Poetry in Place

Around two years ago, Ada Limón started brainstorming possibilities for a signature project to mark her tenure as the 24th poet laureate of the United States. “It began with me having very outlandish ideas,” she recently recalled. “At one point, I thought we should rent a plane, and put poetry on little native seed packets that would fly out of the plane and seed forests.”

The airdropped seed-poems didn’t pan out, but still, Limón knew she wanted her project to entwine poetry and nature. One day, when the world’s seemingly intractable problems weighed heavily on her mind, she sought solace on a hike near her home in Kentucky. Seeing the words “You Are Here” on a trail map, she was unexpectedly moved. The phrase was “a reminder that I was living right now, breathing in the woods,” she wrote in the introduction to a new anthology, “that there was life around me … and I was part of it; I was nature too.”

Limón’s meditations eventually led to “You Are Here: Poetry in Parks,” a collaborative project between the Library of Congress, the National Park Service and the Poetry Society of America that involves the installation of picnic tables — each imprinted with a site-specific poem chosen by Limón — in seven national park sites, from Cape Cod National Seashore to Everglades National Park. The tables will sit near trailheads or scenic areas, where visitors might stumble upon them and pause for a moment of reflection or insight. Beside each poem is a prompt: “What would you write in response to the landscape around you?” A hashtag allows people to share their odes and musings online. As part of the project, Limón also invited 52 contemporary poets to contribute to “You Are Here,” an anthology of original nature poems (the one she penned the introduction to), which was published in April. Taken as a whole, Limón has said, the project is meant to affirm “the ways reading and writing poetry can situate us in the natural world.”

On a mild sunny morning in June, nearly 120 people gathered at Cape Cod National Seashore for the unveiling of the first table, overlaid with a poem by Mary Oliver, the soulful poet and essayist who lived in nearby Provincetown for 50 years and frequented the park’s forests and beaches. Oliver died in 2019, but her estate recently donated the poet’s personal archive to the Library of Congress, a development that smoothed the way for using her well-loved poem “Can You Imagine?” for the table. In the piece, Oliver playfully wonders if trees “stand there loving every / minute of it; the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings / of the years slowly and without a sound / thickening.” As Limón recited the poem, the trees behind her whispered in a breeze.

In person, Limón, 48, is warm and charming. “Step into my office,” she said, as I sat down with her at a (different) picnic table just before the event. Her friendly aura might not immediately read as bookish, but of course, she is. She has authored six collections of poems, including “The Hurting Kind” and “The Carrying,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2018. Born in California, Limón is of Mexican ancestry, and she is the first Latina to hold the U.S. poet laureate title.

She’s in esteemed company. Early on, the likes of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Frost were tapped for the position, which was created in 1937 as the “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.” In 1985, Congress voted to change the name to “U.S. Poet Laureate,” and since then, luminaries such as Louise Glück, Robert Hass and Tracy K. Smith have held the role, which has become more public-facing. Robert Pinsky, who served in the late 1990s, launched the “Favorite Poem Project,” in which everyday Americans were filmed reading beloved poems and sharing personal stories. Joy Harjo, who served before Limón, helped create a digital map and audio archive showcasing the work of Native American poets. In 2023, Limón was invited to serve a second term (for two years) to continue work on her project.

Limón said it can be tempting to think of nature as “something we go to visit,” but her hope is that the park poems will remind visitors of their connection to the world around them, wherever they are. Awareness of place, she suggested, can make people more mindful of how they live and invite change. “If we can write a line or two in response to the natural world, maybe that will help us be better stewards of the planet,” she said.

Choosing poems for the tables, she said, was “fun, but really hard.” Limón and a few well-read colleagues created a Google folder for each park and shared contenders that might suit each landscape. Practical concerns like subject matter (nothing too heartbreaking) and length (they wanted the whole poem to fit comfortably on the tabletop) helped narrow the field. “A lot of my favorite poets write epically long poems,” she said.

