Abram: Hello, I'm Abram Van Engen Joanne: And I'm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is Poetry for All. Joanne: And today we're reading a poem by Ada Limón titled, “The Raincoat”. Abram, would you like to read this poem? Abram: Absolutely. The Raincoat. [To read this poem, visit this link: https://poets.org/poem/raincoat] Joanne: That is a really beautiful poem. Abram: It's great. Joanne: Oh, God, do you feel it at the end? And the way it ends, there's something so humbling about it. Abram: Yeah. Joanne: Not just for the speaker, but for me as a reader, you know. Abram: This powerful sense of realization becomes a kind of a landing spot for the poem and all this driving along, singing along and suddenly the sort of epiphany comes out of nowhere. Joanne: You know, a poem, a great poem is never just a description of experience. It's like the experience itself. And that ending, it really makes me, it just helps me remember that. Abram: Yeah. You know, she's done many interviews and she often gets asked about, you know, her poetic process and what poetry is and so on. And she has a point of saying that this marvel, this wonder, this realization, this surprise is part of the process of poetry itself, the experience of that surprise. And so as she pointed out in one interview, she says, poetry doesn't just point out the world. It makes it strange to us again, so that we can remember. Joanne: Her sense of wonderment, her ability to pay very close attention, her sense of how she creates a real quality of focus in her poems. I think that these are the reasons why she has been such a wonderful poet laureate of the United States. Would you like to say a little bit about who Ada Limón is and and, and what the poet laureate is and does? Abram: Yeah, so Ada Limón is the current Poet Laureate of the United States, just reappointed. The Poet Laureate is appointed by the Librarian of Congress, usually for a one to two year term, and then sometimes renewed, as in Ada Limón's case. They're basically the head of poetry for the nation, and their roles could take any number of forms, from bringing poetry into different settings, setting up, you know, festivals, setting up ways of talking about and writing and producing poetry, but basically they're the poet of the nation. And Ada Limón is the first Latina poet laureate that we have had. Joanne: Yes. And she, I think that not only the quality of her writing, but just her temperament, just her personality, whenever I've seen her or listened to her in interviews, she's just so full of gratitude and joy and wonderment. And I think that that's brought a lot of people to her and to her work and sort of woken people up to the excitement of poetry. And this is just one of hers. She's a very prolific poet. She's written several books. She's won many awards. But I feel like this poem is sort of emblematic of some of what her best writing does, right? So maybe we could get right into the poem and, and see how it works. Abram: So let's start with those first couple of lines, and she is a poet who has talked, as many poets have, about the importance of the line as a unit in and of itself for organizing thoughts, but also for organizing breath. And she talks about poetry as focused on breathing. And even in this poem itself, she has that line about breathing, “I could breathe again” as her crooked spine unspools. And so even these images themselves are bound up with their way of thinking about poetry itself as a kind of unspooling of crooked spines that lets us breathe again. So let's take a look at how she unspools the spine of this poem. She starts off by saying, “When the doctor suggested surgery”, that's one line, “and a brace for all my youngest years,” I want to just pause there because I think this is one of those ways when we talk about on the one hand poetry like this is just describing something. It's just literal like this. We're talking about actual surgery. We're talking about an actual brace. We're talking about actual spine problems, right? And at the same time, we don't often talk about a brace for all my youngest years. We talk about a brace for a back or a part of the body, but this is one of those ways of just condensing language so that you get the sense of what the poet herself (and the poetic speaker) is actually feeling about the surgery and about the brace that this is not just about the body and the back, but about the way that she goes through her childhood. That's what we're really talking about here. Joanne: Those two lines, wow, what a way to start a poem. “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.” When I heard you first read those first two lines, the poem begins with a sense of urgency. So we already know we're in the past. This is a childhood reminiscence, right? This is what her youth was comprised of. And I love that second line,” a brace for all my youngest years”. The brace becomes sort of the structure or the framework for all her youngest years. It also reminds me of the phrase to brace oneself, right? To prepare oneself for the inevitability of something. And then the parent's decision in the face of a potential surgery, they scramble for alternatives. They scramble to the massage, to the deep tissue work, to the osteopathy, and the spine and spores. But it unspools just a bit. And that's really important for the narrative of this poem, because this is a chronic condition throughout the speaker's life. Because as we know, when she gets to the second half of the poem, she's going as an adult to another, yet another spine appointment. This is something she will live with for her life. And so she's thinking about this, the very beginnings of this brace of her youngest years, and then thinking about how it evolves across time. Very, very powerful. Abram: Even just to think about the different modes of temporality in the poem that you're bringing out. I mean, we start here in her childhood. And then we're catapulted to the present day where we learn that these trips have continued, but there's a period for reflection, for turning back, for looking back at all those trips that have been made. And so the poem does a nice job of past, present, and future all blending together at various moments. And we get these markers, like, today or when but at the same time you get the sense of ongoingness the sense of being present in the midst of these travels Joanne: Yeah, and speaking of travels I mean there's little things that Ada Limón does in her work where she really is always marking as you say marking time, marking space, marking objects