KC Trommer on the Launch of QUEENSBOUND

With support from a New Work Grant from the Queens Council of the Arts, KC Trommer created QUEENSBOUND, an interactive site modeled on the Queens subway lines, that hosts audio recordings of poets reading work about the borough. At Literary Hub, Trommer writes about the site's November 2018 launch and the process behind it. "One bright Saturday, on the weekend before it was announced that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had offered up Long Island City and much of Western Queens to Amazon, I stood on a 7 train platform at the Vernon-Jackson subway station with eleven other poets and more than two dozen straphangers and poetry lovers," she writes. Picking up from there: 

We were there to launch the collaborative audio project QUEENSBOUND by staging a reading on the first car of the first 7 train to pull in after 2 pm.

Nervous and excited, the readers were ready to take a risk and be vulnerable in a public space by allowing their work to be seen and heard in a new way. Remarkably, the 7 was on time and no track work was being done that weekend. When we stepped onto the train at 2:02 pm, there were about a dozen people in the car. As we started the reading, I announced to the unwitting passengers that we were not asking for money—we only wanted to offer some poems about Queens as we rode through it.

Some call the 7 train the “International Express,” since its Queens line runs from hyper-gentrified Long Island City—the first stop in the borough—through the heavily immigrant enclaves of Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst, and Corona before reaching its terminus in Flushing, the site of New York City’s first Chinatown. The train serves communities from the Philippines, Ireland, India, Bangladesh, Tibet, Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, China, and many other countries.

To put together QUEENSBOUND, I approached some of the borough’s leading writers to collect and record poems and stories they’d written about their neighborhoods. The New York City subway map is QUEENSBOUND’s organizing principle, and designer Kyle Richard revised the Queens section of the map for our website. Visitors to the site can open up the map and click on select subway stations to hear the embedded audio.

Read on via Literary Hub.