Title: Celebrate Collaborative Poetry With Michael Hill and Morning Edition [music]

Tiffany Hansen: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Tiffany Hansen, in for Alison Stewart. Mark your calendars because our team at Morning Edition is putting on a special event this week to close out their Poetry Month coverage. This Wednesday evening, my colleague Michael Hill is hosting what the morning show team calls Poetry Together: A Night of Collaboration and Community. It'll feature readings and a chance to create poems through collaborative poetry that'll be led by our next guest, who is KC Trommer, a Queens-based poet, founder of QUEENSBOUND, a project that connects poets throughout the borough and features recordings of their work. Let's listen to an example.

Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond: My name is Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond. The poem is called Pact. You can't fit your country in a suitcase. You buy it in a grocery aisle of improvised ingredients. You fill your pots and your pans with it. Your neighbors' apartments with smells that take you back to where you were born and why you left. You hang it on your walls, put it on your fire escape, your own little temple of familiars. You paint it on your face and scream for the team and your goals for your children, enunciating every syllable so they never forget, so you never forget. There is another country with your names tagged to it like a suitcase.

Tiffany Hansen: Poetry Together is a night of collaboration and community. It's free, open to the public, and it's happening at the Green Space on Wednesday, April 29th, 7:00 PM. You can sign up for tickets@wnyc.org/events. Michael will be there along with KC Trommer. Hi, KC.

KC Trommer: Hi there.

Tiffany Hansen: You know what? I think before we go any further, you should maybe identify. Do you recognize that voice? Do you know who that was?

KC Trommer: Oh, that's Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond. I love that poem. That's one of my favorite poems of many favorites, I should say. [laughs]

Tiffany Hansen: Was that a collaborative poem?

KC Trommer: No.

Tiffany Hansen: No.

KC Trommer: The collaborative poem is more of an exercise.

Tiffany Hansen: Oh, okay.

KC Trommer: This is a collaborative project in the sense that we, as poets across Queens, are building it together.

Tiffany Hansen: Let's just talk by defining what collaborative poetry is, because I didn't know.

KC Trommer: Oh, sure.

Tiffany Hansen: I think it's helpful for people to understand, like, what am I getting into?

KC Trommer: Oh, you mean for Wednesday.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes.

KC Trommer: Collaborative poetry is more of an ethos more than anything else. It's more the act of writing collaboratively more than an output. It's a question of being able to work together. May say you have some core like stem phrase or word or something that you're building on together, and then you write different phrases. Different people will write different aspects of a poem, and then you have a final poem that you've written together.

Tiffany Hansen: There's not a writer.

KC Trommer: No, you're all writers together.

Tiffany Hansen: You're all writers together.

KC Trommer: Yes.

Tiffany Hansen: Why do you think that this sort of collaborative environment can be so rewarding?

KC Trommer: We are the people we surround ourselves with. It is a way to find the magic in the room of the people that you're with, and it's also about play. It's really about connecting with people and finding a way to kick words around and play. In a sense, it's a lower-stakes way to connect and write with a sense of discovery built into it. Also, a sense that you don't really know what's going to happen just because you're involving other people in it. It takes away the control piece.

Tiffany Hansen: I think I can imagine myself thinking, I'm not going to say anything or I'm not going to tell them my word or whatever it is. How do you get people past that?

KC Trommer: I think lowering the stakes is very important, making it an invitation, making it fun. Nobody wants to do something where they think they're going to be judged by whatever they put out. The thing is that you have to play the game in order to be a part of it. You have to be willing to be vulnerable. It's a brave thing to do, but also it can just be joyful.

Tiffany Hansen: When did you first get interested in that?

KC Trommer: In writing in that way?

Tiffany Hansen: Yes, in that collaborative process?

KC Trommer: I'm a poet, so, so much of my writing is done in a solitary way. Of course, when poets and writers come together, we're cooking together. It's part of a workshop ethos and a way of writing and exploring. Also, what's interesting, when you write with other people in this way, you will find something that you wouldn't find in your own work. Naturally, you gravitate towards the same things over and over again. When you're writing in a way with others, you're going to be introduced to new things. It's just cross-pollination.

