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Peter Frick-Wright (Host): This is the ���ϳԹ��� Podcast

Abbie Barronian (Interview): We're rolling.

Ada Limon: All right. Awesome.

Abbie (Interview): Great.  Well, how are you doing? 

Ada: I'm doing pretty well. How about you?

Abbie (Interview): I'm good. I'm like feeling a little, um, nervous. I'm so excited to talk to you.

Ada: Oh!

Peter: As a senior editor at ���ϳԹ���, Abbie Barronian interviews a lot of people who share her passion for public lands and sustainable resource management. It’s her job. But when the opportunity to talk to Poet Laureate Ada Limon about her project bringing poetry into our national parks came up, that was an interview that didn’t feel like work at all.

Abbie (Interview): I don't often get to interview or like work at all in the poetry space. I've worked for outdoor magazines for my entire career. Poetry is like my true passion, and I was so pleased when this story came across the the pitch meeting deck and I was like, Oh yeah, I want to take that one.

Ada: Oh, awesome.

Peter: Abbie spoke to Ada from her home in Lexington, Kentucky, about her national parks project, called You Are Here, how nature and poetry speak to each other, and why it’s more important than ever for us to listen to what they have to say. Here’s Abbie.

Abbie: Here’s a question: how do you define a poem? Does it have to rhyme? Does it need a certain number of lines? Or is it supposed to have a set meter to it? For non-poets, it’s a tricky answer. But it turns out that even for the most celebrated poets, it’s a tricky answer too.

Ada: One of my favorite things about the art form of poetry not to get too esoteric But is that you can sit a bunch of poets in a room and you can have nobel Um, you know, Nobel prize winners, uh, in literature and MacArthur genius grant winners and poet laureates, poets laureate, and, um, and you can all sit around and no one will agree on the exact definition of a poem.

Abbie: Ada Limon is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s published 6 collections of poetry, as well as an anthology. She knows her stuff. And to her, it’s less about defining what a poem is, and more about exploring what a poem can do.

Ada: And so I think that, um, that sort of, we think about that distilling, right? Um, the distilling of great emotion in a compact space. Um, but for me. I think that what the poem's job is, uh, really can change poem by poem. Some poems are meant to calm you, to soothe you, to ease you, um, to celebrate, to praise.

Some poems are meant to really unsettle you, to call you to action, Some poems can be action themselves. Um, and so, and I think some, you know, they can hold grief in ways that prose can't.

Abbie: What a poem can do has been of particular interest to Ada lately, because “Poet Laureate of the United States” is not just an honorary title. As Poet Laureate, Ada’s job is to bring poetry to people who might not otherwise interact with it. Which, to me, is a pretty incredible mission.

I've loved poetry—both reading and writing it—since I was a kid. I love it because it's lawless. No punctuation, research, or sentence structure required. It's about feeling and movement, and tries to grasp something perpetually out of reach. In that way, it feels a little more like music, dance, or even prayer.

So it makes sense to me why poetry doesn't always feel accessible. But that also means Ada's job as Poet Laureate—to connect people and poetry—is a tall order. Each of her predecessors has approached the project in different ways. For inspiration, Ada looked to her work, and upbringing.

I knew that I wanted to do something with poetry and nature only because it's been a theme in my work and in my life for so long that it seemed to not honor that obvious connection would be, um, would be to my detriment, right?

I was born and raised in Sonoma, California. I was born at home. Um, and, uh, I really loved growing up in that valley. The Valley of the Moon is the name of the valley. It's about an hour from the ocean. So you can go to the Sonoma coast, which is one of the most protected coastlines, um, in our country.

And it's really just a beautiful rugged coastline where you can see whales migrating and, um, really full of public beaches. It's a chilly coast. So, um, you know, you go. It can be warm in the town of Sonoma and then immediately be cold and foggy and gray at the ocean. Um, and, You know, I was really, I think a lot of my life has been informed by that valley and growing up with nature in that way, I was telling someone the other day that I had the benefit of having whole segments of my education based around nature.

Naming and identifying plants and animals. We would go to the Bouvier Riot on Preserve and, and, you know, with incredible nature guides and find out the names of certain plants and animals. And we would go with a woman named Mrs. Terwilliger, who was phenomenal. And we would go out to the ocean and she would help us name all of the animals in the tide pools.

Um, And so that was, um, an upbringing that was very centered around not just nature, but, um, our relationship to it and that we lived in the same sphere together.

Abbie: So. As Poet Laureate, Ada was going to focus on our relationship with nature. But her next challenge was: how. How do you entwine both nature and poetry on a national level? Her first idea was, probably, a little ambitious.

