Ada Limón: The Painful Kind

BirdNote^®

Ada Limón: The Painful Kind

Written by Mark Bramhill

Mark Bramhill: This is BirdNote.

Poet Ada Limón often writes about birds, and her new book, The Hurting Kind, is no exception. Birds are a throughline in the book – between seasons, from childhood to the present, and known and unknown. That last part, know and don’t know, is what we’ll look at in today’s episode, with two poems examining both sides of that coin.

Things are called What They Are

I went through the feeder and shouted, Grackle party! And after an hour I cried, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder party and the bone on the ground an afterparty.) I get so good at watching that I even dig up the binoculars that an old poet returned to me when I was a kid and headed to the Cape with a lot of future in front of me it was like my own ocean. Tufted titmouse !, I shouted and Luke laughed and said, I thought. But he was laughing at me, he didn’t expect. My father does it. Shout at the feeder announcing party attendees. He threw a whole peanut at Stellar’s ​​Jay who was visiting a low oak branch in the morning. To think that there was a time I thought birds were pretty boring. brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean and the person I dating said, That’s your problem, Limón, you are all fauna and have no flora. And I started to know the names of the trees. I like to call things as they are. Previously, the only thing I was interested in was love, how he touched you, how it terrified you, how it destroyed and revived you. Little did I know then that I was not even interested in love, but in my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

Mark Bramhill: The poem traces Ada’s growing interest in defining the world around her – the flora and fauna, the birds at the party and afterparty – but also within.

Ada Limón: The more I pay attention to the natural world, the more interested I become in naming, the more specific naming I want to do with my own reality, with my own emotions, right? Do I feel angry or sad? Or am I just hungry? Like, what is it? And I feel, the amount of time we have to say we’re okay. And the act of naming birds kind of evolves into the act of naming what is important, what is valued, what is interesting, and what is love. It opened in that direction. And I was surprised there. When I finished the poem, I was shocked where it went. But I thought, right, that’s what it is about. It’s about finding the right language for not just birds, but for human experience.

Mark Bramhill: But in this second poem, Limón examines the limits of valuing birds and the world by giving name and identity. As summer falls and leaves begin to fall from the trees, many birders have had a moment of questioning: am I looking at a leaf, or a bird?

Ada Limón: I wrote this poem, kinda laughing to myself at what you think here, I’m very observant and I’ll really know when I see a bird and then half the time like you, oh no, that is a leaf. . Oh, that was a leaf. Um, and of course, you know — and I know experienced breeders have the same experience, where they stare at something, stare at something and like you, oh no, that’s rubbish. And you know, all this time you’ve been watching it, excited to think that you see some rare visiting bird in the bush. Um, when in fact it’s like, the neighbor’s leftover plastic that exploded on, on the branches.

This is the Season I Often Go Wrong

Birds for leaves, and leaves for birds.
The brown yellow leaves of the mulberry
goldfinches are always falling
across the lawn like ecstasy.
The last of the maroon crabapple
the ovates are song sparrows trembling
simultaneously. And now, when I
I couldn’t stand myself anymore,
a group of sparrows in the field, that is
really sparrows in the field, fly on
the bare branches of the hackberry
and I almost fell down: leaves
reattached to the tree
such a powerful spell for reversal. What
do I expect anything else? What good
is precision in the midst of perpetual
spread that unfolds in the world.

[Field Sparrow song, ML 219693]

Ada Limón: I think it’s really like we like to name things, and in some ways it gives us ownership and connection and we value it because we know it. We must remember that knowing things is not the way we love them. Naming is definitely a way of loving, but it’s not all. I really feel what attracts us to birds is wonder and awe. So I think there must be a balance, right, of the desire for information and the desire for knowledge and the desire for naming, the exact language. But then also surrender to the wonder, the amazement, the unknown, the mystery, and how good it is for the human soul to give up that kind of power and give up that need for naming.

Mark Bramhill: You can read many more amazing poems, with or without birds, in Ada Limón’s new book, The Hurting Kind. Learn more on our website, BirdNote.org. I’m Mark Bramhill.

###

Senior Producer: John Kessler
Content Director: Allison Wilson
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Mourning Dove ML166991841 recorded by W. Hershberger, and Field Sparrow ML219693 recorded by B. McGuire.
The BirdNote theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2022 BirdNote May 2022
Narrator: Mark Bramhill

ID# lemon-01-2022-05-10 lemon-01