The QUEENSBOUND 2020 Remixes
For months leading up to April 2020, National Poetry Month, contributors to QUEENSBOUND, an online audio project I founded in 2018, had been working on poems about Queens — about their lives here and about their neighborhoods. Studio time was booked for them to do audio recordings of their poems and Lexi Namer, our Web developer, was creating a dynamic new website for us, using a redesigned Queens-lines only subway map, in the style of Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 map for the MTA.
All this was done in anticipation of launching the second edition of QUEENSBOUND. We were planning to reprise the 7 train reading that we had staged in 2018 for the project’s launch, ending this time with a reception at Flushing Town Hall. The previous reading on the train had been an affirming and celebratory moment, one that gathered poets and commuters together to hear poems from QUEENSBOUND that spoke about the neighborhoods that we were passing through. At the time, the borough was also in a David and Goliath fight with Jeff Bezos, who wanted to bring Amazon’s headquarters here, a move that would have meant that Queens would be absorbed and homogenized by Amazon, at the expense of the hundreds of immigrant communities who live here. He thought we would roll over; we didn’t. As a country, we were two years into Trump’s presidency. The first train reading we staged brought us together and filled the first car of the 7 train with poetry, community, and sudden joy. In April 2020, we wanted to come together again.
COVID-19 had other plans for us all, of course. Our apartment is a block and a half away from Elmhurst Hospital, a public hospital in Western Queens. In April, Elmhurst was the epicenter of the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. It was on the front page of the Times. I heard from friends in Holland, Canada, Mexico, asking after me and my son. We were inside. We were fine, considering. The sounds of planes coming and going from Laguardia Airport were replaced by the sounds of sirens screaming past us. They always ended in front of the hospital.
The poets who contributed to the 2020 edition had sent their poems to me. They recorded them on their phones in their closets or bathrooms. I uploaded the poems to our SoundCloud site and connected those uploads with our new website. Poetry seemed decadent. There were refrigerated trucks lined up behind Elmhurst to help store the mounting bodies. Until now, I had never understood the persistence of the image of the Grim Reaper, his quiet menace, torn black robes billowing out around him. In Queens, I felt death hover. It felt like a new gravity.
I sat in my bedroom and listened to the poems, traveling around Queens through the voices and imaginations of the poets. As I listened, the poems became necessary. I announced our new website to anyone who needed to think about something other than what we were in. I asked them to travel the borough as they sat at home, listening to all that we had and might have again, however far away that possibility seemed.
Friends began to say they missed riding on the train. We heard how clean the trains were supposed to be now. They were the trains we always deserved but never had. And now they traveled the city’s circuits, carrying only handfuls of us.
This was the first remix: no train reading and celebration but in its place, deep listening and bittersweet introspection. The poets spoke into your ears about love affairs on the F train, breathing together, packing suitcases for new lives, all the languages we once heard on all the streets.
The Queens Museum and Onassis USA asked me for a contribution to their exhibition “ENTER,” a series of new works commissioned from artists in various parts of the world, created in 120 hours or less. Time had been folding over and under itself for months. I had nothing but grief and fear to share. Rather than create a work on my own, I approached poets from the project to ask them to collaborate on a poem. I opened a Google doc and asked each of the poets who wanted to contribute to create an exquisite corpse, with each of us writing 7 lines in honor of the 7 train, and redacting the first six, leaving the 7th line visible for the next poet to work on. Once the poem was complete, we each recorded our section and shared it as a single video, “In the Here and Now.” This was the second remix, the one that allowed us to write together and out of our pain, to record this moment as a collective while we sat in isolation.
As the summer opened up and we dared to go outside, some of us took to the streets, walking down the East-West corridor of Roosevelt Avenue in honor of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the ever-expanding list of Black people killed by the police. A few months earlier, I had ridden my bike down Roosevelt in the rain in the opposite direction, heading to the HMart, the only place you could get N95 masks in Queens. In July, thousands marched together to the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Park, just across from The Queens Museum.
On either side of me were poets and friends who had become as necessary to my life here as the city itself. We came together again, this time to do a BLM fundraiser in partnership with #QueensWritersResist. “Say Their Names” was an online reading and celebration of Black voices, some from the project, and some who had read through #QueensWritersResist. We printed and laminated poems from these poets and from other Black poets and posted them all up and down the Open Streets of 34th Avenue. A friend and local restaurant owner, Dudley Stewart, suggested the idea and called it “Poetry Avenue.” The poems were there for everyone walking the Avenue to stop and read, the words of Lorde and Baldwin blinking at us as if they had been written for this moment, and not decades ago.
Since last March, people have kept asking me if I’m writing. Did I have any new work? At some point, I sat down and thought about QUEENSBOUND, why I had started it and what it’s become. When I came to Queens in 1998, it was no Brooklyn. No one would condescend to visit from Manhattan or Brooklyn, except maybe to go to the Astoria Beer Garden, and even if they did so, they always made a quick getaway. But I knew other writers were here. I wanted to find them. I wanted to know them.
In 2018, as we read on the train during the launch, we began to connect with each other as a collective and that’s what we’ve become. We are a community of writers who see, support, and listen to each other, whatever happens. Each of us around the world has been having a private reckoning with who we live with, where we live, and with what we’ve chosen. The truth is none of us get here alone. Building community is the ultimate act of resistance. Find your people, listen to them, and love them come what may. It turns out my people are here, in Queens.
QUEENSBOUND’s 2021 edition will release in April 2021 in honor of National Poetry Month.
KC Trommer is the founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND and is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019). She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her son.