Ada: My very first thought was what if I could create a project where we flew planes  over deforested land with poems written on seed packets and, um,  and worked to reseed and replant and reforest places that have been harmed by wildfires. Um,  Of course, that is a massive undertaking, and I'm sure the wonderful folks at the Library of Congress were like, Why don't we start, you know, thinking about other alternatives than flying the plane with poems with seed packets?

Abbie: You can’t blame a poet for breaking form. But as Ada tried to think more practically, she was reminded of the Poetry in Motion project, which put poetry on public transit, like buses and subways, where tired and bored commuters might accidentally get swept away by a poem.

Ada: I've always loved the accidental encounter with poetry where you just come across something and it shifts you and you think, oh, oh, interesting, you know, one line, um, Uh, you know, I've, uh, having, you know, spent my twenties and early thirties in Brooklyn graffiti that would say something poignant or true at that moment could just destroy you and send your day on a whole different path.

And I feel like, um, That idea of putting a poem in a place where you don't really expect it that you might be there for a hike or for a family picnic or, you know, to go ponder your own existence on this planet, and then you have an encounter with a poem.

Abbie: And so the project, called You Are Here, was born. Short poems by a mix of modern poets would be engraved onto picnic tables at various locations throughout seven national parks, from Cape Cod to California. Maybe poetry and nature, together, could build on each other, and enhance people’s experience of both.

Ada: They're, um, technically on, you know, like these large picnic table tops. And so you can sit around them. They're accessible.

And, um, the poems are on those. They're, they're really beautiful. And then it includes a prompt, which is, you know, what would you say to the landscape around you? And so not only is it that someone can read the poem and relate it to the natural world that's around them, but they can also then, um, decide if they want to write their own poem or maybe a line or maybe a little prose.

Um, That can deepen their attention to the natural world while they're in it or upon reflection.

Um, and I think putting all of those things together to have an encounter with a poem in this space, not only are these poems that I've chosen ways of paying attention.

They also hold the human breath within them. And then I think that what I'm hoping is that people will have an experience with the poem that reminds them of their human language and the limit of human language when having an interaction with the world. And poetry makes room for that. It's language in itself.

and the failure of language. And I think so often we stand in a forest and we think, Oh, there are no words. And that's enough. That's beautiful. There are no words.

So I think that, you know, the hope is that each person will have an individual and personal experience with each poem.

Abbie (interview): is there one specific pairing that you can, that really speaks to you or that you want to speak on? I'm sure they're all very special for different reasons. I don't like make you pick a favorite, but.

Ada: I have, you know, there's so many that I just keep feeling like I could speak to all of them. But, um,  I think one of the things that I'm  really pleased about is the poem, um, by Francisco X. Arlacón, which will be in the, uh, Redwoods National and State Parks. And he has this poem called Never Alone.

Ada (recorded reading): Always / this caressing / Wind / this Earth / whispering / to our feet / this boundless / desire / of being / grass / tree / ���ǰ�����ó��

Ada: And It's really all about this idea of being with the trees and being in nature and how, how can you be alone?

You can't be alone if you have nature, if you recognize you are nature. And so he's no longer with us and to honor his work in the Redwoods. I just know would mean so much to him. And I think at least for me, it means a lot for the Latine community to see him represented in nature this way.

Abbie: Another, titled "Uppermost" by A. R. Ammons, is set at Mt. Rainier.

Ada (reading): The top / grain on the peak / weighs next / to nothing and, / sustained / by a mountain, / has no burden, / but nearly / ready to float, / exposed / to summit wind, / it endures / the rigors of having / no further / figure to complete / and a / blank sky / to guide its dreaming

Abbie (interview): I'm from Washington and I grew up, uh, looking at my rainier all the time and I really love the poem that has been paired with Rainier and, um, Yeah, I'm very excited about that one.

Ada: Oh, I am too. The poem itself is such a deep meditation on what it is to, um, To let go of the striving. And I think that is that poem, like that sort of that piece of being at the top, but also, you know, the silliness of wanting the top and, uh, just to be at a place where there is no more desire, that you can just be, that you can linger in your isness, uh, It's just really beautiful.

I mean, how many of us have, have gone to nature, intentional nature, as I call it, and, um, have done a hike or have done, you know, this is a, this, we're going to do this loop or we're going to do this, you know, this mountaintop or, you know, we were going to this Vista.

And in doing so, even in this place where you're supposed to be at ease and at peace and in awe, you can miss even that because you're thinking, no, I have to get to this place, which is sort of a ridiculous way to spend a day, right? I mean, what if you just saw everything around you, noticed everything around you.

You might go a little slower, you know, but you will appreciate the experience so much more.

