? The fox doesn't care what you think of the fox. But in general, you're very de-centered in this collection. And there's a lot of letting the lives and existences of, of

• 25:18Ezra Klein?

  the natural world around you actually act as a, the protagonists of the stories. Can you tell me a bit about either that choice, if it was a choice, or just that change in you, if it wasn't a choice?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  No, that's, um, thank you for deeply reading this book. That means a lot to me. That is very true. It's very much at the core of this book. And I think that if I'm looking at the work of the poems in Bright Dead Things, which began a little bit more of an autobiographical strain in my work, I would say, and then The Carrying, which dealt with infertility at its core. And so you could actually sort of, in both of those books, track a personal narrative with a beginning and a middle and an end. And then I think with this book, I really wanted to, A, do something different for myself, and B, I am a different person, so it's hard for me not to do something different. And

• 26:17Speaker 00

  I was very interested in what it would be to not make myself the center of every story. I liked the idea of focusing on the community. That's around me on ancestors and animals and friends and things that are so worthy of witness and sometimes we forget to look and we forget to honor, right? We we look at squirrels, we see squirrels every day. No matter where you are, you see squirrels and there's a poem in there for squirrels. And I feel like there's a it's a reaching outward to this book and to this work that is very much where I'm at philosophically, I think. The work started before the pandemic, probably five years worth of poems

• 27:01Speaker 00

  or worth of curated poems in the book. And I think that idea of isolation and aloneness. I really wanted to look at it, interrogate it, like, am I alone? I don't know if I'm alone. What does that mean, you know? And I think

• 27:21Speaker 00

  being able to be the watcher, but then also realizing that the animals, when you leave the house are watching you and it's the same three crows and we're having this experience every morning. It started to feel like, oh, I am in community, even though we were all sort of social distancing and you know, in the early days of the lockdown, all of that. I was sort of suspicious of the idea of loneliness because I wasn't lonely. I was in community with these others and some of those others were ancestors and memories who are with me all the time. And I think I just started to unravel that for myself of what it was to be part of something larger. And it felt so refreshing. I can't even tell you.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  It was really wonderful to write poems that weren't always coming back to the I.

• 28:11Ezra Klein?

  There's a term you used just a minute ago, in community. And you're saying that you see yourself as in community with animals, with ancestors. But I want to hold on that for a minute because it helped click something together for me, which I'm not going to be able to get it in words quickly enough to make it work, but maybe I can get it enough that you'll get it, what I'm saying. Which is, there's a way that you treat animals across your books. I've read, I wouldn't say a lot, but enough poetry that there's a certain style of nature poetry, of observational nature poetry, which is nature, isn't it beautiful, remarkable, perfect? What if we could only pay attention to it? Which is beautiful, and I like a lot of that work.

• 28:53Ezra Klein?

  But you treat animals unusually as equals, as if they're just creatures from another place who you don't speak exactly the same language. And this will come up, actually, in the next poem I'll ask you to read, but it's here, too. And horses, I think you practically have this relationship with. If I don't misremember, Bright Dead Things opens with a poem about a horse and its strength, and you imagine having the heart of that horse. Could you talk a bit about your relationship with horses, with animals? Like, how you understand the human-animal dynamic?

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think that phrase that you just said was perfect, which is the human animal, like, we are animals. And I'm always so fascinated by the fact that we deny that in ourselves. And I think it's partly hubris and the idea that we've somehow, if we're animals, we're the perfected animal. And I think we can clearly say, as someone who listens to your show, that we are not a perfect animal. I mean, we know what's happening in the world right now. We see what's happening. And I think there is something to be said for the fact that that remembering of our

• 30:07Speaker 00

  own instinctual nature, of our own connectedness to the planet, I think is really important as we move forward into whatever is next for us. Because I feel like when we lose that connection and we forget that our relationship with the world is reciprocal, that's when we sort of give up. And I don't want to give up. But I think for me, the animals are always equals. We're doing the same kind of work. You know, I look out, and when I'm sort of toiling at my poems, or I'm answering emails, or whatever it is, and I'm kind of in my space, and I'm thinking about this and that, and I look over and I watch a robin kind of got his head down, and he's doing this thing with this worm.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  And this literally happened this morning, and I laughed, that we both kind of had the same expression in our eyes of this, like, oh, right, I'm just sort of toiling over this thing that I do to survive. And I've always thought that was really important. And I'm not sure why it's so important to me. I'm not sure if I can articulate it, but I know that even as a child, I was that person that would deeply look at the animals and the trees and feel like they were as important as whatever I was learning in the classroom and as important as ideas. And I sort of sometimes wonder if we give too much credit to ideas and thoughts and the life of the mind and not the life of the body,

• 31:37Speaker 00

  the animal moving through the world.

