Ada Limon was our U.S Poet Laureate prior to our current Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze. She writes poems and puts them in a drawer, returning to them later to see which ones seem to have bloomed. She tells writers who are striving to make a living off “just writing” that their poetry wants them to live and work and pay their bills. Limon lives in Lexington, Kentucky and is inspired by nature, and of course by horses, being so close to the Kentucky Derby -and if you’ve never read How to Triumph Like a Girl, you simply must click this link and devour every single line. Ada Limon is one of the two poets our dog Ollie loves best, as his chewing on the corner of Bright Dead Things reveals (I cropped the damage out in the photo below).
I’ve created a Cento poem by using existing lines from two of her collections and arranging them into new poems. The first poem is from lines in poems in The Carrying.
What a Day Is
The big-ass bees are back, tipsy, sun-drunk
The birds were being so bizarre today
that brute sky opening in a slate-metal maw
and the dogs are going bonkers in the early morning
and this is what a day is. Beetle on the wainscoting,
But friends, it’s lunchtime.
Lines for my cento were taken from these poems, in this order: Dandelion Insomnia; Almost Forty; The Leash; The Visitor; Late Summer after a Panic Attack; The Light the Living See
I couldn’t resist TWO poems for today. Need I say that Ada Limon is in my top tier of favorite poets? Maybe even my very favorite. These lines for this cento were taken from Bright Dead Things.
Shower Dragon
I’m crying near the shower
changing swirl of hips and hope
part female, part male, part terrible dragon
But I want to be more like a weed
perched on the edge of euphoric plummet
of psychedelic-colored canaries: a cloud
of air, of water, of fire, of earth
of fast wishes caught by nothing.
Taken from, in this order: Cower, Play it Again, Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds; The Good Fight; Midnight, Talking About our Exes; Adaptation; The Whale and the Waltz Inside of It; The Plunge.
Common Threads 
Two wonderful new poems born of Ada’s words. Is it my imagination or is your process getting easier? I’d like to consider a cento project, but I’m daunted by the amount of time it seems to take, reading, writing, and rearranging lines.
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