Congratulations to the U.S. for our new Poet Laureate!

If you look on the right hand side of the page, at the list of books read this year, you’ll see Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind. I finished reading it some weeks ago, before she became the  twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate. [The link goes to Milkweed Press’ Limón page, which has a plethora of additional information about the poet and her poetry.] In honor of her selection, I’ve moved The Hurting Kind to the top of my reread pile. Snyder and Harjo can wait. Would that not enough time for reading were my biggest headache these days.]

The Hurting Kind, Ada Limón

Today’s temperatures and breeze were close to ideal for mowing the back yard. Weather and ancient bones and muscles permitting, we’ll get to the front and north side yards tomorrow. Our feral oregano has spread to several other spots in the yard. While it’s in bloom it looks pretty and smells nice. I’m trying to decide how much an aesthetic preference for mown grass is innate compared to an acquired taste.If oregano completely replaced the grass, could I skip mowing? Would I grow to like the look?

For some time I’ve been devoting an hour or more in the morning to reading poetry while drinking my coffee before I engage in chores such as mowing. I need to become as regular with my morning exercises, which I undertake with slightly greater frequency and regularity than mowing. Several of the poets I’m currently reading are not, I think it’s fair to say, nationally known. I’ve come across them in book reviews in outdoors or environmental magazines. Much of their work is based on rural living, hunting, fishing and living close to nature. That helps me appreciate all the more recent poet laureate projects such as:

• Harjo’s signature offering was “Living Nations, Living Words,” a digital gathering of poems and other materials by forty-seven contemporary Native poets from across the nation.


• [Tracy K.] Smith, in addition to launching The Slowdown, focused on editing a poetry anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018), and a tour through rural America called “American Conversations: Celebrating Poems in Rural Communities.”

I’m looking forward to learning what Limón’s laureate project will be. Meanwhile, I suspect several of her other poetry volumes will find their way onto my “To Be Read” pile. If my suspicion is correct, that one won’t die with a great stack of books unread, I’m motivated to get all of Limón’s volumes, but past experience indicates I’ll also find other writers and topics I have to explore. The longer I live, the more I want to read and learn and know. That’s sort of like an expanding universe, isn’t it?

What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use

By Ada Limón

All these great barns out here in the outskirts,

black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.

They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.

You say they look like arks after the sea’s

dried up, I say they look like pirate ships,

and I think of that walk in the valley where

J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,

No. I believe in this connection we all have

to nature, to each other, to the universe.

And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,

low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,

and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,

woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.

So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,

its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name

though we knew they were really just clouds—

disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.