Collaborations

With Composer Herschel Garfein

The Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein and I have collaborated for a number of years, beginning in 2016 with “The Cyclone,” a poem of mine that appeared in AGNI in 2005 and which Herschel found thanks to this thing called the Internet. Herschel turned my poem about sex, love, and the Coney Island Cyclone into an amazing song for soprano, piano, and cello, for the Brooklyn Art Song Society’s Five Boroughs Songbook’s 2017 edition. In May 2023, Garfein released the album The Layers, which includes the “Three Rides” song cycle along with songs inspired by the poems of Stanley Kunitz and Jane Kenyon.

Our collaboration is ongoing and, to date, he has created the song cycle “Three Rides” which debuted in 2019, and includes songs based on my poems "The Cyclone," "Black Ice," and "The Mechanism of Pleasure." The songs were performed as a part of the 2018-2019 New Voices series at Brooklyn Art Song Society, and featured soprano Marnie Breckenridge, cellist Dave Eggar, and pianist Dimitri Dover. In December 2021, for Brooklyn Art Song Society, Herschel presented the world premiere of “A Tuesday Spot,” a song based on my poem of the same name, along with songs based on the work of Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall. The song was performed at the First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn by Marnie Breckenridge (soprano), Keith Phares (baritone), with Dimitri Dover on piano.

“The third work on this disc [The Layers] takes us in a radically different direction with some of the oddest and most inventive songs that Garfein has ever written. Three Rides is comprised of what Garfein calls "three compact dramas" featuring the lyrics of KC Trommer, a gifted writer and poet on the current scene who is continuing to create intriguing new work of her own, while also championing other young writers. (One of her most notable achievements is the creation of an ongoing collaborative audio project called "Queensbound," in which a number of poets have written and recorded pieces and stories about the borough of Queens. It is very much worth checking out.)

Trommer's lyrics are vivid and evocative, and Garfein sets them with unbridled theatricality and musical daring. Fortunately, we have three superb musicians on hand to contend with this work's ferocious challenges. Breckenridge finds a way to ride the wild waves of these melodic lines with astonishing ease, and pianist Thomas Bagwell surmounts everything that Garfein throws at him. Perhaps most impressive of all is the work of cellist Dave Eggar. Whether called upon to spin lush, lyrical lines or to play with slashing percussiveness, Eggar can do it all. It is a masterful performance.”

—Gregory Berg, Journal of Singing, Jan-Feb 2024

I love working with artists, musicians, scientists, and other poets on collaborative projects. When collaborating, I always learn something and I often find something new in my work or a new approach to writing or thinking about poetry. My main collaboration is the community-building literary project QUEENSBOUND. Our last major QUEENSBOUND collaboration was a commission from Onassis USA and the Queens Museum, “In the Here and Now,” a video of a reading of an exquisite corpse poem which we wrote together during May 2020. Poets Nadia Q. Ahmad, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Pichchenda Bao, Nana Brew-Hammond, Jared Harel, Abeer Y. Hoque, Joseph O. Legaspi, Robert Ostrom, and KC Trommer all contributed.

To date, the project has been supported by individual donations from friends and family (thank you all!) and by Flushing Town Hall, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Queens Museum, and Onassis USA. The project has been a finalist for a Creative Capital Award, an NYU Digital Seed Humanities Grant, and the David Prize.

Our next edition is forthcoming in the winter of 2024, featuring 15 new contributors and poems in Japanese, Nepali, Spanish, and Ukrainian, along with their English translations.

GOVERNORS ISLAND RESIDENCIES

From 2021-2023, I have been a poet in residence on Governors Island, first through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program, then with Works on Water, and then through NYU Gallatin’s WetLab.

NYU Gallatin WetLab - August 2021-December 2023
In the fall of 2022, I began teaching my new course, “City Poet” at NYU Gallatin in which I ask my students to take the City of New York as their main text. As part of the course, students travel to Governors Island to use it as a source of inspiration for creating place-based work. The Gallatin WetLab has opened up a room on the second floor of 403 Colonel’s Row named “City of Poems.” The NYC skyline has been blocked out on butcher paper on the walls and visitors to the WetLab are invited to share poems, songs, and stories on the walls of the room.

Works on Water - April-August 2021
For Works on Water, I created a five-poem cycle, “Readings on Water,” audio recordings of which were accessible via QR codes placed throughout WoWHaus’s Nolan 5B space. Image left: Used with permission of the artist, Duke Riley.

