One morning this March, Ada Limón seemed out the window of her residence in Kentucky and noticed a hen in contrast to any she’d ever seen. Limón, the twenty fourth Poet Laureate of the USA, has beloved birds since childhood and takes pleasure in learning their names. But the one clinging to her feeder was unfamiliar. “In fact, I didn’t have my glasses on,” she says. Out of the blue she realized what she was seeing: an upside-down feminine cardinal, made unusual by its inversion. “I simply began laughing.”
That Limón’s discovery yielded delight, not disappointment, would possibly communicate to her work as a poet, serving to readers understand anew what they might simply dismiss as commonplace. Likewise, when she selected the identify for her signature venture as Poet Laureate, she picked a phrase well-known to anybody who has ever perused a path information or museum map: YOU ARE HERE. The declaration serves because the title for a sequence of poetry installations in Nationwide Parks that Limón will preside over this yr, in addition to an anthology of recent nature poetry she edited, printed this month.
As Limón shares within the introduction to You Are Here, she encountered these three phrases on an indication whereas mountain climbing, on a day when the world’s many crises weighed painfully on her. Past revealing her location, the pronouncement struck Limón as a reminder. “It’s a recognition of the current second,” she says, “but additionally the unimaginable reward of being alive in a physique on a spinning planet.”
Although it might have been a hefty tome—“I might have beloved to have the ebook be 5,000 pages lengthy,” Limón says—You Are Right here is a slim quantity of fifty poems, all the higher to slide right into a daypack. Limón reached out individually to poets she admires, together with such luminaries as former Poet Laureate Pleasure Harjo, Camille T. Dungy, and Hanif Abdurraqib, inviting them to jot down poems for the gathering. “Once they got here in, it felt like they have been items,” she says. “Each felt like such an providing, to not me, however to the pure world itself.”
A whale-watching tour off the coast of Washington state was the inspiration for Donika Kelly’s poem, which she was excited to contribute to the anthology. The group did see a humpback, however a spotlight for Kelly was the Bald Eagles, flying and feeding on a distant island within the Salish Sea. Earlier in her life and profession, Kelly says, she usually seemed to animals for clues about easy methods to lead her personal life (as a queer particular person baffled by courting, she was particularly impressed by what appeared just like the readability of birds’ courtship rituals). However on the boat that day, Kelly wished to understand the eagles for their very own sakes. Just like the speaker in her poem concerning the expertise, Kelly now turns to animals “to not clarify one thing about what people do, however to know that there are simply different methods of being on the planet.”
Limón herself has returned to birds again and again in her work, generally leaning into the impulse to interpret, at different occasions resisting. She doesn’t see the inconsistency as an issue. “I really love the concept of the wondrous unknowing that animals present us,” she says. “We identify and determine, however we are able to by no means personal and we are able to by no means fully know.” Tensions and contradictions are additionally current in You Are Right here, which happy Limón as she edited and organized the gathering. “The poems actually began speaking to one another,” she says. “There was a mixture of hope and despair and sophisticated emotions with regards to nature that to me felt like a really genuine response to the place we’re proper now.”
Earlier than Limón’s invitation to contribute to the ebook, Ashley M. Jones had by no means considered herself as a nature poet. However the Alabama Poet Laureate had lately had an expertise within the woods that many can relate to: discovering solace for a heavy coronary heart within the pure world. Two years after her beloved father’s dying, Jones arrived at second of respite beside the Sipsey River, in a wilderness space in northwest Alabama—after a relatively treacherous hike that she realized had mirrored her passage by way of grief. “I didn’t actually know if it was going to finish properly for me, if I might come again with scars,” she says. What she discovered, although, was a second of peace, at the same time as she mourned. Unseen birds referred to as, and she or he heard reassurance in “their promise of music.”
“As a Black poet, there’s two belongings you’re at all times combating in your thoughts,” Jones says. “For one, individuals assume which you could solely write about Black struggling. Alternatively, persons are like, why can’t you simply write about roses?” Jones’s poems usually do each, chronicling magnificence in addition to talking urgently to injustice. She sees You Are Right here as a part of an ongoing effort within the literary world to increase notions of who is predicted and allowed to jot down what sort of poems: “No style is off limits for any of us.” Jones would possibly even write about roses. But when she does: “It undoubtedly received’t be taking a look at a petal and solely the petal,” she says, “I’m going to zoom out to who’s rising the flower.”
In You Are Right here, the poems’ audio system stroll metropolis streets in addition to quiet trails. They muse on moons and timber—but additionally pharmaceutical corporations and Ellis Island. It’s all a part of Limón’s mission to “reimagine what a nature poem is and what a nature poem can do.” On the coronary heart of that pursuit is her conviction that people aren’t separate from what we name the pure world. As she writes within the introduction to the anthology: “Nature will not be a spot to go to. Nature is who we’re.”
Although Nationwide Parks are sometimes a vacation spot, the identical concept animates the opposite You Are Right here venture Limón is spearheading as Poet Laureate. All through 2024, Limón will go to seven parks to have fun a brand new work of public artwork at every: inscriptions in picnic tables of poems she calls “iconic,” every linked to the encompassing panorama or ecosystem. Mary Oliver’s phrases will adorn Cape Cod Nationwide Seashore, for instance, whereas guests to Everglades Nationwide Park can absorb June Jordan’s “Ecology,” about an encounter with a marsh hawk (now referred to as Northern Harrier).
The installations aren’t only for viewing; they may serve double-duty as functioning tables, the place they could take park-goers abruptly. Limón envisions the works as invites—to decelerate and faucet into what she calls “a extra alive alertness”—addressed to anybody who finds them. “I’m hoping that individuals will learn the poem, after which begin to consider a special manner of wanting on the world,” together with their place it, she says. “Possibly it’ll make them wish to write a poem, which might be great.”
As she visits the parks, Limón will meet with native tribes, youth, and group teams, persevering with her work of bringing poetry to the American public. She additionally plans to perform a little birding: “I shall be bringing my binoculars.”
You Are Right here: Poetry within the Pure World, edited by Ada Limón, 176 pages, $25.00. Obtainable here from Milkweed Editions.
