Poet Laureate Ada Limón Takes It All InPoet Laureate Ada Limón Takes It All In

A few months before the Library of Congress appointed her United States Poet Laureate, Ada Limón proclaimed her love of road trips to listeners of The Slowdown, a public radio podcast. “There’s something about the interstate highways,” declared Limón, then the host of the popular poem-a-day show. “The different roadside diners and gas stations ... how the landscape, the road, the car and even the music you’re playing can meld into one blurry experience, until taking in the world becomes the most important job there is.”

Lately, Limón has been taking in the national parks. In June, she visited Cape Cod National Seashore, Mount Rainier National Park, and Redwood National and State Parks. This month, it’s Great Smoky Mountains and Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley. At each stop, she’s reading a different historic American poem—works by Mary Oliver, Francisco X. Alarcón, June Jordan and others—then dedicating a fancy picnic table with the poem inscribed atop it, a very on-brand installation for the parks.

Limón, whose job is essentially to be a national advocate for poetry, calls the effort the You Are Here project. She has a personal connection to each of the seven participating parks. The Redwoods were a haunt when she was growing up in Sonoma, California. As a University of Washington undergrad in the ’90s, she hiked at Mount Rainier, and the sight of its peak on the Seattle skyline was a reliable hallmark of lovely days. In the early aughts, during a pivotal fellowship in Provincetown, Limón says, “Most of my wandering, meandering and becoming a writer took place at Cape Cod National Seashore.”

Today, the 48-year-old poet lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband, Lucas Marquardt. The road is still a constant in her life and work. “They always say great ideas happen in the shower, when you’re relaxed, but for me it’s the passenger side of the car,” she says. “It’s that time where you’re watch- ing the landscape change and blur and twist, and also there’s this kind of relaxation and hum that comes over the body that I think promotes receptivity to poetry.”

Limón’s poems have been praised as intimate and tender, accessible and conversational. She’s published six collections, among them a National Book Award finalist and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. Most recently, she’s edited You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, featuring 52 poets writing verses that Limón describes as “place specific, so that the focus wasn’t necessarily a vague idea of nature, but instead that there was some actual landscape there.”

The book is, in a particular sense, a com- panion piece to the parks project. “I think of the parks as intentional nature,” Limón explains. “They’re set aside and sacred, and you have to drive to them. And that can be so exceptional, but I wanted the anthology to be the counterpart, to offer a moment of, okay, so what is the dailiness of nature? What’s the nature we’re not driving to—our houseplants, the trees in our neighborhood, the birds at the bus stop?”

Her park visits, she laments, are all too brief, wedged in among the many and varied engagements of a poet laureate: readings, keynotes, occasional talks about Jupiter’s moons. (Limón recently wrote a poem to be engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, which launches in the direction of the gas giant this fall.) But she’s aiming to wring inspiration out of those stops all the same. “I'm hoping for at least a little bit of solitude,” she says. “Maybe time to write a poem or a scrap of something.” She will, after all, have plenty of time in the passenger seat.