Walking the High Line With Tommy Pico

Visitors to Manhattan's High Line now have the opportunity to listen to Tommy Pico's audio recording FEED: a garden soundscape as they walk through the park. At Literary Hub, Matt Grant asks Pico about the poem and his thoughts about the park. For newcomers, as Grant notes, "[t]he park, which runs from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to West 34th, opened to the public in 2009. Since then, the High Line has continued to grow in popularity. In its first year, 1.3 million people visited the park. In 2015, the number was 7.6 million." From there: 

If you’re thinking of braving the crowds and taking in the High Line’s verdant walkways this spring or summer, there’s now an audio tour to go along with it. Brooklyn-based poet Tommy Pico has written a meandering, 28-minute poem meant to supplement visitors’ experience of the park. Entitled FEED: A garden soundscape, Pico’s poetry, read in his own voice, is as lush and unexpected as the plant life that inspired it.

I recently had the chance to catch up with Pico over email to ask about his work, the High Line, and his favorite karaoke songs.

Matt Grant: Tell me a little about your background and your work. How and why did you start writing poetry?

Tommy Pico: Obvi I started writing poetry for the money and the sex, but when neither of those things happened I guess I stuck around because of the froyo. Really though, I’ve just always wanted to tell stories, and poetry is I think the most compatible medium for my barbed wire brain. I’ve been doing it as long as I can remember, and even before I could write or spell I was talking into a tape recorder. In a way, doing a soundscape was kind of like coming back to my earliest writing self.

MG: What inspired the High Line’s FEED project?

TP: The Friends of the High Line and Poet’s House hit me up about the idea of making a soundscape to help launch their spring ephemerals garden. There were no real constraints, and they didn’t ask me to do anything in particular, which is actually pretty freaking scary. I actually have no idea how it happened or what I made tbh, I just met with their horticulture department a few times and strolled through the park and spent a couple months generally learning everything I could, from the plants they curated to the history of the park and the train line and the neighborhood. It was a flood.

I started to see the whole project, the High Line itself and the thing I was making, as one of reconciliation. Reconciling “nature” with “the city,” the city’s past with the park’s future. And I just so happened to be reconciling with an ex with whom I’d had many, many dates at the park itself. Just vibes all around. I think in general all I’m ever trying to do is suss out the tethers between things. I’m a sissy and a susser. A sissy susser.

Learn more at Literary Hub.