The Brooklyn Rail

What comes to mind when you think of nature poetry? An ode to meadowlarks? Burbling brooks? The commanding silence of the redwoods? Is it something less bucolic and gentle and more urban and visceral? Or does it reflect the uneasy relationship we are currently facing with our environment that reflects our fears and losses?

Our experience of—and existence in—nature is universal, if rarely identical. As part of her historic tenure as the 24th US Poet Laureate, Ada Limón commissioned some of the finest poets of our era to write to perhaps the most pressing issue of our time, in an anthology that is uniformly intimate, if diverse in subject matter. The collection also serves as a starting point for a National Parks project that comingles these literary offerings with poetic “exhibits” in seven national parks.

This collection will speak to those who love contemporary poetry and those who don’t yet realize they do, as well as all who care about our natural world, and our place within it. The list of participants is a who’s who of contemporary poetry, from Danez Smith to Hanif Abdurraqib, Joy Harjo to Donika Kelly, Aimee Nezhukumatathil to Jericho Brown.

In her foreword, Limón writes about one of her own experiences:

As I stared at the trail map, I saw the friendly little red arrow that pointed to where I was on the map, its caption: You Are Here. It seemed not only to serve as a locator, but as a reminder that I was living right now, breathing in the woods, that there was life around me, that that natural world was right here and I was a part of it, I was nature too.

Marvelously, each poem marks where that poet was in their individual “here” in their current “now,” perhaps even an eternal now with fifty stunning viewpoints.

Limón encourages readers to make their own version of a “You Are Here” poem, and this collection is superbly designed for multiple audiences: nature lovers, poetry mavens, casual readers, or even as a generative teaching tool. This is how we praise what we still experience in the environment, and within us, “because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.”

Mandana Chaffa (Rail): How did you select the participants for this project and what kind of guidance did you provide them? I imagine that was the most difficult aspect.

Ada Limón: Choosing the poems, choosing the poets themselves, was probably the hardest part about putting this book together. If you know me, you know that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of poets whom I love and admire in general, and are living and writing and responding to the natural world specifically. If I could have done so, this book would have been a million pages long.

I thought about the people I had read recently that were doing that work of place and that were doing interesting things: not just how they responded to landscape and nature but those who might take the prompt in new directions. I love the people that took it in a more literal way, responding directly to the natural world. And equally those who thought more about: “How does my body move in this world?” “What does safety mean?” “How does the natural world interact with urban spaces?”

Rail: I assume they all said yes, right away, because who wouldn’t want to be part of this project.

Limón: Because we wanted to put it out in April, we had to move fast and were really delighted with the enthusiasm for the project. It was especially meaningful that so many of the contributors wrote directly to the prompt in a unique manner that only their idiosyncratic poetry could offer, and that kind of trust shifted the scope and soul of the anthology.

Rail: When you finally started to receive the entries, did it refine the project for you from what you initially intended? Because as a collection I felt there were multidimensional conversations happening between these poems. Did that shift your initial intentions; did it become something bigger than the sum of its parts?

Limón: That’s really good insight, because, of course that happens. At the beginning of the project they wondered if I could write the introduction before I received the poems, but, other than a rough sketch, of course I couldn’t until I had everything in hand. What really struck me at that point was the urgency, whether it was about the Maui fires or the urgency of living in a Black body in the United States, or the urgency of grief or death. This is when I realized that the “you are here” prompt is larger than just the landscape. It is our emotional landscape as well, and I felt so honored to read these poems because it reminded me that the gift of poetry is that there is no one lens. It’s what each of us are seeing through our eyes. What we’re hearing through our ears. Or feeling in our hearts. Everything that we’re experiencing when we say “you are here,” all of it, right now. And that was a really dramatic shift for me, because initially I was thinking through the lens of responding solely to the natural world. But of course, we’re nature, too.

