A poem can seem so small, so minor, so invisible, especially when up against the daily crises and catastrophes that our planet is facing,” writes Ada Limón, the former U.S. poet laureate, in the introduction to her edited anthology, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2024). “How can a poem make a difference? How can a tree make a difference?” Perhaps the answer, she writes, is that “poetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone.”
Jodie Hollander (right) leads a workshop in Joshua Tree National Park in September 2023. (Credit: Carrie Rosema)
Inspired by the red arrow on a trail map proclaiming “You Are Here,” Limón’s signature project, You Are Here: Poetry in Parks, a partnership between the National Park Service and the Poetry Society of America, placed site-specific poetry installations in seven national parks in 2024. Poems by luminaries such as A. R. Ammons, June Jordan, and Mary Oliver are inscribed into picnic tabletops in national parks, from the Everglades in Florida to Mount Rainier in Washington.
The larger project of bringing poetry to parks has also been taken up by poets Meg Muthupandiyan, author most recently of Human Geographies (Water’s Edge Press, 2025), and Jodie Hollander, whose second collection, Nocturne, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2023.
In 2019, Muthupandiyan began Poetry in the Parks as a public humanities project to celebrate national, state, and local parks through the words of poets and to celebrate poetry through the beauty of parks. Initially hosted on Instagram, the project utilized location tags to connect posts to public lands, where the text and audio recordings of poems are overlaid on video of the landscapes, plants, and animals found in parks.
In more recent years Muthupandiyan has shifted her priority to the development of a mobile app, Locus Poetica, which will use geolocation to allow park visitors to discover poetry connected to the landscapes they are in. Described as “geocaching for poets,” the app will house an archive of place-based poetry. Visitors to a park, Muthupandiyan imagines, will encounter a QR code that allows them to access the app and learn that a poem has been written about that place. In addition to text, Muthupandiyan plans to provide an audio file of the poem, “so that I can stand in that place,” she says, “and I can hear, with all the orality that it deserves, someone speaking on behalf of the earth.”
Muthupandiyan intends to partner with state poetry societies to engage poets around the United States and begin building a repository of poems about place. Eventually the project will become open-source, inviting submissions from any visitors to public lands. “I see it truly as a community-shared public humanities project, where poets of all walks of life can descend on their most sacred places in their community and praise them,” Muthupandiyan says. “The place becomes a touchstone for other people to appreciate poetry and deepen their appreciation of place.”
Muthupandiyan first worked with her colleague Steven Rosenberg and his senior capstone class of computer science students to build a prototype, iterate on design variables, and understand user experience. Now she is working with a designer to develop the app, which she hopes to make available to communities within the next year.
Jodie Hollander runs another project by the same name: In 2018 she started Poetry in the Parks while running poetry workshops in parks and monuments near Flagstaff, Arizona, including Walnut Canyon, Sunset Crater Volcano, and Wupatki. Hollander has since delivered workshops in places farther afield, including Joshua Tree National Park, Pearl Harbor National Memorial, and Sitka National Historical Park.
Free and open to the public, Hollander’s workshops welcome everyone, regardless of writing experience. After shared readings and discussion, participants are given time to freewrite amid the landscape. Workshops often draw on the interpretive themes of the park or monument where they take place; for instance, at Walnut Canyon, Hollander teaches a workshop on the poetry of migration, which includes an interpretive walk with an expert birder. A short documentary on Hollander’s workshops, filmed in Saguaro National Park, will be released this fall as part of Elisa New’s PBS series, Poetry in America.
“Fear of our shrinking public lands is a real fear right now,” Hollander says. “And one of the hopes is that if people can make a personal connection to their public lands by writing a poem about it, they will become greater advocates for their public lands.”
This aspiration is evident in each of these projects; above all, encountering poetry in parks through installations, workshops, or digital interfaces reminds us that both poetry and public lands are designed to be shared. In Redwood National and State Parks, Francisco X. Alarcón’s poem “Never Alone” reinforces Limón’s claim that poetry and nature remind us that we are here, together with the natural world: “always / this caressing / Wind // this Earth / whispering / to our feet.”
Jenna Gersie is an environmental humanities scholar and a writer living in Boulder, Colorado.
