This is Birdnote.

Shauna Pataki, education strategist for the National Park Service, has always loved poetry,

and even writes poems herself. And a few years ago, she got a phone call she was pretty excited

about. Well, it's always exciting when you get a call from the Library of Congress, and the

U.S. Poet Laureate is interested in partnering with you on their signature project, which has

only happened to me once in my career. With her project, you are here. U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon

seeks to connect people and nature through poetry.

Though, as she explained at the dedication event for Suaro National Park, her original concept was a little more out there.

I thought, let's do something with poetry in the natural world.

Let's get a plane and put poems on natural seed packets and then drop the poems

out of the sky and reseed land that's been harmed. And the Library of Congress was like, hmm,

let's think about another way.

And then I thought, let's put a poem in every single national park.

And they were like, okay, we like where you're going.

One part of the project is an anthology of nature poetry.

And one part is poetry installations in national parks.

There were seven sites selected across the service, and the poetry installations are

customized picnic tables that feature a selected poem connected to place with a prompt

that encourages visitors to think about their own connection

to the landscape by asking them the question, what would you write in response to the landscape

around you?

I want this to be a prompt for all of us to remember that our relationship with the natural world

...