Ada Limon: Trust Poetry

I am most free when I am writing poems. There's a quote from C.D. Wright that says It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside of us that would be free and declare them so. There is so much we hold in every day. Going to the post office and smiling through the small aches of human existence, trying to acknowledge the suffering of the world while still buying dinner and admiring the wind coming up through the streets. We worry ourselves into small knots of grim thread most days, but poems give us a little way of noticing that there is also beauty in surviving and living and even thriving. 

So in a way poetry both complicates and simplifies. Complicated because life is messy and hard and simple because we are all going to die and so we get this moment to make something that might last.

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