A Walking Poets’ Library, MC Hyland at Prismatic Park

Between July 4 and July 8 (Skipping July 7), poet/scholar/book artist MC Hyland will be performing a new work, A Walking Poets’ Library, in Poets House’s Prismatic Park structure. An expansion of an ongoing poetry project, A Walking Poets’ Library is a resource to promote walking, conversation, publication, and exchange.

Starting from the intimate experience of two people walking together, Hyland regularly composes “walking poems” for friends and strangers: each poem begins as a shared walk, and is “published” when emailed to its co-walker and addressee. A Walking Poets’ Library will be a studio for publishing these poems—and new walking poems written by Hyland and others—as physical books, as well as a library where these books can be read and checked out.

Hyland writes: “I started thinking about walking as a special way people spend time together when I read Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem, The Prelude. A lot of his thinking about the French Revolution happens in that poem, and for him, that political thinking was tied up with the conversations he had with friends while walking. He wrote the poem for his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and never published it during his lifetime. I started to wonder what it might mean to write poems with that kind of intimacy as a guiding principle, and what kinds of objects those poems might turn into, so that a reader could experience some of that intimacy. This summer, I’ll be turning the writing that comes from walking and talking with people into small books, each printed in two copies—one for my co-walker, and one for A Walking Poets’ Library. I hope the library will fill up not just with my own conversations, but with conversations lots of other people are having with each other—a whole city of people, walking and talking.”

Poets Aleijuan, Hosannah Asuncion, Chloë Bass, Ian Dreiblatt, Naomi Extra, Anna Gurton-Wachter, David Hobbs, Brenda Iijima, Wendy Lee, Ricardo Maldonado, Kate McIntyre and Emily Skillings join Hyland to present curated workshops and talks. See below for full schedule.

Schedule:

July 4: Library Open Hours: 11:30 am-8pm

• All day: Stop by the library to pick up prompts for walking and writing, to check out a book, write a poem, or talk to the librarians.
• 12:30-2pm: Writing Workshop: “Taking Your Voice for a Walk” with AWPL Writer-in-Residence Emily Skillings: http://bit.ly/EmilySkillingsPrismaticPark
• 2:30pm, 4pm, 5:30pm: Book-making workshops
• 6:30-7:30pm: Walk-and-talk: A walking salon on the public and the private with Ricardo Maldonado and Kate McIntyre

July 5: Library Open Hours: 11:30 am-8pm

• All day: Stop by the library to pick up prompts for walking and writing, to check out a book, write a poem, or talk to the librarians.
• 12-1pm: Walk-and-talk: A walking salon on intimacy with Chloë Bass, Naomi Extra, Anna Gurton-Wachter, and Wendy Lee
• 2pm, 4pm, 5:30pm: Book-making workshops
• 6:30-8pm: Writing Workshop: “Walking Together, Talking Together” with AWPL founder MC Hyland: http://bit.ly/MCHylandPrismaticPark

July 6: Library Open Hours: 11:30 am-8pm

• All day: Stop by the library to pick up prompts for walking and writing, to check out a book, write a poem, or talk to the librarians.
• 12-1pm: Walk-and-talk: A walking salon on bodies in cities with Aleijuan, Ian Dreiblatt, David Hobbs, and Brenda Iijima
• 2pm, 4pm, 5:30pm: Book-making workshops
• 6:30-8pm: Writing Workshop: “Ghost Walk” with AWPL Writer-in-Residence Hosannah Asuncion: http://bit.ly/HossannahAsuncionPrismaticPark

July 8: Library Open Hours: 11:30 am-8pm

• All day: Stop by the library to pick up prompts for walking and writing, to check out a book, write a poem, or talk to the librarians.
• 2pm, 4pm, 5:30pm: Book-making workshops: make a notebook to take with you and/or contribute a volume to A Walking Poets’ Library
• 6-8pm: A Night of One-on-One Readings in and near A Walking Poets’ Library

MC Hyland is the author of Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press) and the chapbooks Every Night In Magic City (H_NGM_N), Residential, As In ( Blue Hour Press), and (with Kate Lorenz and Friedrich Kerksieck) the hesitancies (Small Fires Press). She is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press and a printshop steward at the Center for Book Arts in New York. She is writing a dissertation about the commons in Romantic and postmodern poetry at New York University.

In collaboration with Madison Square Park: https://www.madisonsquarepark.org