Ada Limón is a firm believer in the power of poetry. In her role as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, she has undertaken a series of projects harnessing poetry to transform our relationship to the natural world, from installing poems on picnic benches in national parks to writing a poem that will be sent to the second moon of Jupiter. Her latest collection, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, published in collaboration with the Library of Congress, brings together poems by fifty of the nation’s most celebrated poets to challenge and reimagine our relationship to the world around us.
In all of these projects, Limón is guided by the view that poetry, much like meditative practice, can be an offering. “I’m interested in the way that as writers we can think of our work as offerings, as things that go out in the world and do work beyond us,” she told Tricycle. “When I think of loving-kindness as an offering that spirals outward, I think that poems can do that too.”
In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Limón to discuss how poems can slow us down and return us to the present moment, her practice of loving-kindness and how it influences her writing, and how writing can be an act of offering something back to the planet.
Your latest project is You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a collection of poetry that you edited in collaboration with the Library of Congress. To start, could you tell us a bit about the project and the inspiration behind it? When I first was asked to serve as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, I knew I would be asked to do a signature project. Even in those very early days, I knew I wanted it to be something with poetry and nature. I am someone who has quite an imagination, so I had lots of ideas, like flying a plane that would have poems on native seed packets to reforest lands that had been damaged by fire or making poems that would cross the Rio Grande. Eventually, I came up with the idea of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World.
One of the reasons it has its name is that I was on a hike at Raven Run in Kentucky, and I was trying to figure out which way to go. As I was examining my options, I saw the little red dot that says “You are here.” At the time, I was thinking a lot about how to be of service in this role: What are the things that mean a lot to me? What are the things that in my particular body and being and iteration on this planet I can bring into fruition? And the words “You are here” felt like not just a title but a mantra.
There are two elements to the project. The first is an anthology, which includes fifty original contemporary poems that all speak back to the natural world in some way. I wanted it to be a kind of reclaiming of nature poetry, a new kind of nature poem for this moment. The second element is You Are Here: Poetry in Parks, putting poetic installations in seven national parks around the country. I’m so happy that we were able to partner with the National Park Service and the Poetry Society of America to bring poetry into these beautiful areas and hopefully add a little moment of reflection while people enter these spaces.
You mentioned that “You Are Here” functioned as a mantra for you, and I can’t help but think of Thich Nhat Hanh’s classic book You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment. Could you say more about your relationship to meditation and spiritual practice? How did you first come to meditation? Meditation is really important to me in my life and in my work. I began meditating in earnest in 2007, when I was experiencing what is called labile high blood pressure. One of the things that was suggested to me was to try meditation. I was living in New York City, and I started going to the free classes at Tibet House on Tuesday nights, and to my great luck, Sharon Salzberg was teaching one of those classes. She gave me not only an entryway to the real work of meditation but also a structure. Her work in loving-kindness, or metta, proved very useful to me, and metta is still probably my go-to meditation. It’s the meditation I use the most in my life, and it was also the meditation that brought me to a daily practice.
Does your loving-kindness practice influence how you approach poetry? I think it does. One of the biggest reasons I love poetry is that it brings you into the present moment. There’s breath built into the page with line breaks, caesuras, and stanza breaks, and that breath is teaching you to slow down. All of that blank space around the poem is a way of silencing everything else before you enter it.
The work itself feels like a meditation, but I’m also interested in the way that as writers we can think of our work as offerings, as things that go out into the world and do work beyond us. When I think of loving-kindness as an offering that spirals outward, I think that poems can do that too.
There’s a lot to be said for reimagining the work of poetry as offering something back to the planet, recognizing the reciprocal relationship between us and the natural world. Too often we think of that relationship as being severed or broken—or as causing harm. But if we can offer something, like a poem, back to a tree, back to a river, back to a creek, back to the birds, then that can be a new relationship with the art of making something.
For me, this collection is an offering to this moment, as well as to those of us who may not have language for the way we feel about nature, that provides wonder and awe and curiosity but also anxiety, fear, and a sort of sorrowful unease at times because we’re not sure what will remain. I hope that these poems allow us to address those complicated feelings and maybe even spur us to collective action.