• 31:39Ezra Klein?

  What a lovely setup for the poem I'm going to ask you to read now, which is "Service" from Bright Dead Things.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  I love you're going to have me put this on this grape.

• 31:51Ezra Klein?

  Bringing the gray lady down a notch.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  I mean, I love it. Okay. This is a poem in my book, Bright Dead Things, and I think it was probably written in about 2012. But here it goes. Service. Somewhere outside of Albuquerque, I was all fed up with the stories about your ex-girlfriend's guest billboard in New York City. And to make matters worse, I had to pee like a racehorse or like a girl who'd had too much to drink way too far from home. You stopped at a friend's body shop to talk about a buddy who was stuck someplace in Mexico. You were talking, pulling strings and taking pulls off a brown bottle,

• 32:38Speaker 00

  and no one told me where the restroom was. So I walked back to where the hot rods were displayed like dogs, ready for a fight, baring their grills like teeth. I was hungry. The air smelled like hot gasoline and that sweet carnation smell of oil and coolant. A girl pit bull came and circled me as I circled the cars. She sniffed my ankles like I was her kin or on some kind of rescue mission. You were still talking, not a glance in the direction of me and the bitch working our ways around the souped-up Corvettes and the power tools. The pit was glossy, well cared for, a queen of the car shop.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  And when she widened her hind legs and squatted to pee all over one of the car's dropped canvases, I took it as a challenge. That strong, yellow stream seemed to be saying, girl, no one's going to tell me when to take a leak, when to bow down, when not to bite. So right then, in the dim lights of the strange garage, I lifted my skirt and pissed like the hard bitch I was.

• 33:57Ezra Klein?

  One thing I love about that poem and a lot of your work is I think poetry, for many of us, has developed a reputation as being the realm of the sacred. It's formalistically complex, it's beautiful, it's attentive. Poets feel like these more sensitive, out of humanity people, right? It's a temperament many of us believe we don't possess. And you have a lot of poetry that I don't want to call it the profane, but it's very much, you know, you're a great poet of what it feels like to be at the bar at 3 a.m. And I'm curious how you think about that kind of poetry.

• 34:39Ezra Klein?

  I've heard you say about Bright Dead Things that you wanted to write a book of poetry for people who don't read poems. Could you talk a bit about what you meant by that and how it comes out in the work?

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm always interested when people will say, oh, that subject is not poetic enough. And I've also always had that experience. When I first started in graduate school at NYU in 1999, I had a moment where I felt like I really wanted to write about whatever was happening to me, but whatever was happening to me was not beautiful. I was living in New York City, I didn't have a lot of money, and I couldn't figure out how to make poems about it. And... I think there was a moment in which I really felt like writing poetry was not only

• 35:30Speaker 00

  about beauty, but it was also about intelligence. And I thought, oh, I just need to prove my intelligence. And that's a lot of graduate school stuff that's not even really comes with the community of graduate school, but it comes from within, right? And, you know, as I aged as a poet and Bright Dead Things is my, is my fourth book, there was that moment where I thought, okay, you've done what you need to do in terms of establishing that you can write a poem. Now just tell the poems that you want to tell. And I think that idea of unraveling and sort of connecting with subject matter that was important to

• 36:12Speaker 00

  me, that chewy juicy subject matter that you would tell a friend at a bar, or the funny story that you might lean over and say like, I've got one for you. And I thought, I can make those into poems. Why not? I mean, poems and poets have done that way before me, of course, and have been doing it for years. It was new for me. I didn't know how to conflate the two. I wasn't sure how to make that idea of the pit bull in the garage into a poem. And then, of course, I realized that my teachers, who were brilliant, gave me all those tools, which was, it's the language, and it's the image, and it's the musicality.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  And if I can focus on that and make sure that the line breaks are working and that the poem still has its tension, then it becomes a full event, a full transformation. Because it couldn't just be a story. It couldn't just be like, oh, here's the thing that happened. It has to do more than that. And so I think it was, it was a shift in my work, the poems in Bright Dead Things. And I think it's continued over these last three books.

• 37:22Ezra Klein?

  I know many people in my life who will do something that they wonder if they should do, and they'll think, well, I'm going to do this one for the story. I come out of nonfiction journalism. I know many journalists who are, you know, this might go bad, but it's going to be a great piece. When you're squatting behind the auto body shop with your shit boyfriend out in front, are you thinking, this is going to be a killer poem?