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program - January-April 2021
I was in residence on the empty island with a pile of amazing artists and writers, including
Abigail Donahue | Design Arts - Manhattan, Alexa Hoyer | Visual Arts - Brooklyn, Andres Santiago Pina | Theatre - Manhattan, Anthony Huffman | Literature/Writing - Brooklyn, Betsy Kenyon | Visual Arts - Manhattan, Dena Igusti | Literature/Writing - Queens, Hsuan Yu Pan | Film - Queens, Hyewon Park | Visual Arts - Brooklyn, Isaac Roller | Comics/Graphic Literature - Manhattan, Janelle Lawrence | Performance Art - Manhattan, Josef Pinlac | Multidisciplinary - Queens, Katy McCarthy | Multidisciplinary - Brooklyn, KC Trommer | Literature/Writing - Queens, Kelly Marshall | Visual Arts - Manhattan, Kosuke Kawahara | Visual Arts - Brooklyn, Madeleine Fia Matsson | Visual Arts - Brooklyn, Mingna Li | Multidisciplinary - Brooklyn, Nozomi Rose | Visual Arts - Manhattan, Rhonda Weppler | Visual Arts - Manhattan, Ryan D. Matthews | Literature/Writing - Brooklyn, Selwyn V. Garraway | Visual Arts - Manhattan, and Yin Ming Wong | Visual Arts - Brooklyn. What luck to be in such company during grim days.

From connections made thanks to LMCC, I have worked with Betsy Kenyon on her monograph Slumber, for which I wrote a poem, “through the pinhole, watching,” and have paired photographer Alexa Hoyer with poet Susanne Wise and Hyewon Park with poet Kelly Sullivan to create ekphrastic poems.

RED DOOR SERIES

The Red Door Series is a reading and meditation series run at St. Mark's Episocpal Church in Jackson Heights, Queens. For the series, readers read a single poem, followed by a 10-minute silent meditation, and close with a second reading of the same poem. These are in-person readings, paired with a FB livestream on St. Mark's page: https://www.facebook.com/stmarksjh. Follow us @red_door_series_jh on Instagram. Signed, limited edition broadsides of individual poems designed by John Candell will be available for sale for $10 each on the night of the reading. Readers in the series are offered an honorarium, along with half of the sales of their broadsides. Many of our readings were shared on the St. Mark’s FB Livestream or on our IG page. The series is currently on hiatus.

2022-2023

For the third year of the series, poets will join us on a monthly basis and come to St. Marks in Jackson Heights on the second Wednesday of the month from December to June. Designer John Candell, will create limited-edition broadsides for each reader, signed by the poets on the night of their reading. This season’s writers include Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Nicole Callihan, Anton Yakovlev, Willa Carroll, and Leah Umansky. This season was curated by poet KC Trommer.

2021-2022

For our 2021-2022 series, poets Jared Harél and Philip F. Clark joined as curators and our readings were held on the first and third Wednesdays of the month. Joining our team was designer John Candell, who created an amazing series of limited-edition broadsides, signed by the poets, and Matthew Chavez, who managed the audio and recorded the readings as well as a series of interviews: Beyond the Red Door.

2020-2021

In October 2020, Spencer Reece and I founded and co-curated the Red Door Series at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights, Queens, a weekly reading and meditation series. For each reading, a poet read a single poem, followed by a 10-minute silent meditation, and closed with a second reading of the same poem. During our first year, Alfonso Quiroz created the Red Door Podcast to interview poets who read in the 2020-2021 season.

Since its inception, the Series has been held almost entirely in person, with social distancing, masking, and contact tracing in place. Readings were broadcast on the Church’s Facebook Livestream and videos of most events can be found there. We welcome poets from all over the United States and from Queens, of course.

Poets welcomed to the Red Door include: Francisco Aragon, Sarah Arvio, David Baker, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Mark Bibbins, Ryan Black, Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, Philip C. Clark, MA Dennis, Joseph Fasano, Nick Flynn, Ariel Francisco, Jennifer Franklin, Diane Glancy, Jared Harél, Travis Helms, Scott Hightower, Abeer Hoque, Marie Howe, Safia Jama, Michele Karas, Michael Klein, Joseph O. Legaspi, Amy Lemmon, Ananda Lima, Sheila Maldanado, Vikas Menon, Dante Micheaux, Glenn Mott, Noami Mulvihill, Jason Myers, Meera Nair, Chael Needle, Iva Ticic, Pádraig Ó Tuama, KC Trommer, Gregory Pardlo, Nickay Parades, Sahar Romani, Carmen Giminez Smith, Soren Stockman, Hope Synder, Maria Terrone, Alice Quinn, Susanne Wise, and Jenny Xie.