One morning this March, Ada Limón appeared out the window of her dwelling in Kentucky and noticed a fowl 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. Immediately 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, may converse to her work as a poet, serving to readers understand anew what they might simply dismiss as commonplace. Likewise, when she selected the title for her signature mission 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 collection of poetry installations in Nationwide Parks that Limón will preside over this yr, in addition to an anthology of latest 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 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 present of being alive in a physique on a spinning planet.”
Although it might have been a hefty tome—“I’d have beloved to have the e book 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 put in writing poems for the gathering. “After they got here in, it felt like they had 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 appeared to animals for clues about the right way to lead her personal life (as a queer individual 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 needed to understand the eagles for their very own sakes. Just like the speaker in her poem in regards to the expertise, Kelly now turns to animals “to not clarify one thing about what people do, however to grasp that there are simply different methods of being on the earth.”
Limón herself has returned to birds again and again in her work, generally leaning into the impulse to interpret, at different instances resisting. She doesn’t see the inconsistency as an issue. “I really love the thought of the wondrous unknowing that animals present us,” she says. “We title and establish, however we will by no means personal and we will 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 complex emotions on the subject of 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 e book, 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 loss of life, Jones arrived at second of respite beside the Sipsey River, in a wilderness space in northwest Alabama—after a somewhat treacherous hike that she realized had mirrored her passage via grief. “I didn’t actually know if it was going to finish nicely for me, if I’d come again with scars,” she says. What she discovered, although, was a second of peace, whilst she mourned. Unseen birds referred to as, and she or he heard reassurance in “their promise of tune.”
“As a Black poet, there’s two belongings you’re at all times combating in your thoughts,” Jones says. “For one, individuals assume that you would be able to solely write about Black struggling. Then again, 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 develop notions of who is anticipated and allowed to put in writing what sort of poems: “No style is off limits for any of us.” Jones may even write about roses. But when she does: “It positively gained’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 bushes—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 thought animates the opposite You Are Right here mission 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 soak up 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 unexpectedly. 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 unique method of trying on the world,” together with their place it, she says. “Perhaps it can make them wish to write a poem, which might be fantastic.”
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 can be bringing my binoculars.”
You Are Right here: Poetry within the Pure World, edited by Ada Limón, 176 pages, $25.00. Accessible here from Milkweed Editions.