• 37:47Speaker 00

  That's amazing. I love that question. You know, I mean, in fact, what I remember most about that experience was feeling somewhat unsafe and feeling like, oh, this relationship is coming to its conclusion. I need to, I need to leave. And I did. So, no, there was, for me, I wish I was thinking of the poem. But instead, I was thinking about really what were the next steps for me? And how could I go find my own identity and pleasure again? And so the poem didn't come until years after that. It was probably, I didn't write the poem until 10 years after the experience.

• 38:24Ezra Klein?

  You can tell me if this is wrong. It just occurred to me literally the second. But I feel like a lot of your poems actually take place in cars. You write a lot of road poems, a conversation you're having with your current partner, an ex-partner, a drive you're taking, the first poem I had you, I asked you to read. You were in the car with your, your parents going to spinal appointments. What are cars for you? Why are cars a good setting for poetic storytelling?

• 38:49Speaker 00

  I'm so pleased that you asked this question because my best friend, Trish Harnata, is a playwright. And she has been telling me this since 98, maybe 97. She was like, you, all of your poems take place in cars. She's the only one who's ever said it to me. And now, and now you.

• 39:06Ezra Klein?

  Me and Trish.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  You and Trish. This is amazing. She actually convinced me, or almost convinced me, to call my thesis for NYU, The Passion Your Side.

• 39:19Ezra Klein?

  I would have said driving in cars with poems.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Which is great. I think that there is that time where in cars, you're in transition. And I think so many poems exist in liminal spaces. And they begin with the idea of like, oh, that's a place where you're often quiet. Right? Where you're going from one place to another. There's this transition. There is. Silence, and I think that's really important for me because they bring up, oh, I remember this other time that this happened to me. I wonder too, if there's something in me that is almost inspired by that kind of white noise that driving can give you.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  It's not so much the music of the world, but almost a hum. And that may also do something to me when I compose. And I'm not sure why. But um, yeah, I think that's absolutely right on. And I'm not even sure how to articulate it. But I know that you and my best friend are now the people who have said this to me.

• 40:28Ezra Klein?

  I wonder if there's actually something about speed, not the speed that you're going, but the speed it forces you to go. Because just while you were saying that, I was thinking that I don't think there's anywhere I'm as creative as planes and cars.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 40:44Ezra Klein?

  I really miss being on planes. I actually don't like to travel that much. I just really like the plane ride, which I know is bad from a carbon perspective. And I don't just take planes for the pure associative thinking of it. But you're a little bit trapped somewhere. Where in my life, I mean, my house is so well set up that for the barest flicker of boredom or discouragement or exhaustion, I have a million salves. But I'm in the car, I don't have that much. When I'm in the plane, I can't do that much. And so my mind has to expand. And slowly I become more spacious and more aware of what's actually being served up.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's the same way with walking. I mean, all of those spaces in which we can't get out of ourselves. I think that's really true because, you know, especially if I am driving. Even if there's music on, there's still, there's so many thoughts rushing to me. You don't have your email. You don't have your phone. You're not having this constant sort of barrage of stimulation. Instead, you're focusing on getting from one place to another. And in that, I think those memories and impulses and music all kind of move together. And I do think they can be seeds of poems when I get back to the place where I can write.

• 42:26Ezra Klein?

  You spent 12 years in New York City and then moved to Kentucky with your now husband. And I'm very interested in that change. It's the subject of a fair amount of your poetry. Could you read "Someplace Like Montana" from Bright Dead Things?

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  I just met a woman in, um, where was I? Where was I? I was here. I was in Kentucky at the book party. And she and her best friend have tattoos of the state flower of Montana, based on this poem.

• 42:59Ezra Klein?

  Oh, that's lovely.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Which is so amazing and kind of intense and beautiful. But I laugh because I don't think they have a connection with Montana. They have a connection to the poem. And, um, you know, which is beautiful, too. Now I'm just looking for it.

• 43:14Ezra Klein?

  You know, it's weird. Nobody tattoos anything from my political columns.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  That you know of.

• 43:19Ezra Klein?

  Never happened to my husband.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  That you, see, you've just asked for it. Now it's gonna happen, Ezra.

• 43:24Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, don't, don't do this, audience. Don't, I will not be impressed. Don't, don't do this.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, it can happen. Yeah, this is a poem for Trish, who we were just talking about.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  "Someplace Like Montana."

