09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Modern Love' Podcast: Let Yourself Rage With Ada Limón
'I think we'd all be better off if we encountered poetry on a regular basis, because it reminds us to feel, that we're not supposed to numb out, that the weeping and the rage and the grief leads to feeling alive.'
As U.S. poet laureate, Ada Limón has had a far-reaching impact. She has visited readers and writers across the country, installed poems at majestic sites in national parks, and she even wrote a poem that's engraved inside a NASA spacecraft on its way to Jupiter.
Today on the show, though, our host Anna Martin talks with Limón about something more personal and intimate: What happens when writers fall hopelessly in love. She reads a Modern Love essay about a novelist whose debilitating crush on a poet gives her a bad case of writer's block (before leaving her with a badly broken heart). Limón also tells Anna why feeling anger and grief when we're despairing can be the path to feeling more alive, and she explains why a pair of old sweatpants belong in a love poem as much as bees and flowers do.
Ada Limón's recent book, 'You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World' can be found here.
Lily King's Modern Love essay, 'An Empty Heart Is One That Can Be Filled' can be found here.
Here's how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times
Here's how to submit a Tiny Love Story
