Ada talks about her time as poet laureate and her new book

During her three years as the 24th poet laureate, Ada Limón said her travels around the United States taught her just how many poets the country has. Limón said people would approach her during appearances to tell her they wrote poems regularly in a journal, or on a full moon or with their children. “They might not be publishing poems, they might not even be sharing poems, but there are many people that are secret poets,” Limón said. Limón’s term, which ended in April, included writing a poem engraved on a spacecraft on its way to Jupiter’s moon Europa and spearheading a program placing poems at seven national parks. Her new book, “Startlement: New and Selected Poems” comes out Sept. 30.

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Limon said selecting the works to include in her collection was difficult because she usually approaches her books as though they’re one poem. The author said she had to decide how to build a new poem out of these collected works. “It was more difficult than I thought,” Limón said. “And once I really sat down and did it and listened to the poems and tried to figure out which poem wanted to have this new life, it shifted.” In an interview with The Associated Press, Limón spoke about her time as poet laureate, her new book and her concerns about the current political environment’s impact on the arts.

In your poetry, you seem to find wonder both in nature and seemingly trivial exchanges. I imagine that has to require a lot of focus. How do you cultivate that and how you maintain that with so much distraction right now?