• 43:41Speaker 00

  Now, when I go to the grocery store, I'm amazed at the wide aisles of bright food and foodstuffs. And it's nothing like the bodega I shopped in for years in Brooklyn, between the bars we liked. Once, when I was going for groceries, I ran into Tee, and we decided we needed to drink rather than shop, and we did. There were a lot of beers on tap, and the taps were all different, like toys in a dentist's toy chest. So I said, "I'll have what she's having." And maybe it was snowing out, and it seemed to be at a time when every shirt I bought at the secondhand store would turn out to be see-through. But I wouldn't know it until I was out, so a lot of conversations would start, "Is this shirt see-through?" And it was.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  We talked for a long time, grocery bags empty on the chair, and we both talked about moving to someplace like Montana, and how sometimes it would be nice to see more sky than just this little square between the bridges and buildings. But then we'd miss Brooklyn and each other, and we ordered another beer. Tee was writing a play, also some articles, and we both just needed some money and maybe to make out with someone who wasn't an asshole. But also, we wanted to make great art. Tee was really good at naming things, so we decided she should be a titologist. And she liked that, so she agreed.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  What do we do if we lived in someplace like Montana? We'd go for walks, and look at trees, and write, and look at the sky. Yes, and we'd cook and go to those huge grocery stores that have toy cars attached to the carts so kids can pretend to be driving. Yes, and we'd probably have kids, too. All of this seemed really far off and not like us at all, so we ordered another beer and said, "Life is long." Now I'm walking around the grocery store in Kentucky, and I've just looked at trees and sky. And I should write something. So I asked T to tell me what to write about. She says saturation.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  And I think of that feeling when you're really full or life is full and you can't think of anything else that could fit in it. But then even more sky comes, more days. And there is so much to remember and swallow. I asked T what I should call the thing I write about saturation because she's a titologist. And she says, someplace like Montana.

• 46:21Ezra Klein?

  I want to hold on that idea of life feeling full. You have that recounting early in the poem of talking with Trish. And you both saying, wouldn't it be nice to move someplace like Montana? But oh, my God, we'd miss Brooklyn and the hubbub and each other and all of our friends. And I think that there's a belief among, you know, many people who live in big city centers that that's what makes life feel full. And something I see in your poetry that I've known and other people have made these moves that I felt in myself for small periods of time when I've changed my life up kind of dramatically is that maybe that's a very literal definition thought about what makes life feel full. And it seems to me that actually fullness

• 47:05Ezra Klein?

  has come for you in a different way. How did moving to Kentucky make things feel full? What was behind it and what was unexpected about it?

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that. I think that's so true. How many times people will say, you know, what do you do? And I think it's fascinating to me because I feel

• 47:27Speaker 00

  Like Kentucky offered to me something that I didn't even know I needed, which was time and space. I mean, I knew I needed those things. That's actually a lie. I knew I needed those things desperately. I just didn't know that they would be in Kentucky. And I also think that there's a lot of people that have misconceptions about Kentucky as a state. You know, there's this idea that it's sort of this backwater, you know? And in reality, I've built a really beautiful community here. It has incredible literary legacy. And I think for me, I really needed to get out of this idea that writing could only be in one place and that writing could also only be

• 48:12Speaker 00

  in a place that was really hard to live. And I think it goes back for me also into that idea of the suffering artist, which is really rampant in big cities and New York and San Francisco. As you know, this idea that in order to make art, you kind of have to suffer and you probably have to have an addiction and you have to have, you know, all of these things and you can't be a healthy person. And I realized fairly early on that I really wanted a life that was whole in many ways. And if that meant that my writing wasn't always at the center of my life and that sometimes friends and my husband and my animals and nature and family, that they take over the center,

• 48:58Speaker 00

  that was okay, too. And I think that sort of sense of wholeness, the seeking of wholeness and the seeking of balance was really a remarkable thing that came to me in Kentucky. And it is a different kind of fullness. And it's also the idea of not always praising busyness, but able to give yourself that break, to give yourself a little bit of ease. And for me, it was turning to the work full time, to really write full time. And to know that what kept me whole the most was being able to align my life with also how I made a living. And that never happened before and certainly didn't happen in New York City, as much as I love the city.

• 49:45Ezra Klein?

