'You Are Here': U.S. poet laureate unveils Poetry in the Parks project
Oconaluftee Visitor Center. File photo
Anyone who has ever found themselves looking at a public map — from a trailhead to a mall directory — has seen that little arrow or star or red dot accompanied by the words “you are here.”
For most people, those words serve to situate us within a particular environment. For United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón, those words inspired a national initiative bridging poetry and nature.
Poetry in the Parks is part of Limón’s signature project as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. Together with the National Park Service and Library of Congress, Limón and the Poetry Society of America have worked to install poetry on picnic tables in seven national parks across the country.
As public works of art, each picnic table will feature a historic American poem selected by Limón, intended to encourage visitors to pay deeper attention to their surroundings and connect with the natural world.
“Poetry can really make you pay attention,” Limón said of the project. “It can make you think because it slows you down. You don’t read poetry for meaning. You read poetry for feeling. I think that’s a really important differentiation.”
Limón is traveling to each of the seven parks this summer and fall to unveil the installations and is set to do so at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on Saturday, July 20.
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United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón is visiting several National Parks as part of a project to bridge poetry United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón is visiting several National Parks as part of a project to bridge poetry and nature. Adalimon.net photo
“For me, the impulse for this project was to really combine two of my greatest loves, and that’s poetry and the natural world,” Limón told The Smoky Mountain News.
In addition to the physical installations, Limón has edited and introduced an anthology of new nature poems titled “You Are Here,” which includes 50 poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets living and working today.
Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including “The Carrying,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and wrote a poem that will be engraved on NASA’s Eruopa Clipper Spacecraft that will be launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October of this year.
When Limón assumed the role of poet laureate of the United States, she began to conceive of a project that could explore the union of nature and poetry — something that has been a mainstay in her own work.
“Those are the two things that give people the most hope and the biggest sense of wonder and awe,” Limón said. “I think of them as twins in a way.”
For the poet laureate, nature and poetry serve similar, grounding purposes in people’s lives.
“There’s not a lot of answers in poetry, and there’s not a lot of answers in nature. … Poetry makes room for breath, but it also makes room for a sense of what is unexplainable,” said Limón. “Poetry is the natural language for the natural world.”
Both the anthology and the park project are also intended to allow artists and readers to be in conversation with the natural world around them as landscapes and ecosystems are altered by the effects of human development and climate change.
In addition to the physical installations, Limón has edited and introduced an anthology of new nature poems entitled “You Are Here,” which includes 50 poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets living and working today. Donated photo
“That’s the kind of language the earth needs — not a summing up, but instead a deep attention. And I think poetry at its core is the language of deep attention,” said Limón. “The anthology really speaks to that element, which is sort of the dailyness of nature, the precarity of nature and where we are right now as the climate crisis changes and shifts our landscape.”
As a location at one of seven national parks chosen for the physical installation portion of the project, a picnic table permanently emblazoned with a poem will be unveiled at the Smokies’ Oconaluftee Visitor Center this weekend.
“I love the Great Smoky Mountains. I have lived in Lexington, Kentucky, for 14 years so it’s an easy drive for us and I’ve spent a great deal of time there and have loved it,” said Limón. “The rivers are one of my favorite parts of the Smoky Mountains.”
For the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Limón chose a poem by one of her longtime favorite poets, Lucille Clifton, titled “the earth is a living thing.”
“With the Smoky Mountains, you have this incredible bear habitat, first of all, and I also feel like, in this particular poem, there’s a speaking to the tenderness of the earth and the way there’s a sort of touching of the earth and it felt very intimate to me,” Limón said of choosing the poem. “Because the Smoky Mountains don’t have those really dramatic peaks, but instead there is a softness.”
Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) was an award-winning poet, fiction writer and author of children’s books. Her poetry collection “Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems 1988-2000” won the National Book Award for Poetry. In 1988 she became the only author to have two collections selected in the same year as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Included in her many other accolades are the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal and an Emmy Award.
“Lucille Clifton is one of my top-five all-time favorite poets,” said Limón. “I’ve been reading her since I was 15 years old. All of her books mean the world to me. She’s really an essential poet to me and it felt like putting an essential poet in an essential place was also a real gift to get to do.”
The poem speaks of the earth as “a black shambling bear… a black hawk circling… a fish black blind in the belly of water… a diamond blind in the black belly of coal… a black and living thing… a favorite child.”
Adalimon.net photo
Included among the poems chosen for other parks around the country are poets like Mary Oliver, A. R. Ammons, Francisco X. Alarcón, Jean Valentine, June Jordan and Ofelia Zepeda — the only living poet selected for the physical installations and a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation.
“I really wanted each individual poem to speak to the natural landscape that’s around the national park,” said Limón.
The installations are created on picnic tables designed so the tops extend beyond the benches so they are accessible to differently abled readers.
At each Poetry in the Parks installation visitors will find a prompt to engage with, a call to action of sorts. Seemingly simple at first glance — what would you write in response to the landscape around you? — Limón has come to believe that this prompt might be the one she has been writing to for a very long time.
“This might be the prompt I’ve been using my whole life,” said Limón. “This might be what I write to every day. This might be it. I think that maybe it’s a core prompt of my life, that I enter the world and wake up in the morning and think, ‘what would I write in response to the landscape around me?’ whatever that landscape is.”
It was important for Limón that the prompt doesn’t call for a poem specifically, but simply asks visitors what they would write. It could be a poem, but it could also be a sentence, a word, or just a thought.
“People can be intimidated by the word poem… so it could be anything,” Limón said. “Just paying attention and even just writing what you see in front of you can be enough. It doesn’t always have to be transformed. You can really just sit and receive the world and write what you see.”
For Limón, writing about nature, writing in nature and writing to this prompt all create a sense of reciprocity that brings her deeper into communion and understanding with the world around her. This is what collaborators on the project hope will happen for anyone who picks up the “You Are Here” anthology or visits a national park and finds themselves at a picnic table covered in poetry.
“What is it to think of receiving the world? That might be a gift in and of itself, to write towards that receiving and to think of that as an act of gratitude and presence instead of the pressure we put on ourselves [to write poetry],” Limón said. “Think of it as a reciprocal relationship. Think of it as an offering. Something is being received in turn, something is being offered.”