Tiffany Hansen: We talked about that hesitation that someone might feel. What do you tell people when you see them sitting on their hands and not necessarily?

KC Trommer: Usually, if people are coming into a space like this-

Tiffany Hansen: They're ready.

KC Trommer: -they're willing. Maybe they're willing.

Tiffany Hansen: They're willing.

KC Trommer: What you want to do is make it something that they want to engage with.

Tiffany Hansen: I can imagine that you also, though, even when you're writing your own poetry in a room by yourself somewhere, have to overcome your own self-censorship all the time. How do you do that?

KC Trommer: You have to set aside that part of your brain, or you can't get to anything interesting, because if you put that front and center-

Tiffany Hansen: That's terrible. Why did I write that?

KC Trommer: -that's terrible, or thinking that you know what a poem is. The best poems are discovered. They are the surprise for the reader. That adage that says no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. They should be led by questions and curiosity. If you are judging the lines or even just feeling overly in love with them, which absolutely does happen when you fall in love with your poems, and then you read them to a friend the next day, and you realize you have to start all over. Something about that process means letting go of the editor and the judge. You have to be entering into a space of openness and vulnerability in order to get to anything interesting, really.

Tiffany Hansen: What about, in this collaborative process, when you have a room? I'm trying to get people to think like, "Oh, I could show up for that event," right?

KC Trommer: Oh, yes. It's fun. That's why you should come.

KC Trommer: First of all, there's fun. Second of all, it's not going to be a room full of poets.

KC Trommer: Exactly.

Tiffany Hansen: People are going to have all sorts of experiences and backgrounds that they're bringing to this, which actually could make it even more--

KC Trommer: Makes it more interesting. This process is going to be showcasing the poems that have been played or the event is going to showcase the poems that have been played over the month on Morning Edition, which is so wonderful, popping in the poems into the terrifying news headlines that we are living with. This process is going to celebrate those and then listen, and then I'm just going to make it an invitation. I'm going to give people a couple of things to respond to, and then we're just going to share. It's not like we're writing a capital P poem. It's really the act of writing together.

Tiffany Hansen: The event we're talking about is some something that our Morning Edition team is putting together, happening this Wednesday evening. It's called Poetry Together: A Night of Collaboration and Community. Of course, my colleague Michael Hill will be there. Also, KC Trommer, who's a Queens-based poet and founder of QUEENSBOUND, which is a project that connects poets throughout the borough. Listeners, we'd love to have you in this conversation. We're talking about poetry, wondering, what do you think is your favorite poem? Let's say your favorite poem about New York City. Call us, text us 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-9692. You can call us or text us at that number. You live in Queens?

KC Trommer: I do.

Tiffany Hansen: What do you find inspiring about the borough?

KC Trommer: I think Queens is actually the version of America that America likes to say it is. It's a complicated and beautiful place made up of people from all over the world living in relative peace alongside one another. It's a very complex and beautiful space. Of course, we have all the food and all the people. [chuckles]

Tiffany Hansen: How do you encourage people, in QUEENSBOUND, for example, to get excited about Queens in the way that you are?

KC Trommer: Building QUEENSBOUND has been an organic process.

Tiffany Hansen: Talk about that first. Let's back up.

KC Trommer: This is a poetry project that I started in 2018. It was developed out of a question when I was up for the role of the Queen's Poet Laureate. I didn't get that role, but it gave me this interesting question to work with, which is how to connect people across Queens with poetry. I thought, "What do we have in common?" I thought of the subway. I also know that every poet I know has a city poem or a neighborhood poem up their sleeve. I just approached poets. I didn't end up getting that appointment, but I came away with this beautiful question.