  I spent the weekend reading your poetry to prepare for talking with you and rereading a lot of the earlier books. And these poems and then a bunch that you really write from the other side of them, the other side of the move, really reawakened this longing and point of fracture in myself. Some number of years ago, after I'd stepped down as editor of Fox, which I used to run, my partner and I, we left DC where we lived at the time. And we went and we spent, you know, almost three months in like a little cottage, basically, near the beach on California Central Coast. And the very explicit idea

• 50:30Ezra Klein?

  of that was to let life be small for a while, to just shrink everything down. And I thought I would go a little crazy with boredom in a really healthy revitalizing way. And the genuine shock of that period of my life was that I've almost never felt bigger as a person. I did nothing. Like, I did not, I mean, I worked, but I didn't see people, really. I didn't, you know, go that many places. And it has infected me with this horrible lurking suspicion that I am wrong about what my own preferences are as a person. My sense of being an urban person is incorrect. Now, look, I had fewer responsibilities at

• 51:13Ezra Klein?

  that moment, and, you know, I didn't have kids, and there are all kinds of changes in my life. But that sense that we're socialized, or many of us, to think that fullness comes from a kind of hubbub, and to maybe miss what gets drowned out by that, maybe the wholeness you're talking about, has really, really lingered with me. And a lot of your poems really reawaken that ongoing worry I have about the decisions I've made in my own life, and continue to make.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that story because I think it's so true that I did have moments, really hard moments, when we moved to Kentucky, primarily it was missing friends and family. But a lot of it was just like, you know, what do I do? And then, within days, honestly, I was like, Oh, I write, I read, I do these things. And, you know, of course, I had to make a living. So immediately, I was freelancing for all the magazines I left in New York. And I was working in New York on those hours, anyway. But I felt like it was, it opened something in me that I didn't know I needed. And I am always sort of surprised by, I don't

• 52:26Speaker 00

  know, there's this sort of sense that we're often told who we are by other people. You're a city person, like you're the New York girl, you do this. And I remember thinking, oh, yeah, of course, yeah, that's me, that'll be me. And I was, I was like, no, I'm not, though. I'm from Sonoma, California. I'm technically from Glen Ellen. Like, I'm in a very rural place. And I think that being able to push against some of the narratives that were put on me by other people and assumptions, and then my own stories that I would make up for myself of sort of never being able to adjust life. I think that's a big thing. But I'm, I'm sort of, as I age, sort of becoming more and more all elbows when someone is like, you're this, or you're that, or I'm this, or I'm that. Because I'm,

• 53:11Speaker 00

  I really believe in the mercurial changeability of our souls. And I'm counting on it to save us again and again, is that we can change, and that we can shift, and that we can make decisions that will make us feel wholer and make us feel more complete. And in doing so, we might be better people and kinder to each other.

• 53:32Ezra Klein?

  It reminds me of a line, and I think I'm right about where it comes from, but forgive me if I'm not, from the Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh, where he once said, paraphrasing that many of us mistake excitement for happiness.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I think about that a lot. I think about also, like, the emotions that are overlooked in our lives, like contentedness. I think people are often more comfortable with anxiety than they are with contentedness. Because what happens if you admit that you are okay? That's a strange place to be, you know, when all we are supposed to do is desire, and desire, and desire.

• 54:21Ezra Klein?

  What a great segue to sanctuary from the hurting kind.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Sanctuary.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  Suppose it's easy to slip into another's green skin. Bury yourself in leaves and wait for a breaking, a breaking open, a breaking out. I have before been tricked into believing I could be both an I and the world. The great I of the world is both gaze and gloss. To be swallowed by being seen, a dream. To be made whole by being not a witness, but witnessed.

• 55:12Ezra Klein?

  So that one hit me a little hard on a lot of levels. But, but in particular, and I guess it relates to our earlier conversation about the last poem. But that idea that you could be made whole, not by being a witness, but by being witnessed, feels to me, to your point about being told who we are by the world around us,

• 55:38Ezra Klein?

  to the question of how social media makes us think and feel, right? You know, we're validated, we feel real because we're getting all this feedback. It does feel in a way like a central delusion of the age that we can be made whole by being witnessed. But maybe I misread it completely.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  No, I love that. That's definitely there. The idea of needing an I, E Y E, to become an I, the capital I, I think is fascinating to me and that sense of not knowing who we are unless we are in relation to others. I find that fascinating as well.

• 56:21Ezra Klein?

  You have this line in there. "I have before been tricked into believing I could be both an I and the world."

• 56:30Ezra Klein?

  What do you mean by being both an I in the world? And again, it's a letter I, not a, not an E Y E.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that idea that there's so much work that I do to try to, in some ways, reimagine who the self is, who I am, what kind of fear and anxiety and depression and all the things that the human experience can often encompass, that, you know, goes on in me. And there's that idea of like, oh, we've always been like, oh, at some point we can release that, right? At some point you come to some wisdom, some age that you can let go of that ego, that self, that's the heart pounding self, the part that is full of need and want, and the part that is holding on to the thing someone said 20 years ago,

• 57:22Speaker 00

  or the thing you said 20 years ago. And I've always thought, okay, at some point that will leave us and I'll become more the world and dissolve into something more. And I think that as I've aged, I realize it's an, everything is an ongoing process and that it isn't something that suddenly you've done this work and therefore you become enlightened, right? That you like, oh, you wake up one day and be like, oh, guess what? I don't have an ego. I'm not bothered by anything. And instead, of course, it's just the ongoing slog of being a human and returning to the practice and like, okay, here we are again.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  That's bothering me. Here I am again. I'm full of faults. And I think that's at the core of those two lines.

• 58:16Ezra Klein?

  It reminds me a little bit of the poem about Montana, but about moving to Kentucky.

• 58:23Ezra Klein?

  Let me think about how to say this. I think it's an idea that what is poisonous is for us to care about the world's judgment of us, to care what other people think, right? And I think it's almost in a way subtler than that, that it's actually about, one of the things I thought about when you said the delusion that you could be both I in the world.

• 58:51Ezra Klein?

  I think there's something there about you don't really want to know too much about how the world sees you, not because you care and don't care about their judgments, but because you can't help but see yourself the same way, that it becomes the way you see you, right? To give an example from the podcast that we're doing right now, I have a tendency, sometimes these shows come out, I've worked hard on them, I go look at the feedback in the email inbox, maybe I'll search the link for the show on social media, see what people are saying about it. And I have an authentic view, the view I had the moment the recording ended and nobody else had access to it, of what that show was and what it is in the world

• 59:34Ezra Klein?

  and, you know, what I thought of it. And it's very, very hard for the unrepresentative, but nevertheless consensus view, that I then expose myself not to become my view of it. If I'm not just going to be I, if I'm going to look through the gaze of the world, like, I actually become the world, right? I can't keep the two separate anymore. And, you know, I mean, social media is sort of the obvious example here, but it's also, I mean, it's one reason that it was very different for me to leave DC and then, you know, just be at the beach, because wandering around in my journalist friend groups, I really always saw myself as a journalist. I really always saw myself through that eye on me. And I think we're told this should be a discipline, right? That we're supposed to not care what the world

• 1:00:19Ezra Klein?

  thinks, as you put it, you just lose your ego as you get older. And I don't know if that's true. To go back to maybe the example of the monks, there's something telling about the fact that so many spiritual leaders go and live in huts somewhere or retreat to monasteries so often, that if you don't want to see yourself through the eyes of the world, you actually have to stop letting...

• 1:00:41Ezra Klein?

  Either the world sees you so often, or stop at least being exposed to how much the world sees you so often.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. I think that's really true, everything you just said. And I think as an artist, there's a way that you can let the world in too much. It's very easy to get caught up in reviews or any kind of chatter or noise around the work. And sometimes even that's the good things, right? Even when someone's like, oh, this work's amazing. And that's a beautiful thing to hear. But you also have to go back into your room and be like, okay, how do I write a poem again? And you can't sit down there and go like, well, I can write anything because I'm amazing. Because that is not going to work. That is not going to be okay. And you're not going to write good poems that way. And so I have to really make sure that I am leaning into the impulse,

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  the real authentic impulse of making the poem and making the poem for me. And that's really essential to doing what you said, like this idea of how we can be in the world and also sometimes shut the world out. And I think that's important, especially as an artist, to not always be looking for how we are seen. And I think about labels a lot. And of course, as people write headlines, people have to have labels. It's understandable. You know, there's the Twitter bio. There's all these things that you have to sum up these things. And I'm just very suspicious of any kind of summing up, of any kind of this is who I am. Because, you know, first of all,

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  who I am is changing rapidly all the time with what I'm reading and who I'm with and what I'm experiencing. And then the other thing is even I can't sum up who I am, you know? So I don't know if I can trust someone else to do it.

• 1:02:29Ezra Klein?

  It reminds me of something you said in a recent interview. You said, someone asked me what my muse was, and I said, the world? And it strikes me, it's actually the quote that can be read very much in two ways. To the point you're making, your muse can be the world in the sense of you gazing out onto it, or even beyond that, you being in community with it. And your muse can be the world in you are receiving feedback from the world. You know, how do you let the muse be the world, but your world, not, you know, the world coming directed back at you in your own sense of self?

