What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In the occasional series, Reprise, we republish some of the most loved essays from What Sparks Poetry’s archives.
Taylor Johnson
Young buck tapping
its velvet against the
bathroom window in
the morning. The land
leaning in the pines,
the well, cattails,
muscadines, hot metal,
in the shed, chicory on
the stove at twilight. In
the orange morning I
rose w/ my grandfather,
w/ the larger animals
of our imagination, and
warmed the truck to go
to the water. On the
way I laid down in the
truck bed and caught a
rabbit barely in the
grasp of a hawk. What
did I know about being
hunted? I knew
everything. The meek
don't inherit shit—I
stuffed my mouth with
pine needles and spit, bled
and spit, at the
root, and look where it's
got me—landless. If
the water was a myth, then
I went in looking
for my dog only to find
my grandmother's
armchair. I rode it as I
would any wet story—
to deeper blue. Listen:
by lamplight my
grandfather would lead
me to the edge of the
woods—this is yours—
then he would kill the
light. If I told you he
flew back to his house,
what are you supposed
to believe; it was just
me and my green hope
pressing through the
black. How else am I
supposed to enter the
world if I'd already left
once: as myth: not set
apart: but as a small
shelled thing: low:
toiling in the dirt: lifting
every bit of black to
breathe
from the book INHERITANCE / Alice James Books
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Cover image of Taylor Johnson's book, "Inheritance"
What Sparks Poetry:
Brian Teare on Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance

"Maybe you already know inheritance is vexed by paradox. Boon or burden, boon and burden? Each of us enters Johnson’s book through that singular, seemingly never settled and always unsettling noun, holding a small flat object labeled Inheritance. A thing made and possessed by another, and now—is it really yours? A thing given, but was it freely chosen? 'Extraordinary limitation,' Johnson writes, 'playing freedom.'"
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Color photograph of a smiling Ada Limon
How Ada Limón Brings Poetry to National Parks

For one of her projects as Poet Laureate, Ada Limón wanted people to encounter poems as they wandered through natural landscapes. "The result is a dispersed exhibit of picnic tables engraved with poems by a variety of modern writers selected by Limón. The initiative is being rolled out at seven national parks this summer. At Mount Rainier, in Washington State, the late poet A. R. Ammons’s work 'Uppermost' will accompany a view of the 14,411-foot peak from the park’s popular Paradise area."

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