'You Are Here' celebrates poetry in the natural world with National Park exhibits

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: There’s a new yearlong project by the nation’s poet laureate bringing poetry in the natural world into focus and what’s at stake due to climate change.

Jeffrey Brown reports for our new series, Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy. It’s part of our Canvas coverage.

Jeffrey Brown: It was a walk in the park with poetry, National Park Service Ranger Aleutia Scott leading, then reading the work of poet Mary Oliver.

Aleutia Scott, Park Ranger, National Park Service: “Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars.”

Jeffrey Brown: Oliver, who died in 2019, was known for her love of nature. And this was one of her favorite walks around Blackwater Pond, on the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts.

Taking that walk this day, one of today’s leading poets, U.S. poet laureate Ada Limon, launching a project she calls You Are Here.

Ada Limon, U.S. Poet Laureate: I kept thinking that poetry and nature are the two things that work so beautifully together to bring us a sense of awe and wonder.

And I feel like poetry is a way that opens us up to a deeper experience with nature. And so the two of them working together is really beautiful.

Man: Please join me in welcoming our 24th United States poet laureate, Ada Limon.

(Applause)

Jeffrey Brown: One part of You Are Here is poetry in the parks, bringing classic nature poems by past writers into the natural world itself.

Ada Limon: One, two, three, poetry.

(Cheering)

(Applause)

Jeffrey Brown: Limon chose to kick off the campaign here in Cape Cod with Mary Oliver’s poem “Can You Imagine?” printed atop a picnic table, a place for all who come here to read, to contemplate, perhaps to write something of their own.

Ada Limon: I really wanted to offer a moment of reflection and deeper intention in the parks.

Jeffrey Brown: What does poetry do?

Ada Limon: Poetry sort of ignites a place in you that is receptive to a deeper kind of attention. And a poem, sitting and reading a poem, even a very short one, can allow you to receive the world in a different way.

Jeffrey Brown: That was certainly the impact the Pulitzer Prize-winning Oliver, one of the country’s most read and best-loved poets, had on many, including Limon, who was eager to honor her year.

Ada Limon: She famously used to hide pencils in the beach forest so that, if she had a good idea and was without a pen, she could find one of those pencils and make sure she could write it down.

Jeffrey Brown: Oh, really?

Ada Limon: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: That’s an interesting kind of littering. Poetic litter?

(Laughter)

Ada Limon: Poetic pencil litter.

Aleutia Scott: “To live in this world, you must be able to do three things.”

Jeffrey Brown: But poetry in the parks, a collaboration with the poetry society of America, and, notably, the National Park Service, is also about a far more serious impact on the world around us, the destructive forces of climate change.

Ranger Clay Hanna works in interpretation and engagement at the national headquarters.

Clay Hanna, Park Ranger, National Park Service: Yes, when we think about our national parks, we see those impacts of climate change, right? We see that directly within our parks.

And I think a project like this is another way to approach communication about what’s happening to the natural world, right? And connecting that through a different means, through poetry, allows visitors to immerse themselves, find themselves in these landscapes, and think about how they have a connection to the natural world.

Jeffrey Brown: The project brings Limon into seven national parks around the country, featuring significant American poems relating to each.

Ada Limon: This is another dear poet and poem.

Jeffrey Brown: She read the seven poems at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, including “The Valley” by Jean Valentine…

Ada Limon: “The valley edge by edge.”

Jeffrey Brown: … for Cuyahoga National Park in Ohio, “The Earth Is a Living Thing” by Lucille Clifton for Great Smoky National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina.

Ada Limon: “The Earth is a living thing, a black, shambling bear.”

Jeffrey Brown: “Cloud Song” by Ofelia Zepeda for Arizona’s Saguaro National Park.

Ada Limon: “Greenly, they emerge. In colors of blue, they emerge.”

Jeffrey Brown: The other piece of Limon’s You Are Here project requires no visits to the great outdoors. She commissioned new work for an anthology from contemporary poets addressing our lives as part of nature, her goal, a new kind of nature poetry, reflecting traumatic changes for millions and for the Earth itself.

Ada Limon: Now when we write about nature, there’s solastalgia that’s connected to it. There is sadness, there’s worry, there’s anxiety, there’s tension.

Jeffrey Brown: Solastalgia.

Ada Limon: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: What is that?

Ada Limon: It’s basically being nostalgic for a place that you are in at the moment because you know it’s shifting and changing. And I’m not quite sure how clear-eyed our poetry can be if we’re not making room for our whole selves and those parts of us that are grieving, those parts of us that are furious, and those parts of us that are trying to figure out how to make impactful change.

Jeffrey Brown: The You Are Here project also includes a kind of call to action via social media to encourage people to share their poetic responses to the prompt and to build a community of concerned citizens.

Back at the park, Ranger Clay Hanna refers to the idea of democracy for all in describing the role of storytelling in the parks using poetry and other arts.

Clay Hanna: We see parks as a place for people to come together, right? We — our programming is audience first. We’re audience-centered, right? So we’re not telling people how to think. We’re providing those stories to make them think, right, and often to interact with the audience. Other.

Jeffrey Brown: In an unusual partnership, Ada Limon collaborated with government climate scientists, studying their findings and contributing a poem to an official report.

For Limon, there is the ultimate belief in the power of her art form to impact lives, even at a time like this.

Ada Limon: Because it feels to me like we can get very myopic and feel like we are the only person going through whatever it is that we’re going through. And, in reality, all of us need to recognize that what happens in this world happens to all of us.

Man: One, two, three.

(Cheering)

(Applause)

Jeffrey Brown: After our time together, Ada Limon took her project to Mount Rainier National Park in Washington and Redwood National and State Parks in California. Her park visits continue through the fall.

For the PBS “News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the Cape Cod National Seashore in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Geoff Bennett: And, in October, Ada Limon will send some of her poetry into outer space. Her poem “In Praise of Mystery” is being engraved onto the Europa Clipper spacecraft set to take off for its 1.8-billion-mile mission to Jupiter’s smallest moon.

The so-called Message in a Bottle project invited people around the world to sign on to the poem. Some 2.6 million will now have their names stenciled onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft.