On June 14, 2024, at Cape Cod’s National Seashore near Provincetown, Massachusetts, the nation’s twenty-fourth Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, unveiled the inaugural installation of her signature project, “You Are Here: Poetry in Parks,” an initiative that now encompasses seven national parks across the United States. Its goal: to bring poetry to the public. Through the end of 2024, six more national parks featured poems she chose to resonate with their settings. Those poems, responding to nature, will be available on benches and tables for the public to read, enjoy, and perhaps inspire them to write their own verses.

“The invitation on the picnic bench, what would you write to the landscape around you, how would you respond to the world around you. I think that’s an invitation not just to write, but to look deeply, and I think that one of the things that we have trained ourselves to do, is to ‘Numb Out’ because noticing can hurt us. But I think that we have to work through that hurt and grief so that we can move into a deeper way of loving, [and] at its core, attention is a way of love.” (Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Author’s Notes, Interview with Ada Limón, June 14th, 2024).

Poet, Mary Oliver, a longtime resident of Provincetown, inspired the site for launching Ms. Limón’s project. According to National Park Ranger Aleutia Scott, Oliver left pencils hidden in the trees of Provincetown’s Beech Forest Trail so that she could write whenever inspiration struck. Limón commented “She was one of our nation’s most beloved nature poets…and when I came to Provincetown, she was really important for me, to read, and to get to know this landscape. And I also feel that it was really important to put a queer poet in Provincetown with its history of inclusion and celebration of the queer community.”

To describe the social impact she hoped to accomplish with this project, Ms. Limón said, “You know, I think that at my core of being I hope that all of us can find some ways to feel connected to the earth, [and] in that connection, find ways to be better stewards of the earth. I also think that right now, as the globe reaches a critical moment in the Climate Crisis, that we need to embrace our capability of wild imagination, and I believe we actually have all the solutions and tools. We just have to get out of our intellectual mind, and our intellectual limitations, and lean more on our imagination and creative souls, as well as our emotional capabilities.”

In her introduction to You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, an anthology of 52 new poems by American poets commissioned and published to accompany the Poetry in Parks project, Ms. Limón wrote, “When I was first asked what I wanted to create for a national poetry project during my tenure, [I] remember staring out of the window of my office in the Library of Congress thinking, I just want to write poems and save the planet…A poem can seem so small, so minor, so invisible, especially when up against the daily crises and catastrophes that our planet is facing. And that’s not to mention the hardships that we each face publicly and privately. How can a poem make a difference? How can a tree make a difference?” (You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, p. 3).

She went on to say, “I had a lot of different ideas. Some of them were more outlandish than others. One of them of course was the plane [dropping] native seed packets. [I] thought about building bridges, I thought about doing something across the Border that would be a healing opportunity for the Rio Grande, the river itself. Lots of things that were large and perhaps beyond our scope, but their intent was of course to have impact.”

The first poem Ms. Limón selected for the launch of Poetry in Parks was Mary Oliver’s Can You Imagine? Oliver’s words are inscribed on a picnic table at the entrance to the Beech Tree Trail, along with a QR code with more information about Poetry in Parks and Limón’s accompanying volume of poetry inspired by nature. At the Provincetown launch, Ms. Limón observed that for poets to have social impact, they need to forge public/private partnerships. Before we embarked on the Beech Tree Tail, Ms. Limón thanked her partners — the Library of Congress, the institutional home of the America’s Poet Laureates, the National Parks Service, and the Poetry Society of America — leaders of whom brought to fruition two years of work begun during the COVID lockdown. Ms. Limón hopes we will take up our pencils to write our own versions 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.” (You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, p. 5)

By printing poems about nature on picnic tables situated in our national parks, Ada Limón ultimately brings all of us together as a community over a meal. And not just any meal, but one of summer’s most portable meals. At a picnic, the spread assembled is far greater than the sum of each contribution. Through this communion of poetry in nature, created in bold strokes across our national parks, Ada Limón observes, “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. Because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.” (You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, p. 5)

In conclusion, Ms. Limón observed, “We are bringing poetry to the people. This project wanted to exist. I am just a steward of it.”

Author the Author:

Elliot Bostwick Davis, Harvard ALI Fellow ‘22, is a museum executive and curator with extensive leadership experience at major U.S. institutions. Most recently, she served as Director and CEO of the Norton Museum of Art, Florida’s largest museum, based in West Palm Beach. Previously, she led the Art of the Americas collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, overseeing a 16,000-piece collection as the John Moors Cabot Chair. She has also held key curatorial roles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, specializing in drawings, prints, and American paintings. Davis has served on the boards of Mass Humanities (Massachusetts’ affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities), the American Antiquarian Society, the Association of Art Museum Curators, the Groton School, Shelburne Museum, and the New York Academy of Art.