SANTA FE ‒ A sense of place – belonging to a culture and the land. That is what Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets spoke about during his conversation with the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival on May 16 at the Santa Fe Convention Center.
“Knowing a place is just as important as living there. It was poetry that taught me how to know a place,” Skeets said.
“What connects our work so often is that story of place,” Limon said. “There is something to be said about making art toward a place.”
Limon added that being a stranger in a land leads someone to try and identify it through “place, plants and animals.”
Skeets, who lived on the Navajo Reservation, said there were no jobs for a poet, so he went to work for the Navajo Land Department, where he had to review archeological surveys and other documents related to land development.
“They would list every signing animal, every single plant life,” Skeets said, adding his book “Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers” grew out of that process.
Limon also worked in a land office in the Seattle area, and the poetry that grew out of her work became her first book “Lucky Wreck,” published in 2005.
That same year, Limon said every poetry book she read had no sense of place. “The Internet was the place. People wouldn’t tell you where they were. There was no place in poetry,” she said.
“I feel like there was a time when we were scared to talk about place or maybe love it,” Limon said, adding “I don’t know if the climate crisis made us stop loving it or maybe fearing land and water.”
Skeets said it is his belief that “setting is really important in a poem,” and “those types of details matter in a poem.”
He even enjoys including weather themes in his poetry, because as a child it was his desire to be a meteorologist.
“There are times where we get so attached to a story we hear about weather or ecology,” Limon said, adding that “poems are the answers to our world.”
Through poetry people explore humanities’ “relationship to everything else,” while the poet is “bearing witness,” according to Limon.
Skeets chimed in that their work as poets is “completely optional. We don’t have to tell these stories. We don’t have to write these poems.”
Limon echoed saying, “no one is waiting for us to write another poem,” but she is “deeply invested in the strangeness of the world and the strangeness of being alive. Poetry is the way I can navigate that, and I can find the music for it.”
The music is in the way the words flow, where the pauses are found and Limon said that is very intimate for the reader.
“It is a language for this extraordinary, bizarre reality that is ours,” Limon said. “I’m not sure poetry does make sense of it, but to capture it for a day – you’ve pinned down this one ethereal thing.”
Skeets pointed out that poetry as another form of storytelling has been around for thousands of years and by joining that long line of storytellers, he is in a sense doing his civic duty as poet laureate for a sovereign nation. “How do I talk about poetry as an act of sovereignty,” he asked.
“In Dine we have horse songs that are sung in honor of these animals. I wonder if it is a relationship with place – talking about living in rural places outside of bigger cities,” Skeets pondered early in the talk and then closed with, “Poetry is our very first language. We learn language through songs and nursery rhyme. We rhyme ourselves into the world.”