Ada Limón is featured again in today's New York Times (see May 7 for my post about her in a recent Times story). You might agree, if you've read them, that her poems are worth a second look in the national press and you might agree that, given her circumstances, she's a deserving star. Certainly more so than some have been in recent years. She's earned her place in the pantheon, in my opinion, and is mature enough as a writer to not let the attention get the better of her work.
I'm speculating, of course. But it seems to me that too much attention to anyone's output at any point in a writer's career is a dangerous thing. It risks commercializing the very thing that attracts us in the first place. Worse, for the writer in question, in these hyper-media days, it risks turning writer into celebrity. Not even Robert Frost was a celebrity!
If you can, listen to the Ezra Klein podcast (link above) in which he interviews Limón for over an hour--a very in-depth and instructive conversation! The poet discusses this dilemma about maintaining a sense of who you are as your celebrity (or at least your audience) grows. She acknowledges that it's not easy and that it has taken her a lifetime to get a handle on it.
Now, shouldn't a writer, and especially a poet, welcome two features in the New York Times in the space of one month? Ours is such a neglected art! I would argue no. In fact, I would argue that any writer so featured ought to run for the hills--go, hide yourself, write poems. Else you could stunt your art.
We writers of poetry suffer such ambivalence about fame. Writing, putting something down on paper (on a screen) more than implies a bid for fame and posterity, right? We commit our art to text partly because we want it to be seen and appreciated. There's some vanity in that, but vanity is a human thing and we shouldn't discount its power over us, which can be a good thing if put to the best use (e.g., it encourages us to practice what's essentially a lonely pastime). But on the other hand, when we write poems, do we really want to be commercial writers? Are we really writing copy instead of making art?
To me, that's the danger of being featured twice in a single month in a national newspaper. I'm not saying we should suffer in anonymity for our art. Not that at all. But I am saying, don't kill the artist with the adulation.
Ada Limón is mature enough as a writer, I'm sure, not to be so affected by this NYT attention as to develop an affectation as "Artist" or worse, "Poet." And she is truly a professional poet who earns her keep through poetry (and not by writing potboilers or a tenured gig at Breadloaf or Iowa Writer's Workshop etc.), so promoting her work in whatever way she can is lifeblood to her. She's earned it and, I assume, is relatively immune to the celebrity aspect of public attention. At least I hope she is.
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