What makes Cuyahoga Valley National Park great?
The beauty? The serenity? The sense of restoration? Picnic tables?
Those are all factors in Friday night’s visit by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón to Ledges Shelter in Peninsula. It’s part of her project, “You Are Here: Poetry in Parks.”
Limón is visiting just seven sites nationwide as part of a partnership between the National Park Service, Library of Congress and Poetry Society of America. Each event debuts a picnic table which has been transformed into a work of public art – inscribed with a site-specific poem.
“I find our landscapes so incredible and so unique and so diverse,” Limón said.
Although this will be her first visit to CVNP, she said it's been "an education" learning about the area and its rich cultural history. That's why she chose Jean Valentine's poem "The Valley" for inscription on the picnic table here.
“I like the idea of the valley, and I like the idea of attention and pausing,” she said. “Also, on a personal note, my very first book was called ‘Lucky Wreck.’”
Valentine selected “Lucky Wreck” for the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize.
“I'm really, really happy with being able to represent her as a legend, but also the way it connects to that particular landscape,” Limón said.
Each poetic picnic table also displays the question: What would you write in response to the landscape around you?
“My hope is that people will read the poem and really look deeply and pay attention to the nature all around them," she said. "Maybe if they are so inclined, they might write a poem in response. And if a poem is too intimidating, they could just write anything. It could be a scrap of anything. It could be one line. It could be one sentence.”
Limón encourages visitors to share their thoughts on social media with #YouAreHerePoetry.
"We have these incredible tools, and yet we tend to use them for more toxic means," she said. "If we can use them for good, I think we should, and they can be these tools of connection. I also think that if you have a difficult time with social media, it’s okay not to share it on social. You can also send it to a friend. You can burn it in your backyard burn pile. You can do whatever it is that satisfies you. I think the real healing is in the making.”
That healing is also what led Limón on her path from the New York City marketing world to full time poetry in Northern California after her stepmother’s death in 2010.
“She died when she was 51, and I thought, 'Well, what if I only had that many years? What would I want to do?' And I wanted to write poems,” Limón said. “It’s been quite a journey, but I don't think any of that would have happened if it wasn't for a kind of healing, a kind of grieving.”
Seating is full for Limón’s Friday 6 p.m. visit to Peninsula, but there is a waiting list online. The project has already visited Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts, Mount Rainier National Park in Washington and Redwood National and State Parks in California. On July 20, she'll be at Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, followed by Everglades National Park in Florida on Oct. 8 and Saguaro National Park in Arizona on Dec. 3.
Her term as the 24th poet laureate with the Library of Congress ends in April 2025. After that, she’ll be releasing a new poetry collection as well as two children’s books, one of which is based on “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” The poem will be engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper as it travels 1.8 billion miles to the Jupiter system.
