Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
— Ada Limón, from “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa”
There in sweeping blues and yellows is the Glass City River Wall, a mammoth mural of sunflowers sprawled across several grain silos that rise tall from the eastern bank of the Maumee River as we drive across it.
Soon we are making our way through the middle of America: the rubber mud flaps on trucks ask “Got Milk?,” so, too, the billboards enquire urgently — dairy is subsidized, the barns are red, the cornfields neat, the flat distance only broken by a quiet, smoggy blue.
When we arrive in Cuyahoga the sun is low, and we drive into the valley, shaded and dim.
We follow the signs to Kendall Lake, although it ends up looking more like a pond. We are greeted by a flock of gray geese and one of several turquoise signs that read “You Are Here,” and are of the same complexion as Ada Limón’s new anthology, which commissioned “fifty poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by our most celebrated contemporary writers,” according to Milkweed Editions, the nonprofit that publishes Limón’s work.
This anthology is one of two initiatives by Limón and The Library of Congress. The second initiative is the event we attend now, one stop on Limón’s tour of seven U.S. national parks in partnership with the Library of Congress, the National Park Service and the Poetry Society of America. Limón was named the 24th poet laureate of the United States in 2022 and is the author of six books of poetry.
“Some of the poems included here contend with the destruction of nature, while others consider its abundance and resilience — and some do both at the same time,” reads the anthology’s forward, written by Carla Hayden who currently serves as the 14th librarian of Congress. “They also serve as a call for readers to take in the nature around them, wherever they are.”
After we load onto a yellow school bus along with other attendees, giddy like schoolchildren, we head to the Ledges Shelter which borders an outspread field, lively with a large crowd communing on lawn chairs and picnic blankets facing a podium. Before the event starts, I purchase a couple of copies of Limón’s anthology, anticipating the book signing scheduled at the reading’s close.
This July the heat is thick and it stills us, and we are stilled yet more by Dr. Lisa Petit, the superintendent of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, who takes the podium, beginning the event.
“This is a place where people discover their own connection to nature and the arts,” Petit said. “Writers have found inspiration and inspired others here in Cuyahoga Valley for a very long time.”
Although Cuyahoga Valley is rather metropolitan and maybe not the western, remote, national park that comes to mind for most Americans — it was chosen as one of the seven national parks included in Limón’s project just because of this difference, according to Petit.
“We thrive because of our connection to our communities,” she said.
Next to the microphone is Robert Casper, head of poetry and literature in the Literary Initiatives Office at the Library of Congress, who tells the crowd that this is the most attended of the “Poetry in Parks” events thus far.
After much anticipation, the laureate ascends the podium in a blue suit jacket, to uproarious applause. Limón’s voice, as one might expect of a career-poet, and someone trained in drama, is measured, considered and dulcet.
“What a beautiful crowd,” she says. “I wanted to ask if this was anyone’s first poetry reading.”
Several audience members raise their hands.
The tradition of poetry reading is, in fact, a little odd. One shows up not for theater or circus, but for a kind of, often too-intimate, telling of someone else’s life, in strange staccotic bits. To better understand the character of this ritual and poetry in the Midwest, I spoke with Kathy Fagan, distinguished professor of English at the College of Arts & Sciences at The Ohio State University.
“[A national park] is supposed to be a democratizing space,” Fagan said.
The same goes for a poetry reading.
“I feel as if I can read a poem on the page, never having met the poet before,” Fagan said. “But there are an awful lot of people who cannot, for disability reasons or for reasons having to do with just simply not being fluent in poetry. There’s this vitality in a poetry reading that one might not always find on the page … hearing poetry, for some people … is the only way to receive it.”
Limón’s job is to work for the U.S. government as a consultant in poetry, and she is here at Cuyahoga to read on ambassadorial terms that have special meaning for the Midwest, which Fagan said has a rich and deep poetic tradition.
“With Ada, and certainly before her with Joy Harjo, I think it’s become — and this is a good thing — a much more political position, by which I mean a position that doesn’t just bring attention to poetry, but to other issues of the laureate’s choice. In Ada’s case we saw a wider recognition of … ecopoetics.”
Fagan defined ecopoetics as a poetic tradition that includes and considers the natural world but “means different things to different people.”
According to Fagan, the Midwest is “lousy with poets,” no less with ecopoets. That’s why it’s important that Limón chose Cuyahoga Valley, a national park in the middle of the country, one among a landscape that has often been figured as barren, or at least uninteresting, yet has been muse to ecopoets for so long, Fagan said.
The introduction of Limón’s anthology shares that its title, and her signature project as laureate, came to her while hiking near her home in Kentucky.
“My brain that day was full of bad news. The climate crisis was presenting in furious and disastrous ways all over the globe, the human element was behaving no less ruthlessly,” it reads. “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 the natural world was right here and I was a part of it; I was nature too.”
At each park Limón visits she picks a poem somehow emblematic of the park and its landscape. Her choices are installed on picnic tables, for anyone to read. The tables also include the prompt: “What would you write in response to the landscape around you?”
“We really like things that help people make their own meaning and express their own ideas. So a poetry prompt is absolutely perfect for that, because reading a poem and then having a prompt … lets people tell their own story in response to the landscape,” Jennie Vasarhelyi, chief of interpretation at Cuyahoga Valley National Park, said when I spoke with her a week prior to the reading.
For the Cuyahoga Valley inscription, Limón picked Jean Valentine’s “The Valley,” which feels more like a lexical choice than anything else — Valentine was born in the Midwest, but has little to do with Ohio.
Fagan described “The Valley,” as “short, lyric, mysterious and enigmatic,” and it is all of those things when Limón reads it to us.
Next, David Hassler, director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, joins Limón on stage for a discussion, and he asks the laureate, throughout their discussion, to read several more of her poems, including “Sanctuary,” “Startelement,” “The Year of the Goldfinches” and “The End of Poetry.”
They are each about something specific — twin yellow birds, the futility of poetry amidst crisis and pandemic and what it means to be witnessed — but after hearing so much poetry, Limón’s words start to amount to what feels like one large call to action, urging us to think about the land we gather on — and its destruction.
Such action, which can feel utterly small in the face of the visible and quickening destruction of our planet, is perhaps only possible if we acknowledge our great luck, as Limón puts it in “The Conditional”:
“Say, that would be / enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive, / right here, feeling lucky.”
And we are lucky, sitting this evening hour listening to poetry under a white oak, which Limón, several times throughout the reading, raises her arms to, as if in thanks.
After the picnic table is unveiled I rush, book in arm, with the other interns and fellows, to the signing, which takes place under the shade of the Ledges Shelter. From the front of the line, we watch as the crowd amasses, snaking around the shelter.
We each get a chance to exchange a few words with the laureate. I find it challenging to force out my thanks from behind my tight grin. Limón signs my copy of her anthology, writing “For Wonder” below her name, as if instructing us to go about our days for such a purpose.
When we drive home, the sun looks giant and maroon, like a Ferris wheel-sized scoop of orange sherbet, and it pulls over the highway and the cornfields and perhaps all the heartland, a reddish glow. But when I tried to point this out, through the car’s window, the sun had gone somewhere, too low to spot. For wonder, I’ve been searching ever since.