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's a lot of work. Every advice I've gotten from any writer who's really had a career that's been long and beautiful and they've written for a long time was always to not listen when they say anything good and to not listen to when they say anything bad. That you have to treat them with equanimity, that those both exist in the same place. And that is really hard because I think the ego will lean into the good things and be like, I'm just gonna keep doing things like that forever. Or the ego will lean into the bad things and say, well, I will just never write again. So either one is really dangerous. And I have to remember that. And, you know, I do, I meditate every day.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  I do a lot of that work that will hopefully sustain me when I get tempted by either of those two polarizing opposites that hinder creative work.

• 1:04:05Ezra Klein?

  What's your meditation practice?

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  I usually sit for at least 15 minutes a day, sometimes in the morning and sometimes at night. At night, it's usually because I've forgotten to do it in the morning or like I had something early or early flight or something like that. But I try to start my day with it. I also try to do, set an intention every day that I just kind of hold with me throughout the day. And sometimes it's just like, oh, I'm feeling a little stressed out and I'll just say, let's just think about ease. And I'll say, I just keep saying the word ease and it comes up. And then my meditation practice, it differs. Sometimes it's, I think the core is always loving kindness. That's what I learned many, many years ago. And that's my fallback, but I'll do, I'll do different kinds.

• 1:04:51Ezra Klein?

  That's a nice way to get to the poem I wanted to end us with, which is, "I have wanted clarity in light of my lack of light from the hurting kind."

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  Hmm, yeah.

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  This is a poem that begins, the title is a line from the poet Alejandra Pizarnik from Argentina.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  "I have wanted clarity in light of my lack of light," after Alejandra Pizarnik.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  Fireworks in the background, like an incongruous soundtrack, either celebratory or ominous. A veil of smoke behind a neighbor's house, the air askew with booms. The silver suitcase is dragged down the stairs. A clunk, another clunk. Awkward wheels where wheels aren't any use. Uselessness of invention. There's a knocking in the blood that is used to absence but hates this part the most. The sudden buried hope of illusion. Lose my number, sadness. Lose my address, my storm door, my skull.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  Am I stronger or weaker than when the year began? A lie that joins two selves like a hinge. Sawdust in the neighbor's garage that smells of the men who raised me. What is the other world that others live in? Unknown to me, the ease of grin and good times. Once, I loved fireworks so much, they made me weep without warning. I smoked too much pot one young summer and almost missed them until I simply remembered to look up. Gold valley crackling in chaos. Now, it is a sound that undoes me.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  Too much violence in the sky. In this way, I have become more dog, more senses shake and nerve. Better now, when the etches in the night's edges are just bats, erratic and avoiding the fireflies. How much more drama can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams. I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness. Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger. I am soundlessness amid the constant sound of war.

• 1:07:39Ezra Klein?

  I love that one so much that I'm almost loathe to ruin the mood with my questions.

• 1:07:46Ezra Klein?

  But that, that line in there, "How much more drama can one body take?" "I wake up and relinquish my dreams." That's a very beautiful poem about aging, it seems to me. Can you just talk a bit about that idea? Do you wake up and relinquish your dreams?

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I have a very active dream world. I have to relinquish, I have to put them somewhere.

• 1:08:12Ezra Klein?

  I guess, yeah, that works on two levels.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  There's a moment when I wake up that, in this poem, I think it's both the dreams that you have at night, and then also the idea of the dreams of that sort of, oh, right, this is the real world again. And it's not a fantasy, and the war isn't always far off.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  And I think that's important to remember as a human person moving in this world at this particular moment. I think too often we can kind of compartmentalize violence into another space. And at the same time, we still have to live within it. And so that idea of tenderness that follows those lines, it's like, well, I can still be in this place that has both violence and this incredible sort of surrender that sometimes comes over you, like, I'm just, I need to give up, right? But then also the tenderness and the doubling down on connection. And I think this poem holds a space for both.

• 1:09:20Ezra Klein?

  I realize it was this poem that had brought the Thich Nhat Hanh quote to my mind. And so I actually have it in this part of my notes, and I'll read it here, where he wrote in "The Art of Power," quote, "Many people think excitement is happiness." And then he continues, "But when you're excited, you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace." And I wonder if that rings true to you. It goes a little bit to our conversation about leaving hubbub for more open sky. It feels very true to this poem, this idea that maybe there is something about...

• 1:09:59Ezra Klein?