Rail: There are such a range of perspectives included in this collection, and I especially appreciate that you’ve edited it in such a way—it’s comprehensive without suggesting it is complete—that it parallels our own experience of nature, underscoring that we can never really engage in all of it, that our lived experience only entails a minute fraction of what exists. After multiple readings of the collection, I still wanted more, and that’s wholly appropriate: we don’t know all of nature, and there’s space held for the poems yet to be written.

Limón: I envision this as a call to action for everyone to respond. I don’t come from a place of wisdom—I have questions, and I have curiosity, and I feel that’s what these poems are also doing. They’re not suggesting “this is what we know,” or “this is how this works.” Instead, it’s “this is my life and my experience in this time and place.” It leaves room for the reader and all those experiencing this crucial moment on the planet to enter into a conversation about it. Sometimes when we think about nature poetry or ecopoetics, it’s really just description that honors nature, trees, animals, plants, which is wonderful. What these poems do is allow room for an emotional reaction to the beauty and awe of nature, and also to our fears, and I think that it would be dishonest to not give light to those fears, those complicated, burdensome feelings of anxiety.

Rail: As you said so impeccably, nature is not a place to visit: nature is who we are.

Limón: I wrote a poem for the National Climate Assessment [“Startlement”] and one thing all of these incredible, brilliant scientists—who are working within every single aspect of climate change throughout the United States—said to me was that when you write this poem it cannot be nostalgic, or suggest that we know what the future holds. They taught me that right now we need to think about adaptation and mitigation, not reversal. We’re not going back to a prior existence. We are entering a new place, and that’s our reality. That’s not politics. That’s science.

Rail: Congratulations on the historic second two-year term of your laureateship. Might we discuss how and when you chose this project during your first term?

Limón: It’s funny, you get asked right away. Very sweetly and it’s because they’re so excited, but you’re sitting there thinking, “I’m still just processing that this is even happening.”

Rail: It sounds like starting your first semester of college and already everyone wants to know what your major is.

Limón: Not only your major, but what the subject of your final thesis will be!

Rail: “Let me find my dorm room first. Can you just show me where my classes are? Where’s the bathroom?”

Limón: Because so much of my work centers on the natural world, I knew that was something that I wanted to focus on. But I really also wanted the whole project to be accessible. I was excited by the prospect of putting poems in parks, and it was even more amazing when the National Parks came on board. We’ll have poetry installments from the collection in seven different national parks and then our incredible partners at Poetry Society of America will continue leading that charge after I’m no longer serving in the role, so the poetry in the parks will continue beyond the scope of this effort.

I also thought about Diane Seuss’s idea that nature isn’t somewhere we drive to: “Nature, which cannot be driven to / To drive to it is to drive through it.” When we talk about poetry and nature, I didn’t want it to just be these curated, protected spaces that in some ways are designed for people who already have the mindset of going into nature. I’m equally interested in our unintentional experiences with nature, the dailyness, what happens to us on the way to the bus. I remember living in New York City when the daffodils come up in early spring. You think, how is this possible? They’re coming up through the pavement. Or being in a highrise and seeing hawks outside.

I wanted people who do not consider themselves in any way, shape, or form attuned to the natural world to be able to pay attention a little more deeply. I envisioned this book as a balance to the National Park project, which celebrates our incredible protected resources, such as Mount Rainier or the Redwoods.

It is also about what it is to live with nature in our unprotected lives, in our normal quotidian lives. I was interested in the parallel where both poetry and nature become accessible to the wider public.

Rail: You’re so right about New York. The first time we get that unexpected spring day at the end of winter, people go into the park and take half their clothes off. People who might always eat lunch at their desks, are suddenly gone for an hour and a half, just sitting on a bench with their face turned upward like urban sunflowers. Another thing this collection accomplishes is sharing wider cultural and individual perspectives of nature than we typically see in one place.

Limón: I have always loved nature poetry. But even as a young student studying at the University of Washington, studying at NYU, I found that most nature poetry was written by white authors.

Rail: Often white men, for that matter.