Although the two-year planning process was a group effort — she said some weekly Zoom meetings could involve dozens of people discussing everything from layout to accessibility — Limón had final say on the park locations, which included several personal picks. Her brother worked for three years as a ranger at Mount Rainier National Park, where a table displaying A.R. Ammons’ poem “Uppermost” now sits. The poem imagines a grain of rock on a mountaintop as “ready to float, / exposed / to summit wind.”

Cape Cod National Seashore, too, is a special place for Limón. Two weeks after 9/11, she and a friend drove there from Brooklyn, where she lived at the time, for a seven-month residency at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center. Each day, she took long walks through the dunes to settle her mind before writing. The experience reinforced for her “the healing power of poetry and nature combined, and the way it can bring you back to your most rooted self,” she told the crowd in June.

After her remarks, Limón joined most of the attendees on a guided walk along the Beech Forest Trail, where Oliver sometimes hid pencils among the pitch pines and oaks, in case she was without one when an idea struck. Ranger Aleutia Scott said that when she came to the Cape from New Orleans five years ago, she was told to read Oliver’s poetry to orient herself. “I was like, ‘OK, I know exactly where I am now,’” she said. “I could hear the echoings of the words I had already read.”

Ofelia Zepeda, a renowned writer and linguist whose work will be added to Arizona’s Saguaro National Park in December — and who is the only living poet to be featured in the park installations — understands that tie between language and place. Her poem, “Na:nko Ma:s Cewagĭ / Cloud Song,” which appears in both the O’odham language and English translation, describes clouds dramatically shifting colors as a storm builds, suggesting the promise of rain in the Sonoran Desert. As a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, Zepeda has carefully observed the ecosystem since childhood. “You can’t find it anywhere else in this country,” she said, “so it is very special in that way.”

For the companion anthology, Limón reached out directly to poets whose work she admired, asking them to interpret “nature” as they wished. The resulting collection is wide-ranging; it includes anxious poems about climate change and illness alongside meditations on the food chain and giraffes, a riff on John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” and a joyous paean to sunlight.

In her anthology contribution, Camille Dungy revisits a honeymoon hike she took with her husband in Point Reyes National Seashore in California. She describes the foggy pocket of shoreline “like the soft spot / in your self” and “An inlet / kept safe inside a cloud,” evoking the safe harbor of a long-term partnership. “One of the things about places we love is that our identities are wrapped up there,” Dungy said. She has already begun using the anthology in her “Literature of the Earth” course at Colorado State University and said her students “really responded to the poems in this collection.”

Dorianne Laux also tapped her memories for her poem “Redwoods” — in her case, a childhood road trip along the California Coast, where she encountered the giant trees for the first time. “It was like being transported to another realm,” she recalled. She writes of “the great buttery platters of fungus / climbing like stepping stones / up their shaggy trunks.” Laux, author of 12 poetry collections, credits Limón with helping her access those long-ago forest reveries: “It was like she gave me a key and said, ‘Here, unlock this door.’ And it all just kind of flooded out.”

On the trail in Provincetown, we caught glimpses of dune ponds, and a lime-green bullfrog stared placidly from the path’s edge. Under a stand of old-growth beeches, Scott prepared to read Oliver’s “When I Am Among the Trees,” but a participant jumped in, volunteering to recite it. She had memorized the poem years ago, she said. “Around me the trees stir in their leaves,” she said with a flourish, “and call out, ‘Stay awhile.’ The light flows from their branches.”

Over the summer, Limón made additional stops in Mount Rainier, Redwood, Great Smoky Mountains and Cuyahoga Valley national parks, and she will finish up her tour this fall and winter in Everglades and Saguaro. With all the pieces in place, she hopes the project might offer park-goers “a moment of deep breathing and deep feeling” — some version of what she experienced on that trail in Kentucky. “If people come away feeling like they are paying more attention,” she said, “that would be my dream.”