  Contentment that requires, to go back to the name of the podcast, slowing down a little bit and not being so tightly on the edge.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think as a person, I'm naturally wired for anxiety. And I think it can sometimes transform into excitement. And the excitement is much more fun than the anxiety. But I think as I've aged and as I continue to work on my poems and myself, I do think that finding that space within the self that is at peace, at ease, that can find the breath,

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  right, that can live in that space of like, okay, what does that feel like? How are we different after we took one breath? That to me feels like an easier place to live. And I think for a long time, I thought you just sort of lived with your heart, kind of going a million miles a minute. And now I think I really would like to live for a very long time. And I would like to be writing poems. So a very old woman on a porch somewhere, or maybe by the beach. And I would like to get there as easily and as peacefully as possible. And I think partly I want to do that because I feel like I want to honor this work

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  and honor this life. And if I keep kind of giving back to it in some ways, writing the poems helped me slow down, writing the poems helped me breathe, and writing the poems helped me remember that there is more to this world than that kind of...

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Madness and rush and, and the sort of fury of busyness that we all live in. And I believe in that importance of, of taking that breath and, and slowing down and actually being in the moment and being present. And I hope as I age, it'll continue to guide me.

• 1:12:14Ezra Klein?

  You'd said a minute ago, when you were saying that you're suspicious of, of headlines, of trying to boil people down to a label, that one reason you're suspicious of it is that you're not even always the same person moment to moment, certainly not year to year. And one reason I really love this poem as a poem about aging, something my best friend and I have been talking about a lot, is the way that what worked for us, and maybe it didn't, but seemed to work for us in our early twenties, maybe, what we wanted, doesn't really work now. You know, I just turned 38. It's not that old, but it's different, you know, and I have kids and a different life and more responsibilities. And, and

• 1:12:57Ezra Klein?

  it's hard, I find, and I know it's been a theme of this conversation, it, it's hard to track the way you changed, you know, forgetting what the world tells you, you want. There are also things that you told you, you want, and you may have been right. I mean, it's something I really like about this particular poem. It doesn't imply that there's some greater wisdom. It's not that you didn't like fireworks, that you were wrong to like fireworks. It's just that your body has absorbed the drama it can take to a certain extent. And so that part of you is changing. And I think it's really hard to recognize that we change. Sometimes we're forced into the recognition by an injury,

• 1:13:39Ezra Klein?

  by an illness, by grief. But sometimes there isn't that forcing mechanism. And so we run along harming ourselves by trying to chase past preferences, long past a time when our body has new ones.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  I think that's very true. I think there's also, to go back to the fireworks, there is that moment of bravery, and I say, you know, was brave and courageous and this sort of sense of that righteousness of youth that is so beautiful and amazing and fiery. And then there's another part of me that's like, you know, when do we get to praise? Tenderness and vulnerability and, you know, also just a need to be quiet or a need to not be the person that's on the front lines all the time, but to also do some self-care and some caretaking. And I mean that in the most authentic sense, not in the way that you could purchase something.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  And I think that's important because so much of, especially when people talk about artists, it's that, oh, you kind of always have to be off kilter to write, or, you know, there has to be something kind of going on that is a disturbance. And I think if you're really paying attention, I mean, the world is full of disturbances and anywhere you look, you can find them. But the question about that is, can you be still enough to receive it and to notice and to witness everything in a way that's not always about either recreating trauma or in some ways, you know, furiously defending the self that you may no longer be?

• 1:15:21Ezra Klein?

  What's the relationship between your anxiety and your poetry?

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  Hmm. I don't have anxiety when I write poetry.

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  It's not there. In fact, it's gotten so much better. I actually don't have it that often. I made a lot of choices in my life to make that the case. But honestly, the calmest and most myself and most at home, I feel, is when I'm making poems.

• 1:15:49Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a lovely place to end. Always our final question. What are three books, hopefully maybe books of poetry, you might recommend to the audience?

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love this question. I love Stones by Kevin Young. It's a beautiful book. Diane Seuss's book that just won the Pulitzer, it's called Frank Sonnets. And then Natalie Diaz's book of poems, Post-Colonial Love Poem. It's incredible.

• 1:16:18Ezra Klein?

  And Ada Limone, your new book of poems, which is beautiful, is called The Hurting Kind. Your podcast is The Slow Down. Thank you very much.

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to talk to you.

• 1:16:41Ezra Klein?

  The Azur Contra is produced by Andy Galvin, Jeff Geld, and Roji Karma. Fact checking by Haley Milliken, original music by Isaac Jones and Jeff Geld, mixing and engineering by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi, and special thanks to Kristin Lynn and Christina Sami-Luski.