Abbie (interview): Yeah, it's so sweet. The hearing you say, be present and enjoy this. It's like, Oh, okay. Yeah. I also need to be present and enjoy this. I think that we're like constantly when we're, you know, on our hike and we're trying to get to the vista and then like once you get to the vista and you have like put the effort behind you, you can sit and be present. Um, and I think of poems as just like a way to access that kind of presence.  You know, without the four mile hike where you're thinking that you're going too slow the whole time. So it just feels like such a tender, generous offering to have in these spaces where people are kind of like, Okay, I'm here. I'm looking at the big thing. Like, what am I supposed to feel, you know?

Ada: Yeah, and also to be aware of that, right? Like, so we pay attention and that's. a deep looking, right? And a deep looking is a way of loving. And then the other unveiling in that moment is often, why can't I pay attention? What is it that's distracting me? What's holding me back from being here at this moment? And that's just as important of a question, right?

Because we, it's easy to say, be present or, you know, pay attention. I really do think it's important to then be curious as to, okay, what's going on in my mind? You know, well, why does this hurt? You know, why did coming to this creek make me want to cry? And is it possible, you know, why did I look and read this poem in this park and it made me bring me to tears?

And is it possible that I would've been holding my breath for three years after I lost someone I loved? Or is it possible that I haven't slowed down enough to notice that I was deeply grieving the state of our planet or the state of our? Humanity, you know, so it's not only paying attention to what's around you, but paying attention to how you move within it and what's moving in you in that world.

And um, we don't take time to do that. And I think that's what's so wonderful about the connection between poetry and nature is that they both do the same thing. They give us a moment to recognize what we ourselves are going through. And they give us a space, they give us the breath, they give us some air to think.

Oh, where have I been? And in some ways they return us to ourselves. And um, that job is a lot easier if we can have a sense of awareness that's either turned on by the poem itself, an encounter with the poem, or setting an intention of being aware before we even enter those spaces. And I know poets, we're constantly noticing things.

And so we're constantly telling other people, Oh, notice this thing. And um, And that means the Vista isn't the end game, you know, it's a, it's every, it's every little moment on the way, including the moment where you recognize that the mind's chatter was louder than the trees are louder than the wind. And you think, wow, how amazing that the human brain.

can be louder than the ocean, you know? And then, Oh, right. Oh, right. What else is there? What else can I hear aside from myself?

Peter: We’ll Be Right Back

AD BREAK

Abbie: As part of the You Are Here project, Ada asked fifty poets to respond with a poem to the table’s question, “What would you say in response to the landscape around you?” She collected them into an anthology, also titled You are Here.

Abbie (interview): So a central piece of your project as Poet Laureate is this anthology, You Are Here, Poetry in the Natural World. Um, I'm curious if you can tell me what nature or natural means to you, if you have a personal definition of it.

Ada: Yeah, I think that's a great question because I actually struggled with that a little bit in the beginning. Um,  because I do think that we have very fixed ideas about what is nature. And I think a lot of the harm that we've done As a species on our planet is that we have denied that we are also nature.

And so I think that as I was contemplating putting together this anthology, which was a huge endeavor and I'm super happy we did it, but it was a ton of work and it was amazing. And, um, but I really wanted to think about being curious and wondering at the definition of nature itself. And what does that look like?

I think that for me, um, nature has always been the planet itself and, and our connectedness with it. And I lived for many years in Brooklyn after growing up in a more rural community in Northern California. I was able to find nature, you know, and I realized there that nature was everywhere, that it wasn't just our nation's beautiful national parks.

It wasn't just, um, what I like to think of as intentional nature. Um, but that it is a daily occurrence and that we wake up every morning in the breath of the universe and that we are also nature, um, made of stars. The stars are also nature. The sky is also nature. So for me, uh, It is an all encompassing term that really speaks to our whole identity of being, um, and everything that we encounter.

And that was something that I had to portray to the poets that I was asking to be part of this anthology because I didn't want it to be necessarily just, you know, think about a beautiful flower and write about it. Um, but really what is our urgent relationship to the planet. Right now at this moment.

Abbie (Interview): I think, A lot of folks who spend a lot of their time outside have learned, too, that like, every ski trip I take is  couched or contextualized by  a sense that we're losing it, and that the snowpack is not what it should be, or every river trip is like, you know,  backgrounded by this knowledge that  the flow is lower than it should be, and all of this. And so, um. In the way that poems and nature do sort of the same thing, I also think the changing,  the changing nature or changing role of, of a poem or, or of a nature poem and just time and nature in general feel, they feel really twin in this way. Um, and I love the idea that  a poem can give you a little space to hold grief or give you a little space to consider that maybe you were holding onto a tricky feeling you didn't know you're holding on to.

