Ada Limón & Poetry in the National Parks!

—This is a guest post by Rob Casper, head of poetry and literature in the Literary Initiatives Office. 

Ada Limón spent her summer as many Americans do — visiting some of the country’s spectacular national parks. The U.S. poet laureate, however, visited with a special purpose: to kick off her signature project, “You Are Here: Poetry in the Parks,” connecting poetry to nature.

“I want to champion the ways reading and writing poetry can situate us in the natural world,” Limón said of the project. “Poetry’s alchemical mix of attention, silence and rhythm gives us a reciprocal way of experiencing nature — of communing with the natural world through breath and presence.”

Limón’s initiative consists of promoting poetry through visits to national parks as well as an anthology of new nature poems.

This summer, Limón visited five National Park Service units across the country — Cape Cod National Seashore, Mount Rainier, Redwood, Cuyahoga Valley and Great Smoky Mountains national parks. At each, she revealed poetry installations in cooperation with the Poetry Society of America and the National Park Service. The initiative concludes with visits to Everglades National Park in October and Saguaro National Park in December.

At the entrance to the Beech Forest trail at Cape Cod, visitors encountered a picnic table covered in black cloth, facing picturesque Beech Forest Pond. Limón read “Can You Imagine?” by Mary Oliver.  It begins:

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now – whenever
we’re not looking

After reading the concluding lines, Limón then stepped to the table. Pulling back the cloth, she revealed “Can You Imagine?” printed on a powder-coated aluminum panel.

Afterward, a park ranger led a guided tour of the trail, read other poems by Oliver along the way and spoke about her life. One of the country’s most popular and celebrated poets, Oliver spent over 50 years in the area and often walked the trail herself. Her papers are now in the Library’s Manuscript Division.

Returning to the table after the tour, Limón pulled out her notebook and tried her hand at the initiative’s prompt: What would you write in response to the landscape around you? She’s encouraging readers to share their responses using the hashtag #YouAreHerePoetry.

The aptly named Paradise location at Mount Rainier National Park, at 5,500 feet, offered a spectacular setting of snow-covered mountains for Limón to discuss the poem she chose for the park, “Uppermost” by A. R. Ammons. Later, at the reveal of a picnic table emblazoned with the poem, she called up a special guest to join her: her brother, Bryce Limón, who worked as a ranger at Rainier from 2011 to 2014.

Two days later, Limón arrived at Redwoods National and State Parks. While there, the traveling party stopped to see some of the park’s famed big trees along the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway. Later, at the Crescent Beach day use area, morning fog gave way to sun and breezes, perfect for an extended reading.

Limón finished the reading with commissioned poems she wrote for NASA and the National Climate Assessment, followed by the poem “Redwoods” by Dorianne Laux in the “You Are Here” anthology. She also read the featured poem for the park: “Never Alone” by Francisco X. Alarcón.

The next day, she traveled to her childhood home near Sonoma, California — a home she recently purchased.

In her backyard, in the beautiful California sunshine, Limón pointed out the lemon tree she planted as a child — a perfect example of how the project connects to her own life in the most personal of ways, as the natural world does to us all.

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