In Praise of Space-Bound Mystery

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

As the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limon has been involved in some very cool projects.

For one thing, her poem, In Praise of Mystery, is engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft. That’s going to launch later this year and will go 1.8 billion miles to explore Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

Which is so cool just to imagine your poetry floating around out there in space. That’s incredible. Isn’t that something?

And then also, along with the National Park Service and the Poetry Society of America,

She’s launched an effort to install public art in seven national parks.

Now, each of these installations features a sleek metal surface atop a picnic table, and on that surface is a beautifully rendered poem that somehow connects to the environment.

So, for example, at Cape Cod National Seashore, there will be a poem by Mary Oliver.

And at Everglades National Park, there’s one by June Jordan.

In the Great Smoky Mountains, there’s one by Lucille Clifton.

And there’s several others.

And this effort to bring poetry to the parks goes by the wonderful name, You Are Here.

And Lamone got that idea when she was about to set out on a hike herself, and she looked at the trail map there.

And she saw those words with a little red arrow.

And it was, she writes, 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.

And in addition to all this, she’s edited a new anthology called You Are Here, Poetry in the Natural World.

And Grant, as you know, it’s an amazing roster of poets. Victoria Chang, Joy Harjo, Ilya Kaminsky, Jose Olivares, Patricia Smith, Ellen Bass, and even the table of contents reads like a poem.

You belong to the world. When the fact of your gaze means nothing, then you are truly alongside. And you must be present, among many others.

And it’s this thrilling, accessible volume of poetry. It’s one that invites you to think about engaging with the landscape yourself. You know, whether you put pen to paper or you visit a national park or you just plant some flowers outside your door.

As Lamone writes, nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are. And it’s just a lovely, lovely book. It really is.

That book, You Are Here, we’ll link to on our website. And I have to say, as someone who doesn’t read poetry much as a pastime, I was moved. There were quite a few poems in it where I said, wait a second, that’s a brand new idea. That had never occurred to me. And it was delivered in the form of poetry, which somehow has a lot more force sometimes than prose.

We’d love to hear the poetry that you love. What have you been reading? Let us know. 877-929-9673. Words at waywordradio.org.