I am in Maryland this weekend teaching a workshop in a friends studio. We are making hand built pots and experimenting with materials. I told my students that as they pinch their pots they have to listen to the clay and imagine that their forms breathe. These pots speak of our time together in and amongst majestic beech oak and tulip trees
Poems are like trees…They let us breathe together. In each line break, caesura, and stanza, there’s a place for us to breathe. Not unlike a redwood forest or a line of crepe myrtles in an otherwise cement landscape, poems can be a place to stop and remember that we too are living. W.S. Merwin wrote in his poem “Place”: “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.” I think I would add that I would also like to write a poem. Maybe I’d even write a poem about a tree?
— Ada Limón, editor and introduction for You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, Milkweed Editions and the Library of Congress, 2024, page 3.