In my neighborhood, there is a little acrylic box attached to a wooden post in someone’s front yard. The word “Poetry” is neatly carved into the post, and the box is filled with poems for the perusal of passersby. I thought of this little box and paid it a visit after reading former national poet laureate Ada Limón’s (pictured above) new book, “Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry.”
The slim volume is actually the text of Limón’s closing address as poet laureate, delivered in April 2025, and she makes her intention clear: “to make a case for poetry.” Poetry, she argues, offers us not only belonging, but new ways of seeing, new ways of being. Speaking of the writing of poetry, even if it is never shared with anyone else, she asks, “Didn’t you, even briefly, feel as if you inhabited the world? Didn’t it, for a moment, make you feel connected to language? Didn’t you find a container for your heart?” The answers to all of those questions, for me, has always been yes.
Reading poetry, and writing it, always puts me in mind of the Russian formalist distinction between siuzhet and fabula, two difficult-to-translate words. Fabula refers to the raw material of the story, the “what” of the narrative, from point A to B to C. If you’re reading for the fabula, you’re reading solely for the plot. Siuzhet, on the other hand, is the “how” of the story, all of the artistic choices that go into the way the narrative is related to the reader, the story scrambled, perhaps into C, then A, then B. Poetry, it seems to me, is all siuzhet. It forces us to slow down, to attend to a story (or an emotion, or a question or an experience), in a decidedly contemplative fashion. This is one of its most perennial gifts to us.
“When you read another person’s poem, you are entering their music and their syntax, and because of the line breaks, commas, caesuras and stanzas, you’re entering their breath. It’s oddly intimate. We can inhabit each other’s lives just by reading a poem aloud. It’s this intimacy that prevents us from being alone.”
–Ada Limón
Poetry, Limón contends, is made “in the cement mixer of the soul,” and each person’s cement mixer is different. “When you read another person’s poem,” she writes, “you are entering their music and their syntax, and because of the line breaks, commas, caesuras and stanzas, you’re entering their breath. It’s oddly intimate. We can inhabit each other’s lives just by reading a poem aloud. It’s this intimacy that prevents us from being alone.” I’ve found all of this to be true in my experience, but how can we invite people into this beautiful act of reading and belonging on a larger scale? Limón had an idea.
One of Limón’s largest projects during her tenure was called “You Are Here: Poetry in Parks.” Through her guidance and advocacy, poems were installed at national parks throughout the country: A.R. Ammons’ “Uppermost” at Mount Rainier National Park, Lucille Clifton’s “the earth is a living thing” in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and many more across the county. Limón declares that she had one singular intention in organizing these installations, “to help us do one simple thing: Pay Closer Attention.”
Why pay attention? Limón has an answer for us: “We pay close attention to the world because paying attention is a way of saying thank you, a way of loving.” For those of us unable to say thank you, to offer our love to the national parks in person, Limón’s companion volume, “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World,” offers us 50 new poems by America’s most beloved poets, each one reminding us that our love and attention can be offered in any place where we might find ourselves.
I haven’t visited these national parks yet, haven’t read the poems in the natural settings where Limón arranged for their installation, calling for celebration of the beauty of both the natural world and the written word, making a case for how they are intertwined. But I did recognize the similar spirit of our neighborhood poetry repository and appreciate it anew.
What it (poetry) offers us is a gentle yet insistent beckoning to see not just anew, but differently. To pay attention, and, to release our tight grasp on hurry and efficiency.
The poem I saw in the neighborhood poetry box on a balmy April day was Marge Piercy’s “On New Year’s Day,” a prayer and a plea for a peaceful new January beginning. I was acutely aware in that moment of time passing me by, National Poetry Month drawing to a close. And yet Piercy’s poem, originally composed in 1981, reminded me that in poetry, both time and place fold over on themselves, always self-renewing.
I’m grateful that we have a National Poetry Month. I’m grateful to live in a neighborhood that offers me a tiny invitation to enter the alternate modality of poetry. But poetry, I believe, moves far beyond that limited time, this limited space. What it offers us is a gentle yet insistent beckoning to see not just anew, but differently. To pay attention, and, to release our tight grasp on hurry and efficiency. To let go of the “what” and enter into the “how.” January or April, in this century or the next, I hope that it’s an invitation we continue to accept.
“The right poem,” Limón writes, “can make us recommit to the world.” I hope that we will, again and again and again.
Top photo of Ada Limón courtesy National Park Service.