and plants and animals. She's so attentive to detail with the simplest, most accessible language. And again, I think this is a big part of her appeal. Look at how she locates the poem. “My mom would tell me to sing / songs to her the whole forty-five minute / drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty- / five minutes back from physical therapy.” Very straightforward sentence. What I love is that Middle Two Rock Road. I'm such a nosy reader. And so of course I looked up Middle Two Rock Road and I love that that locates me precisely in Sonoma, California, where Ada Limón was born and raised. Right. And the poem is allowing, it's providing me a kind of map for those journeys, you know, and it's also providing me with sounds that seem really significant to me, right? “And soon my crooked spine / unspooled a bit, I could breathe again, / and move more in a body unclouded / by pain.” So there's spine pain again. There's also soon, crook, spool, there are all of these wonderful sounds that are aligning with each other and creating a lot of action and momentum in the lines. You know? Abram: Yeah. And even as you say it, it sounds like somebody who has free movement. Somebody who is. Enjoying the making of this music and, and the music itself is brought forward in the poem itself, right? Because this is a person who's asked to sing and she sings and she thinks that she's singing for her mother's sake, but we get the sense through the realization at the end that the mother is actually asking this child to sing for her mother's sake. So that the child will not be in pain. So the child won't think about it. So the child will not be bored. The mother's actually asking for a song for the child's own sake. And if you think of poetry, like music, you could begin to see that this poem itself is a song that has been enabled by this mother. Joanne: You really can see that alignment between poetry, breath, and song. So as you move through the poem “She'd say, 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, / or how her day was before this chore.” She sang and sang. I love that repetition of the singing there earlier, the singing of the songs, this insistence, and then jumping forward to today. “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 younger daughter when / a storm took over the afternoon.” So this is a really terrific, longish sentence, you know, the penultimate sentence of the poem. And again, so much singing, and that all these ah sounds, song, saw, mom, off again, it's creating this incantatory quality that's really quite compelling. Abram: All of the pieces of this long sentence, singing along, spine appointment, they're continuations of the past. And then suddenly this stoppage. These words, “my God”, come at the very end of a line, “my God”. So you realize. “My god, what?” Right? So the line breaks create the kind of suspense of how What have you seen? What have you noticed? And then the landing comes. “I thought my whole life I've been under her / raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel / that I never got wet.” Joanne: It seems so natural and I'm so delighted by it when I get there, but this is not an easy poem. This is not really a poetic speaker who's saying that she's had it easy, you know, this poem is actually situated in a book called The Carrying, which is a really interesting title. One of the kinds of carrying that the poetic speaker is concerned with in this collection is whether or not she will have a child. There are poems in the book that address issues surrounding fertility visits to fertility clinics and so forth. And there's a kind of a joy in this poem, a deep gratitude, but also there's sorrows surrounding this poem. So elsewhere in the collection, there's a beautiful poem called The Vulture and the Body. And there's a line in that poem that really just stays with me. She writes, “what if, instead of carrying a child, I’m supposed to carry grief?” What an interesting question, right? It's very powerful. And throughout this collection, this is one of her signature moves and I think that this is a very powerful way for a poet to earn the trust of the reader is by asking questions and expressing uncertainty or doubt. As I read the book this time through, I noticed how many times she asks questions like maybe, or what if, or I don't know, or I don't know how much or what would happen if. All of these speculative types of questions and uncertainties. And so I only mentioned all of this, I'm going on at some length to talk about the poems that surround this poem, “The Raincoat”, because to arrive at this moment of joy and gratitude is so earned in a collection that is examining some really difficult complex issues and in a poem that's talking about physical pain that's lasted her whole life. Abram: It's not for nothing that she marvels at her mother at the end of this poem and it reminds me so much of a poem that we did before Robert Hayden's “Those Winter Sundays” when he comes to the same realization at the end of this poem. He's gone through, again, not an easy childhood. And at the end of that poem, he says, “What did I know? What did I know? Of love's austere and lonely offices”, thinking of his father polishing his shoes and making a fire on a cold winter Sunday. For me, anyway, what makes them so powerful is just this overwhelming sense of gratitude. Joanne: What she's saying there is, my whole life I've been under her raincoat, thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet. You know, whatever you think of your reality, who is it that is making that reality possible? What agents of action do we kind of just rely on and assume to be there all the time? And, you know, what moments might we have that kind of, you know, Whip us out of those assumptions and sort of sharpen our realizations as to the debt that we owe to others. It's a very, very powerful challenge in this poem, I think. Abram: So Joanne, with all that we've said and learned about this poem, would you be willing to read it for us again? Joanne: I would love to. “The Raincoat”. [Poem] Abram: Beautiful. Yeah. To learn more about Ada Limón, you can visit our website at poetryforall.fireside.fm or visit us online at poetryforall.fireside.fm. You can find this poem in The Caring, published by Milkweed Editions. Joanne: Please remember to subscribe to Poetry for All wherever you get your podcasts. Please be sure to rate this podcast and leave a little review if you like what you're hearing. And please be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Abram: Thank you for listening!