I thought, "I'm just going to do this anyway." I approached 16 poets I knew to share poems about their neighborhoods, and they almost all had them. Then we mapped them onto a Queensland's only subway map. You can hear the audio of the poems on queensbound.com. We're building this project in the sense that every poet who's contributed, every contributor has suggested the names of other poets to invite. It's independently produced project. We're building it that way in a very organic way. People just end up having poems about their neighborhood. Now we have about 60 poets contributing to the project, and about 60 more station stops to cover in Queens to get a poem for every station.

Tiffany Hansen: I want to listen to a poem from the project here in a second. I want to know, what about the audio do you love so much?

KC Trommer: Oh, the reason it's an audio project was because personally I like being read, too. I have a secret agenda to get poets to stop reading and the terrible poet voice that-- Thank you for knowing.

Tiffany Hansen: [laughs] Sidebar.

KC Trommer: That particular cadence that people go to when they feel insecure, and they want to signal that they're writing a poem, is actually a death of a poem, in my opinion. I wanted to celebrate the many voices of Queens, and also just to capture some of the beauty and the sonic range of voices that you can hear in Queens.

Tiffany Hansen: Let's listen.

Sahar Romani: I'm Sahar Romani, reading my poem Diversity Plaza. Briefly, I shake off my anxiety portal out of my head into the plaza lit with uncle's high from slow talk and betel nut as young women, FaceTime lovers, perhaps long distance in a Himalayan city, sidewalks tipsy with strangers who stroll in a grammar of laughter I once heard in the mother country. Down the street, mannequins dressed up like it's holiday royal in sequins, golden embroidery as if we're at a wedding party, as if I have no papers to grade tonight over calendared tomorrow with department meetings. At least along 74th Street, a subwoofer bumps out a Qawwali tricked to forget it's nearly winter Elixir that suspends even daylight's departure. Spell of good company walks me home tonight.

Tiffany Hansen: All right, KC. Talk to us about Sahar.

KC Trommer: Sahar is my neighbor, a lovely human being, and obviously, as you can tell, an incredible poet. I think she's still teaching at NYU, and she's a poet that I invited to contribute a poem. We have Diversity Plaza in Jackson Heights, where I live, where Sahar lives now with her partner. She just magicked up this poem. She's an incredible poet. I don't think this is a poem that she had already. I think it's one she wrote for us. The 74th Street stop, because I'm based in Jackson Heights, is pretty crowded on our map, and so Diversity Plaza is adjacent to you.

Tiffany Hansen: Me and all my neighbors.

KC Trommer: Yes. I'm based in Western Queens, so of course, the first circle on the tree is in my neighborhood.

Tiffany Hansen: When you went to all of your neighborhood and queens in general, poets, were they all receptive to you?

KC Trommer: Oh, yes, because poets will write about what is on their minds. If you live in New York, you're going to think about New York in a certain way, and you're going to have to write about it at some point. Almost all of them had a secret waiting poem. If you invite people to write about Queens and to write about particular corners, not Queens in general, not the talking points of Queens that everyone goes to, but the specific corner and the places they know and the people they know, they'll come up with something magical like Sahar did.

Tiffany Hansen: You're the director for this orchestra of all of these poets.

KC Trommer: Thank you.

Tiffany Hansen: Did anything surprise you about what you saw sparking between the various poets?

KC Trommer: What's been beautiful about this project is, when I started it, I just did it because I thought it was a good idea. What's been really lovely in the past eight years, because I started in 2018, was to just watch people meet one another and know one another and collaborate. I know, for example, when we launched the project, we did a reading on the 7 train. We took over the first car on the 7 train.

Tiffany Hansen: I was going to ask you about that.

KC Trommer: To know that people met on the train or that they met at an event, and then to see them collaborate or read together and to build friendships, and in some cases, they're people I know hadn't met otherwise. That's exactly what I wanted this project to do, is to connect writers across the borough with each other so we can appreciate and celebrate and amplify one another.

Tiffany Hansen: Hosting poetry readings on the 7 train, also, around and about this city, I've seen those placards on subway cars with various poems on them, what is it about the subway that brings poetry to mind?

