Back when I was studying for my MFA in the effervescently endless green of North Carolina’s Piedmont region, I was tasked with proposing a business that engaged with poetry in some way. A child of the “There’s an app for that” generation — and the exact opposite of what you might call a Shrewd Business Man™ — my idea was to create a location-based app that a user could turn to when in need of a poem to ground themselves in a particular place or landscape. 📲
What would it be like to read or listen to Matthew Arnold‘s 19th-century poem “Dover Beach” while standing near the Strait of Dover on its famous White Cliffs? 🌊
Or, in a more mundanely magical Mid-Missouri moment, to experience Mary Oliver‘s beloved poem “Wild Geese” while walking around the noisy gaggle that make their home at Stephens Lake? 🦢
A wonderfully wise poet-friend of mine often says each poem is only fully completed when it reaches its reader(s); I wonder how poems can be completed in the landscapes, places and moments we move through each day — and in turn, complete us in some small, necessary way. ✨
Which brings me to the wholly magnificent subject of this blog, our outgoing Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, whose signature project, “You Are Here,” has been to “focu[s] on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world.” As part of her tenure as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, Limón has commissioned fifty of her fellow contemporary poets to each write a poem about their own dynamic, ordinary, mournful, inspiring, questioning and/or loving connection(s) to the natural world “[b]ecause,” she writes, “nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.” 🌳
These fifty poems make up the anthology “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World” and culminate in a tenderly radiant call-to-action:
If in order to have one tree flourish, we must plant more around it, the same must go for poems. . . . I hope you will consider making your own version of a “You Are Here” poem to grow alongside ours—whether you put pen to paper or visit a beloved national park or plant potted flowers on your stoop in Brooklyn—so we may continue to flourish. I hope this anthology serves as a reminder that there is more time to plant trees, to write poems, to not just be in wonder at this planet, but to offer something back to it, to offer something back together.
Beyond the stirring generosity and genuine affirmation of “You Are Here” (as an anthology, a project, a heartfelt reminder, a vibe check), there are SO many reasons to love Ada Limón and her worldview — which is matched marvelously by her poems! 📝
In particular, I admire the deep candor of her work — as when she writes “My shards are showing” and “I have always been too sensitive, a weeper, / from a long line of weepers. // I am the hurting kind.” — as well as the profound accessibility of her language, her conversationality, as if each poem, each word is a secret she is more than happy to let us in on, to share with us, gently, inquisitively, lovingly. ❣
In my mind, she is the non-ironic, anti-racist, trans-affirming epitome of the term “girlboss,” not for her focus on #thegrind, but on uplifting and centering the experience of what it means to be a woman or girl, a creature who thrives alongside her chosen community despite cishetero white supremacist patriarchy and ableism. Read her poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl” and send it to a friend who needs to be reminded of her own elemental and precious power. 💙💖🤍💖💙
And for those of us (myself sometimes included!) that fall into a kind of binaried logic that thinks disciplines like “poetry” and “science” are inherently oppositional, here is Limón again reminding us that the lines we draw to divide are actually far more circular, overlapping and fluid:
We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distant of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.
The “second moon” Limón refers to is Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons and for whom she wrote the poem “In Praise of Mystery”; in fact, her words were engraved on a research-gathering “spacecraft” that NASA has sent to Europa, to discover more about “a vast ocean [scientists believe] lies beneath its icy surface.” So, not only is Ada Limón focused on how we connect to our blue planet now, but on other future, life-giving possibilities. 🌌
So, what are you waiting for? You are here. Spend some time this National Poetry Month and beyond with one our nation’s greatest, her most generous spirit and insightful mind. As she writes best, “we [are] all meant for something.” 💌