Ada: I love that because I think that that's one of the other parts of that was really important for me to have the anthology too, as, um, you know, as a, part that connects to, um, the park project because it, I felt like the project wasn't whole if it only had, you know, a poem in a park, right? You also had to have the, the daily, the daily nature, um, the urban nature, um, ourselves as nature, all of these things.

And I feel like  poems do hold space for complicated feelings.  The limitations of prose  As you know, as a prose writer, they're difficult. I mean, we crave clarity, and the poem  does not give you clarity.  The poem embraces the mess. It embraces the big feelings. It embraces the fact that how could I be standing in a beautiful spot,  um, feeling loved?

You know, maybe feeling well, maybe feeling healthy, um, maybe feeling good for the first time in days or weeks and still feel grief, sadness,  uh, worry, anxiety. Um, and I think that's really important to witness and to name  because I think especially with young people these days, we're all going through it, but we, they know that we can't say, Oh, look at this ocean.

Isn't it beautiful and that's it, right?  Everything is tied up in our impact on nature and what we have done. Um,  and to hold space for that and to make room for complicated grief, for soul nostalgia, for, um,  for bearing witness.  to our new reality,  I think is just as important as making room for the praise, for the beauty, for the awe and the wonder.

Abbie: Ada is the first Latina Poet Laureate in US history, and it was important to her that the anthology represent diverse voices. She wanted the anthology to be a modern articulation of humanity’s complicated relationship with nature, and the more inclusive that conversation is, the closer it can get to something like the truth.

Ada: I think that for many years, um, the nature poem, I mean, it's always been evolving as we evolve and as our relationship with nature evolves. But I think that there's been a level in which it's existed in primarily white spaces, primarily patriarchal spaces. Um, I think of a lot of the romantic poets and poets.

Sort of the early days in which most of those poems and some of them I absolutely adore, but are, um, a white man standing on a mountain, having an epiphany. And, um, you know, of course that has shifted through the years, you know, the seventies brought a lot of amazing work and the reemergence of a lot of native writers, et cetera, but, um.

But I think now, not only, uh, are nature poems more available, um, to any of, any of us, they don't just exist in white spaces, but we're also having a different relationship with nature because, you know, of solastalgia, that term that we use for, um. You know, missing a planet that we are already on, or, you know, a premature missing of it.

Um, and, and also because, you know, the climate crisis is, is clear and present and with us on a day to day basis. And so I think that you can't really have a nature poem extracted from the emotional impact of climate change. And, um, those early. nature poems could do that, right? And there was also a lot of colonial ideas.

When we think about nature, we tamed nature, right? This was a sort of, um, the poetic impulse of what is wild and, um, And what is pure, all of those things, and I think so back to some of those early poems and you can see a really sort of colonial idealistic taming of the land in those poems, where that nature exists, just for the poet to observe it.

Right. And I feel like what that does is always center the human being in the story of nature. And what hubris and that when in reality, of course, nature is observing us as well, because we're doing it together. It's reciprocal.

And I think that when you realize, recognize that. Also, everything around us is noticing us and our impact and what we're doing. That becomes a different relationship. And when you think about the birds in your backyard, you think, Oh, you know, these are my birds, but no, like they're not mine.

The word my what, you know, and then you start having a different idea of like, Oh, when they watch me and now I notice when the birds watch me, you know, and if they, if I haven't filled the feeder in a while, they're kind of come by and be like, Hey. What's going on? And I think that that noticing that kind of relationship.

And feeling like you are being seen by the world not only makes you a better steward, but I think it also makes you less lonely. And I think that there's so many times in our lives and in my life in particular, where I felt very alone or very isolated, um, or where I can't fit in, in the right places. I can't find myself in the right places.

But when I have gone to nature and felt seen and be held by nature, whatever that means. Um, I have felt, Oh, I am part of this. I am part of something larger and I am being witnessed. I am being seen as much as I am seeing the Pollywogs or I'm seeing the, you know, the old man's beard on the, on the. Oak tree and that that is just that we're, that we're in this together, that we're in this moment and experiencing this together.

And I think that so many people, um, need to remember that because they may, they may feel isolated and alone within their communities or wherever they are at in their, in their lives. And, um, they're not alone. None of us are.

Peter: Ada Limon is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She was interviewed by Abbie Barronian for the article, “The Newest National Parks Feature? Poetry.” There’s a link in the show notes to a full list of which National Parks feature picnic table poetry. You Are Here, the anthology of poems, is published by Milkweed Editions, and is available now.

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