Limón: Not only white men but primarily, and thematically, it was an idea of nature being the savior, being God, being redemptive. Nature as a blank slate on which poets had their epiphanies. An important aspect of this anthology was to ensure that it was representative of different landscapes, and equally diverse array of voices and poetic styles.

Climate crisis, though it affects us all, might pale in comparison to immediate survival, so I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t solely a book of praise, and also included the complicated reactions we have and lives that we lead as part of nature ourselves. An additional aspect that became clear to me as I was compiling the entries is there was a spiritual component to the collection, which is a word I don’t often use. One of my most spiritual experiences with this anthology was printing out all the poems and figuring out the order.

Rail: There are so many ways one can arrange an anthology. What was your process?

Limón: It could have been alphabetical. I discussed that with Bailey Hutchinson, who’s an amazing poet and is the editor of this book at Milkweed Editions, and has been such an amazing steward, because in some ways that would have made the most sense. I knew I didn’t want sections, and I kept reconfiguring the poems until they started to move a certain way, and I finally saw the arc: this is a landscape! It was so emotional for me: all of these poems together are doing something I could not have even dreamed of.

Rail: It’s almost like creating a multi-course meal, isn’t it? The beauty of poetry is that readers can engage with it on their own timetable; read several poems on the 2 train or flutter through the pages at night and land on a page as a kind of divination. I can even experience poetry a stanza at a time, if all I have time for is that.

Limón: It’s funny, because I also always love organizing my own collections. It’s my favorite part. I love putting together the books themselves, and I think of it as making a long poem. This is the first anthology that I’ve edited, and I wondered how it would be to do that with other people’s work. It was such an honor to be the curator of this collection; I thought about how the reader would experience it: What is the flow? How do each of the poems speak to one another, which shows us both the American landscape of poetry, as well as the landscape of the natural world?

Rail: How has the laureateship impacted your ability to focus on your own poetry? Do you have time enough, breadth enough, breath enough?

Limón: I love that you ask this. I write all the time. It’s the way I tether myself to the world. I might think “this will go in the new and selected” or “this will be a different book altogether.” But I’m writing all the time. It’s how I am in relationship with the world.

Rail: Preparing for this conversation, I’ve been thinking about one of your poems that I re-read frequently, “The Conditional,” which ends:

Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.

As well as “It’s the Season I Often Mistake” from The Hurting Kind, which closes: “What good / is accuracy amidst the perpetual / scattering that unspooled the world” which is meaningfully not a question but a statement, and underscores an ever-present theme in your work: uncertainty. Beyond nature, I think of how uncertainty—or its cousin, possibility—is something that threads through your contemplations, and your poetry.

Limón: I absolutely am interested in uncertainty: it’s one of the only things I trust. I also think uncertainty is one of the few things that actually leads to a happy life, because if you’re embracing uncertainty as part and parcel of the human experience….

Rail: There’s a simpler threshold of what constitutes happiness.

Limón: I love that moment where it feels like everything’s in its place; everyone’s safe for one second even if it’s just your small microcosm. All the animals are okay. Everything’s okay. I love that moment, yet it’s easy to become anxious about what will transpire in the next moment, so I focus on believing the next moment will come. But we don’t know. Especially now, there are inevitabilities and catastrophic thinking that can come to the fore. So I try to notice when I’m doing it and instead think: it’s a mystery, and in that way lean into curiosity as opposed to despair.

Rail: Also, apparently you’re not busy enough with this enormous project with the US National Parks; there’s also space poetry, as in your poem dedicated to and engraved upon the Europa Clipper, with an ending that inevitably inspires a chorus of sighs: “We, too, are made of wonders, of great / and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, / of a need to call out through the dark.”

Limón: Yes! October is the launch of the Europa Clipper, when I’m going to read “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” at the John F. Kennedy Space Center while the spacecraft takes off.

Rail: I’d like to imagine that we might get a poem back from space. That what they really wanted from us was poetry and up until now, we didn’t give them the right inspiration to respond to us.

Limón: That would be unbelievably cool. I didn’t know that I needed something to root for today. But that is what I’m going to root for.