What I Learned from Ada Limon's "Failed" Novel and My Own
Plus a "Secret" Poem from Costa Rica
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Recap: Why I Failed to Finish My Novel in Costa Rica
In my last few posts, which you can read here, (Mislead by Butterflies, Economies of Beauty, How the Pandemic Changed my Writing Practice) I admitted that I never could finish my novel while living in Costa Rica. I did, however, manage to write a number of poems about the pandemic and about the natural world around me. Actually, it’s more accurate to say, that while I couldn’t focus on the longer work, I found that I needed to write poems about the pandemic and discovering the new world around me.
What Ada Limon Says About Her “Failed” Novel
Reflecting on this reminds me of something I heard Ada Limon say once in an interview with the Creative Independent. She was working very hard on a novel of her own, but hadn’t finished it or had it published. In between chapters of that novel, she wrote very personal poems. The novel still hasn’t come out, but the poems she wrote in between chapters turned into her book of poems, Bright Dead Things which became a sensation.
Ada Limon characterized her book - the novel - as the story of a woman who stands in a field and thinks about all the other times she’s stood in a field. (That’s a book I’d read, Ada! Please publish it!) She called it very much a “poet’s novel.” While she says she likes writing fiction and learns a lot from it, she doesn’t feel she’s necessarily very talented at that and doesn’t feel her fiction necessarily needs to be out there in other people’s hands.
I felt like I could understand that sentiment and process. My novel was difficult to work on. I never felt like it was coming easily. I wasn’t sure I would ever finish it, or that I would ever share it with anyone else. At the same time, the poems, by comparison, seemed to “come as naturally as leaves to a tree” to quote Keats.
What Can We Learn from This Story?
Maybe novels are just hard. Maybe some of us just think like poets and will always think like poets. Maybe working on a really hard project makes everything else seem easy by comparison. Or, maybe by distracting yourself with a “hard” project, you let yourself relax into the other projects. This filters out the material you think you should write, and allows the material you need to write about to percolate up more organically.
The creative process is a mystery. All I can say is that many of the poems I wrote at that time felt like they came naturally because they needed to come out. I didn’t feel like I was trying to make anything happen until I had already finished up a vast majority of the writing. Only then did I start culling and editing and cultivating themes to finish the poems, which became the backbone of my first book, When the Moon Had Antlers (Pine Row Press 2023). (I chose this title with help from my fellow writers in a workshop with Kelly Grace Thomas of “The Creative Crossover.”)
Many of the poems were set in Costa Rica but not exactly about the country or my experiences there. Now I want to share one that I didn’t fit in the collection, but I do feel fits in a book specifically about living in the tropics at that time.
It is (for the time being) just for you, my Substack Subscribers. I hope you enjoy. I’ve copied it below, along with two poems about the pandemic.
A “Secret” Poem about Cost Rica
Faith
A conure crosses the sky in Costa Rica.
Mangos hides under the leaves of this tree, too shy to see.
I sit on a balcony, counting the seconds
of silence I can endure. Ten, twenty, twenty five.
All my life I have been running from this kind of quiet.
Making a kingdom of my own
clever calculations.
But the Rich Coast knows different.
Here a man can climb the coconut tree and fetch
a price for doing small tasks. Climbing, cutting, nourishing you
with something he gathers from the palms.
On the side of the road a woman stands, holding
her offering of fish. Their silver bodies slung together, tempting
the sun to glint and reflect their scales.
Do you see it now? The generations and generations who have pulled
life from the earth and used it to build their bones?
Your breath?
What can you do to return
Such a favor, but hold still, as the trees fatten
with new rings, and mangoes fall into your hands, ripe
as you open your eyes to watch
this ancient flock of conures teach you
how to look up, dreaming yourself into their old sky.
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