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By Catherine Calamé

As the current poet laureate of the United States, Ada Limón raises the national consciousness of poetry in this country. She shared her passion with Hotchkiss students on May 5 for the annual Lambert Lecture series.

Limón is the author of six collections of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her latest book, The Hurting Kind. She is also the author of two children’s books: In Praise of Mystery and And, Too, The Fox. She was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in October 2023, and she is a TIME magazine woman of the year.

Her signature poet laureate project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world.

Katie Fleishman, head of the English Department and instructor in English, thanked the Lambert family for bringing the community together each year, and she applauded John Lambert '81, P'29 and his wife, Ramona, in the audience. The Lambert Fund was established in 1981 by Paul C. Lambert ’46, P'76,'81, GP'13,'29 and his wife, Mary, in memory of their son, Christopher Lambert ’76, who died in 1979. The fund brings writers of prose and poetry to Hotchkiss to work with students in the English Department and offer an evening for the community.

Fleishman said it is “a gift” to have Limón on campus to help celebrate 50 years of women at Hotchkiss. “Like light moving across the landscape, her words reveal to us something that was there all along, but that perhaps we had never truly beheld,” she said. “Thank you, Ms. Limón, for the many ways, large and small, that you have illuminated our world.”

In introducing Limón, Albert Chen ’26 and Lucy Radtke ’25 offered their reflections on the impact of her poetry.

“In my English class, we read Limón's book, The Carrying. I love how Ida Limón embraces grief,” said Albert. “In After the Fire, she writes, ‘Funny thing about grief, its hold is so bright and determined like a flame, like something almost worth living for.’ Grief and sadness in my life are feelings that I typically try to escape, to fix, to remedy. From Limón, I am learning that grief is an essential part of the lived experience, that it is the fight that is worth living for, not the victory.”

Lucy concurred about the impact of Limón’s writings, adding, “Limón's poetry possesses a unique ability to take two seemingly opposite ideas and express them as one, accessing meaning that ordinary language cannot reach. In The Quiet Machine, she writes, ‘There is the silence that comes back a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones, and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore.’”

Lucy added, “In describing silence as deafening, she brings together two sides of a complex feeling that is difficult to describe. Through an engagement with the seemingly mundane, she demonstrates that things and people we encounter are not as disparate as we make them out to be.”

Limón read 12 selections and helped students understand that poetry is full of open opportunities.

“One of the things that I really wanted to do, and have made it my goal, was to make sure that I wasn't writing poetry just for other poets,” Limón told the crowd. “I really have always wanted to write poetry that anyone could grasp and understand. For me, part of my art form is to deeply connect. And many times, if I'm being more specific and more personal, and if I'm getting the music right and figuring out where that music works and doesn't work, it's having a deeper resonance. It actually is a container for the musical instruments—the body and the breath. And if I do that right and well enough, it will transform into something that you might be able to catch in the air or off the page.”

One of Limón's poems that resonated with students was Instructions on Not Giving Up, which is about finding strength and perseverance by taking lessons from trees. “More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me,” she read aloud.

Limón’s poetry is out of this world—literally. Her poem In Praise of Mystery is engraved on a NASA spacecraft, the Europa Clipper, which launched on Oct. 14, 2024, and was sent to the second moon of Jupiter.

“NASA asked me to write an original poem that would go to an icy moon that they believe has all of the ingredients for life,” Limón explained. “I didn't know at the time that it would be engraved in my own handwriting on the side of the spacecraft, but it is, and I am very thrilled that it's up there. At the same time, I really wrote the poem for everyone here. Every NASA scientist will tell you that this planet really is the best planet. The one that we're on is pretty miraculous.”