GENEVIEVE PFISTER, Staff Writer—

Poet Ada Limón spoke at Denison for the final Beck Visiting Writer Series event of the semester. Limón’s visit was the longtime brainchild of current senior and English Department Fellow Riley Halpern.

Funded by the Harriet Ewens Beck Endowment for English, the series brings accomplished professional writers to campus to talk and visit with students. 

Prior to the pandemic, Halpern approached the organizers of the Beck series to ask if it would be possible to bring Limón to campus, and now, with more campus events resuming in person, that idea was finally realized. Limón performed a selection of fifteen poems, including works of both prose poetry and verse poetry, cracking jokes and sharing the stories behind each between readings.

She began with her poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” which parallels the powerful, beating heart of a female horse with the heart the narrator pictures inside her own body, a heart destined to prevail and win. Other poems read included “After You Toss Around the Ashes,” “The Raincoat,” “A New National Anthem,” “Lover,” “What I Didn’t Know Before,” and “Calling Things What They Are.” Intricately descriptive, deeply personal, and rhythmic in cadence, her poetry captures tender moments of realization, reflection, and personal musings, such as her moment of awe when she saw fireflies for the first time, and why she likes the word ‘lover.’ Fittingly, she ended her reading with “The End of Poetry,” a piece that highlights the frustration of a writer running into the dilemma of subjects that have already been written about many times before.

After the reading, Limón took questions from the audience, addressing such topics as publishing and the importance of both providing for yourself and producing your art, her belief that anything can be a poem if you pay close enough attention to it, and her first experience in writing poetry. In response to the latter question, Limón said: “Suddenly I had this moment [where] I could write my own truth and that felt like . . . freedom.” In one of her closing statements, she highlighted the importance of each person sharing their own truth, because, as she sees it, while those truths may not be universal, they are “all we have.”

Limón then stayed several minutes after the reading to talk to students and sign collections of her poetry.