KC Trommer: Those are Poetry in Motion, which is a wonderful Poetry Society of America initiative partnered with the MTA. I think that's part of what was going on with QUEENSBOUND, as I was thinking. I was looking at them. They're amazing poems, by and large, by incredible poets, but I was sitting there thinking, "Why are these poems--"

Tiffany Hansen: Why aren't poets doing this?

KC Trommer: Not even that. These poems are happening, but they're not responding to what the space that we're in. That's where I was like, "Oh, what if we had poems that were in situ and responding to the neighborhoods we're going through on the train?"

Tiffany Hansen: I made a couple of notes here. There are poems about the subway, obviously. Joyce Kilmer has the subway. Billy Collins has a subway poem. Hilda Morley has a subway poem. What do you remember about that experience of hosting poets on the subway?

KC Trommer: Oh, you know what? I was so nervous because, of course, we just did like a flash mob on the first car of the 7 train. We went from Vernon Jackson to Mets–Willets Point, and then we did a reception in the Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum. When we took over the first car of the seven, I spoke to a friend of mine who is a transit reporter and was like, "Are we going to get in trouble for this?" He's like, "It's the subway. It's a public space." I was like, "Oh, yes."

Tiffany Hansen: There's plenty to get in trouble for on the subway, but I don't think that's it.

KC Trommer: It ended up being a beautiful day. We took over the first car. We had this sweet spot of people. There, of course, were riders on the train who were being typical New Yorkers and absolutely cold, blocking us out.

Tiffany Hansen: Sure.

KC Trommer: One thing that was particularly nice is we spaced out the poets like the front and middle, and back of the train. Then the poets read in a volley and passed.

Tiffany Hansen: Oh, nice.

KC Trommer: There was, for example, one rider who was on his way to Flushing reading a Korean paper, and he had the paper up in front of him. Over the course of the ride, I watched him fold down a corner of the paper.

Tiffany Hansen: Oh, yes.

KC Trommer: Then fold the paper all together, and then fold the paper in his lap, and he was looking and listening, and smiling.

Tiffany Hansen: Speaking of reading poetry, can I ask you, do you have comings and goings with you?

KC Trommer: I do, yes. I did bring it.

Tiffany Hansen: Before we let you go here, how about we hear this is on Morning Edition's theme this month was Good Neighbors. A poem you submitted called Comings and Goings was played on the air. Let's hear it.

KC Trommer: Sure. Comings and Goings. Cheek to jowl, shoulder to shoulder, rubbing elbows, packed in like sardines, tip to tail. Upstairs, the creaking of floorboards at 6:05, my weekday alarm clock. Downstairs, I drop a plate in the kitchen, and Nettie thinks I've just bowled a strike. One neighbor, not the good kind, was up at all hours and told me to soundproof my ceiling. One the good kind lent me a shovel when New York had more snow than Maine. No need to put a glass to the wall to hear them loving and yelling and cooing. We see each other in the hallway, say nothing. All of us known and unknowable, nestled in our rooms at night, holding fast like a secret we're afraid to spill.

Tiffany Hansen: That is KC Trommer. She's a Queens-based poet. She's the founder of QUEENSBOUND. She will be at an event on Wednesday night that is being hosted by my colleague Michael Hill and the team at Morning Edition. The event called Poetry Together: A Night of Collaboration and Community it's happening in the Green Space, Wednesday, April 29th, 7:00 PM. You can sign up for a ticket at wnyc.org/events. That's wnyc.org/events. KC, thank you. You looking forward to Wednesday?

KC Trommer: Oh, it's going to be so much fun. Thank you so much for the time.

Tiffany Hansen: Oh, absolutely. That again, just one more time for our friends and neighbors, wnyc.org/events, event happening in the Green Space on Wednesday, April 29th. It's Poetry Together: A Night of Collaboration and Community. Thank you so much.

KC Trommer: Thank you.

 

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