About the featured image: Ada Limón, as poet laureate, has begun an initiative called Poetry in Parks in conjunction with the National Parks Service. To complement this project, she invited poets to write new work centered on our relationship with nature. In April, Milkweed Editions published You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World as a testament to that enduring relationship.
Ada Limón, 24th poet laureate of the United States, gave an amazing reading at my alma mater, Smith College, on the last day of National Poetry Month, April 30, 2024, followed by a conversation with Matt Donovan, director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith.
So many things struck me about the reading, many of which resonate with my own poetic sensibilities. The sense of place and relationship with the natural world. The vast possibilities for poems that surrounds us. The exquisiteness of short poems, just long enough to offer what needs to be said. The way the mind seeks myriad connections. That there are poems written for oneself that may never be shared with others. The interest in received forms without the compulsion to write them for public consumption. The honesty and authenticity of her work and of her speaking between poems and responding to questions.
I was not able to be there in person but I know John M. Greene Hall, where the reading took place, well, having spent many hours there as a student rehearsing and performing with choral groups and practicing the organ. It’s a cavernous space, which seats about 2,000 people. I was awed at the intimacy that Ada Limón was able to project, as though she were reading and talking with a small circle of friends in a living room after dinner.
I wish I had been able to be there.
Maybe, someday, I will hear her read in person.
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Joanne Corey 
That sounds like a wonderful event. I think that’s one of the ways poetry draws in the listener/reader, sometimes more than other forms: when it’s done well, the intimacy of it is startling.
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Thank you for that trenchant observation, Devon. Poetry does have that ability to reach the heart quickly, even more quickly when it is heard. I think people are less inclined to give into the fear that they won’t understand a poem when they hear it as opposed to if they only experience it on the page.
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