Along those lines, you say that this collection aims to be not just a community but an ecosystem made stronger by its parts. So how can poetry function as an ecosystem? There is a myth in art-making, which is that one exceptional artist rises to the top and is lauded for their particular idiosyncratic gift. But art-making is much more collective than that. When you sit down to write a poem, you actually sit down with every poem that’s ever been written. Most likely, you’ve read a lot of poems, and those lines are moving through you, just like when we breathe out, the plants are taking that breath in and giving us breath in response.
All of that blank space around the poem is a way of silencing everything else before you enter it.
It feels to me that we need to do some reimagining around art-making—that it’s not done in isolation, that we’re never really in isolation, and instead we’re creating something that is then read and rebuilt into the world itself. That cycle is just as essential to imagine and tend to as the cycle of reciprocal relationship with the planet.
There’s power in recognizing that you’re not alone, and I think poems can do that. I know that I need it. For this project, when I go on the road, part of me is thinking, “Oh, this is my job to bring poetry into these spaces and to unveil these poems and to share the anthology.” But what I found is most of the time my job is to listen and hear about all the poetry that’s already being written in these communities and all of the community projects that are already happening. I think we have to remember that, because so often it feels as if we’re up against this massive “No.” After hearing about what other people are doing, I leave feeling like, “Oh, we have a chance.” There are people doing this amazing work stewarding this land. They are reforesting places. They are restoring creeks and waterways. That kind of work needs to be highlighted because so much of it gets overshadowed by the true terror of living in this day and age.
Right, community seems essential in this respect, and one of your poems, “Sanctuary,” closes with the lines, “To be made whole / by being not a witness, / but witnessed.” Could you say more about the role of witnessing and being witnessed? A friend once told me that an ornithologist had said to her that birds notice you more than you notice them. It always stuck with me: Here I am thinking I’m watching the birds, but in reality, all the birds notice exactly where I am and where I’m walking and whether I’m moving toward the feeder or the birdbath or just in my own silent world.
The idea of being witnessed is important when we think about our relationship to the world because so often we think our job is to be the watcher or the receiver. As poets, we think our job is to watch and notice and pay attention, and that’s beautiful and essential and important. Practicing mindfulness, too, is all about noticing and looking and watching. But there is also a moment in which we are also in someone else’s view. The trees are noticing us. The wind is noticing us as it moves around us. Birds are watching us. The lizards that we don’t know are there are skittering off and getting darker in their caves and corners as we go by. And I think that that is another way of being in the world and rethinking ourselves as center.
That decentering of the self is so refreshing because we live in a world where you have to think about yourself so much in order to do the good work you want to do in the world. Yet there are times where I just remember that I’m being noticed, and I wonder what the trees think of me. That keeps me out of the cycle of centering the human, centering the self, and centering my own needs as the essential needs. That’s been really important not just in my life but in my poems.
You also say that poems can be a place to stop and remember that we, too, are living. How so? I lived in New York City for many years. When I was living in New York, I had jobs that were very intense, and I would forget sometimes that I was a body, that I was a being, that I was an animal, and that time was existing within me and that I had a beginning and an end and also was endless. Remembering those things was so important to me as I was rethinking my relationship to work and to art and to life.
So often you just forget that you’re living, and in doing so you forget that you’re dying, and you forget to be present altogether. I always think that one of the easiest ways to remember to love the world is to remember that you have to leave it at some point. That’s been a really important remembering for me to do on a regular basis.
When my stepmother died of cancer, in 2010, it put everything in perspective for me. She was only 52, and I kept thinking, “What if I died at 52? What would I want to have done? What would I want to have experienced?” That helped me recommit to making poems. She died in February of 2010, and I quit my job in September of 2010 and tried as much as I could to be a full-time writer, which is something I’m still doing now fourteen years later.
Sometimes it takes that kind of reminder, as hard as that reminder was. I think that sometimes the people who leave give us something in return, and the gift she gave me was to remember that this life was a wonder and a gift and to do the most that I could with it. I don’t mean that in an urgent doing way but in the way of recognizing it and not missing it.
