Ada Limón and Joy Harjo's Advice on Writing Poetry: Two US Poets Laureate in Conversation

Joy Harjo served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022 - the first Native American to hold the position. She is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, a saxophonist, and the author of An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, and the memoir Crazy Brave. Ada Limón succeeded her as the 24th Poet Laureate. She wrote The Carrying, Bright Dead Things, and The Hurting Kind, and published Startlement: New and Selected Poems in 2025.

Their writing advice comes from David Perell's How I Write podcast, Limón's interviews with The Creative Independent and Literary Hub, and Harjo's conversations with the Academy of American Poets and the Chicago Review of Books.

Start With Sound, Not Ideas

Harjo begins "not even with an image but a sound." Poetry for her is not a written art that occasionally gets read aloud. It is a spoken art that occasionally gets written down. Everything connects back to rhythm: "The heart goes, loses its rhythm, that's the end of it. But that rhythm runs through every organ, all the earth systems, the rocks."

Limon composes out loud almost entirely. She once went downstairs to get tea while working on a long poem, came back upstairs, and thought: "What was I just listening to?" She genuinely could not tell if it had been a podcast or music. Then she realized it was her own poem. "The sound was so loud in my own body that it felt like it was coming from outside."

Two poets. Same instinct. The poem lives in the mouth before it lives on the page. If you are writing poetry only with your eyes, you are writing with half your equipment.

A Few Lines Can Hold a Whole Lifetime

Harjo: "Sometimes three or four little lines can hold a whole lifetime." Poetry's economy is its power. A novel gives you three hundred pages to build a world. A poem gives you a breath. The compression forces every word to carry weight that prose words never have to bear.

"It is poetry that holds the songs of becoming, of change, of dreaming, and it is poetry we turn to when we travel those places of transformation, like birth, coming of age, marriage, accomplishments, and death." Poetry marks the thresholds. It is the language people reach for when ordinary language runs out.

This echoes what Dana Gioia calls poetry's function: "creating a magic spell of heightened attention and sensitivity in the reader." The spell requires compression. Remove a word from a poem and the structure shifts. Remove a word from a novel and nobody notices.

Write From Place

Limón moved from New York to rural Kentucky after twelve years in the city. The shift transformed her writing. "Rural life allowed greater tenderness and openness in her writing that wouldn't have emerged amid city self-protection mechanisms." The country gave her space. The space gave her vulnerability. The vulnerability gave her poems their distinctive warmth.

Harjo maps her poetry to geography in a different way. As Poet Laureate, she created an interactive map of Indigenous poetry across the United States - connecting tribal nations to their poetic traditions, making visible what American literary culture had rendered invisible. Place is not backdrop in her work. Place is character.

David Whyte writes about landscape and selfhood as inseparable. Limón and Harjo arrive at the same conviction from different directions. Where you stand determines what you see. Where you live determines what you write.

Poetry as Gateway Drug

Limón calls herself "a gateway drug for poetry." She is proud when non-poetry readers connect with her work. This is not pandering. It is a philosophy of access.

She does not write poems for other poets. She writes poems that help her remember her own connection to the world. The accessibility follows naturally. "I don't sit down thinking I'm going to write a poem that someone else will like. I try to write a poem that will help me or remind me about my own connection to the world."

Harjo shares this commitment to accessibility but through different means. She teaches through metaphor, layering meaning so that a first reading yields one understanding and a tenth reading yields another. "The gift of metaphor enables poems to be constructed with many layers of meaning." The poem opens wider the more you return to it.

Poetry as Spell, Not Sentence

The conversation kept returning to what poetry does that prose cannot. Limon described it precisely: "It's like a song, except all the music has to be on the page. Everything has to be on the page. It's not waiting for music to join it. The percussion has to be the periods or the ellipses."

Harjo took this further. She described attending a reading by dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson in Amsterdam in the late 1970s. He had no band. He just read his poetry. "And pretty soon we were all just like we were all dancing. But it was he wasn't singing it. It was just the rhythm of the words." That experience permanently shaped her understanding of what language can do to a body.

When Harjo's editor questioned her word order in a recent poem, suggesting a grammatically correct alternative, she refused: "This is sound sense." The phrase makes the air move differently. Grammar would flatten the sentence. The poem is not serving the rules of English. The rules of English are serving the poem.

Anchor Poems and Collection Building

Limón's method for assembling a poetry collection: start with individual poems. Identify the ones that matter most - she calls them "anchor poems." Then find the poems that talk to those anchors, "even if it's to disagree or contradict - at least they are in conversation."

Write down simple connecting words: "Animals, tension, isolation, connectedness, ancestors, love, grief." These abstractions provide a sense of the world in which the work is living. Then ask: What have I avoided writing? What must appear? Write new poems to fill the gaps.

"However you make your book, you should be willing to change it, to alter it, to write more, to move it in whatever direction you want to move it." The collection is not a museum. It is a living structure that changes as you understand it better.

Be Obsessed With Endings

Limón is obsessed with endings. "I see a lot of contemporary poets maybe not making choices for endings, just leaving the poem - like having readers in a room and then just walking away."

An ending is a choice. Leaving a poem without one is not openness. It is avoidance. The poem owes the reader a destination, even if that destination is uncertainty expressed with precision.

Poetry Ancestors

Harjo teaches students to identify their "poetry ancestors." Every poem has many. She constructs a lineage that runs from her mother's teaching of William Blake through Hank Williams' lyrics, through Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, and the Muscogee-language orators on her father's side. Simon Ortiz and Leslie Marmon Silko bridged the gap between Western and Indigenous traditions.

"Without poetry, we lose our way." Harjo treats poetry as prophetic by nature. It is "a tool for disruption and creation." When she began writing in 1973, as a twenty-three-year-old mother during the Native American rights movement, Indigenous names were absent from American poetry. She felt that Native voices needed to be heard and started writing out of a need to speak - not just for herself but for a people who had been made invisible.

Key Takeaways

• Start with sound. Compose aloud. The poem lives in the mouth before it reaches the page.
• Trust compression. A few lines can hold a whole lifetime. Remove what does not earn its place.
• Write from place. Where you stand determines what you see. Let geography shape the work.
• Write for yourself first. Accessibility follows authenticity, not the reverse.
• Build collections around anchor poems. Find the poems that are in conversation with each other.
• Make choices about endings. Do not walk away from the reader.
• Know your poetry ancestors. Trace the lineage of influence that made your voice possible.

Limón and Harjo prove that poetry's power lies in its precision and its openness simultaneously - holding a lifetime in a few lines while leaving room for every reader to enter. Athens can help tighten prose, but only silence, sound, and place can supply what a poem requires.

This post draws from Limón and Harjo's appearance on How I Write, Limón's Creative Independent interview, and Harjo's Academy of American Poets interview. For more on poetry and prose, see Dana Gioia's writing advice and David Whyte's writing advice.