This awareness of death runs through your poetry, and one dynamic the collection explores is how to hold multiple conflicting energies at once, including grief and beauty and love and rage. You’ve talked about this in the context of Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende, which has four elements: irrationality, earthiness, a close awareness of death, and the diabolical. Could you tell us about the concept of duende and how you balance darkness and lightness in your poetry? Duende is one of my favorite terms, partly because it feels very difficult to talk about. I think I’ve dedicated myself to things that are hard to define, like poetry and nature, so it would make sense that I would also like duende. One of the things that Lorca said in his lecture in Buenos Aires in 1928 was that duende is different from the muse. It doesn’t come from outside the body. It’s different from the visiting angel that’s supposed to anoint us. Duende lives inside of us. It comes up through the soles of our feet. It lives in the bloodstream. I’ve always maintained that to be true, at least for my own work: It feels like my poems come from something that already exists. It’s not coming from the outside in; it’s already there.
When I think of loving-kindness as an offering that spirals outward, I think that poems can do that too.
One of the things that Lorca talks about is that poems have to have an acknowledgment of death. I think that that is an engine of almost all my work. If you asked me what most of my poems are about, I would say that most of them are shouting, “We are all going to die. Didn’t you notice?” And I think that that is at the core of my poems, but that is also where the light comes from: If that is true, how can I not be in wonder? How can I not love this stranger or love this moment?
When we talk about what poetry can do, I think that it’s not always about hope. It’s not always about bringing light. There are a lot of poems that really plummet you into the depths of the soul and do not bring you out. And so I think poetry’s role is to make room for all sorts of feelings and explore them.
I’ve always been interested in balancing that awareness of death and that awareness of what is damaged about us as a species and as a society. Those truths are there. We’re watching them unfold every day. And yet there is still goodness. There’s still light. There are so many people working so hard to protect the natural world, and that work often goes unsung because we just hear about the hard things. In my work, I want to make room for all of it. And the poems that I love make room for all of it. So I think it’s about the depth of feeling and the range of feeling that we have.
In this latest collection, you do hold all of those things in balance, and one question that runs throughout the book is the role of poetry in the face of catastrophe. You ask, “How could a poem make a difference? How can a tree make a difference?” So how have you come to view these questions? And how do you view the role of the artist in times of crisis? It’s a question that’s always been asked of artists living through hard times. I think that one of the things that we’re supposed to do as artists is to recognize that it’s dangerous to give up. It’s dangerous to not feel and to numb out.
When we’re careening from one crisis to another, one of the main jobs that we have as artists is to remember that we may not have to have hope, but we have to have some curiosity. We have to have some resilience. And I think that poetry can make room for that. It can help us feel like, “Oh, right. I’m not alone in this feeling.” It’s when we despair alone that it becomes easy to think there’s no hope. Poetry allows for different ways of being: “Wait, I can feel that and that too? I can lose someone and grieve and feel really deep pain and then also feel a sense of tenderness watching a little lizard go in and out of the rosemary bush, or hearing a kind person at the grocery store ask me how I’m doing?” I think that a poet’s job is to make room for all of that and to encourage us not to be numb.
“Time is on Fire”
I meet a physicist at the party and immediately
ask him if it’s true that time doesn’t exist, time
being important to me. Even now I’m older,
time’s crypt and wish curl around me like ghost wind.
He doesn’t answer so maybe I don’t exist. One day:
nothing. Another: mushrooms or mildew, or some
inching sprout, or some leaf gone black and dead.
Time does that. The arrow we ride into the now,
then into the future, does not pull out of the skin
backward. Or does it? The past is happening.
Pampas grass slicing the thumb before the dozer
came and cut the grass out like a cancer, my old cat
Smoke leaving dead birds on the garden posts,
the first man, the first woman, the madrone’s rust-
colored berries of fall, each second is in me. The arrow
we ride like a horse, mute and fast, retraces and races,
so that right now even as my valley burns, it rewinds
too, each black ash rubble pile pulls itself back
into a dear home, a living cat leaps into the understory,
and in the soft yellow hills, the first flame goes out.
From The Carrying © 2018 by Ada Limón. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions, milkweed.org.