Walks & Weathers

After reading William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, The Prelude, in her PhD program, poet and publisher MC Hyland became fascinated with the importance of walking with friends in Wordsworth’s poetry—and with the ways that writing for his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, unlocked Wordsworth’s most powerful voice. She set out on a poetic research project, walking and writing with friends and strangers from the banks of the Mississippi river to the streets of Manhattan, Cambridge University, and a fjord in western Norway.

Along the way she walked with poets Sarah Fox, Fred Schmalz, Stephanie Anderson, Holly Corfield-Carr, Patrick Cabello Hansel, Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen, Ru Puro, Brian Teare, Christy Davids, Ted Rees, Jared Stanley; playwright Deborah Stein; scholars David Hobbs, Maria Damon, and Tara Menon; family members; visual artists and curators; archivists; and others. After each walk, she wrote a poem for her co-walker or walkers—each poem both a letter and a continuation of the conversation.

This book collects these “walking poems,” written between 2015 and 2018 and originally published in emails and in small handmade books, along with the text of a subsequent writing project and artist’s book, inspired by the poet Bernadette Mayer’s suggestion to keep a notebook of “elaborations on weather.” The “weather poems” in this book record weathers both personal and meteorological, from Brooklyn, New York and Gloucester, MA in the years 2017-2019.

Excerpts Published Online:

in The Brooklyn Rail (2020)

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The Dead &
The Living &
The Bridge

In the tradition of Montaigne’s Essais and Anne Carson’s Short Talks, MC Hyland’s poem-essays weave together the conceptual and the material, leaving a trace of thought-in-flight. Originating from a moment (pre- and mid-pandemic) when Hyland taught canonical British literature as a contingent university worker, the essays in The Dead and the Living and the Bridge take up the topics of grief, gender, art materials, capitalism, and close reading. “What I loved,” Hyland writes, “was the dead and the living and the bridge my voice sometimes made between the two.” This voice casts spells to summon clarity against institutional failures and personal and global losses, while placing thinking in its proper context: conversation, shared worldbuilding, and a love that touches both the living and the dead.

Excerpts published online:

“Five Short Essays on Open Secrets” in Solstice

“Essay on Lady Macbeth” and “Essay on Last Things” in Couplet

“Essay on Materials (Thread),” “Essay on Labor & the Body (Gender I),” “Essay on Labor & the Body (Gender II)” in the tiny

“Essay on the Prose Poem,” “Five Short Essays on Timekeeping,” “Essay on Materials (Ink),” “Essay on Birds” in Periodicities

“Essay on Ophelia” in Dreginald

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The End

Composed between April 2013 and February 2017, the poems in MC Hyland's THE END, each titled “THE END,” chronicle a time of late capitalist crisis, as a populace alights on, endures, and absorbs turbulent change. Hyland's project, launched as an ironic formal conceit, evolves on the page into a witness account of the ways that the personal and private brush against and dissolve into collective being — in protest, through social media, on a crowded subway car rattling into darkness. A diarist lyric for the Occupy, #MeToo, and Twitter era, THE END captures in crisp, intimate flashes an extended moment in which the personal becomes inherently political, and the daily musings and observations of a mind navigating these times cannot help but be inflected by a collective preoccupation with a felt sense of futurity's impending end. “Hers is a kind of feminist-Wordsworthian project for our moment, without Wordsworthian lapses of condescension. Or perhaps it is more appropriate to think of Hyland in THE END as a Baudelaireian flâneuse: alert, occasionally dyspeptic, sensitive, registering the discontents of life in the 21st C. metropolis — as a woman, a citizen, a thinker, a listener, a friend, a racialized subject, an embodied self.”

— Maureen McLane

Reviewed on rob mclennan’s blog.

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Neveragainland

“Tendril of Alabama yet wintry spoke, MC Hyland is attuned to the physical aspect of print and its measured and immeasurable construction and dissemination. Out of text she constructs a poetics of space, evoking films, maps, magazines, homes—things with plots, markers, events. Neveragainland addresses addressing: in one sense epistolary—Dear So and So or Chairman Mao, and in another sense, dialogue with a house that responds. You’ve built your house / of words like these. These are spaces in which to play, to dream, to feel at home.”

—Farrah Field

Reviewed in Fact-Simile 7 and Shawn Kemp Carwash.

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Chapbooks

  • Prevailing Conditions/ Re: Tell me about your weather?

    Letterpress, laser-, and risograph-printed artist book of poems about weather and crowdsourced weather reports from the week of the 2019 winter solstice. Made in early 2020.

  • Plane Fly At Night

    Collage poems assembled in 2011-2012 from text culled from notebooks I kept while living in Tuscaloosa, AL from 2002-2008, published by Above/Ground Press in 2018.

    Included in Elizabeth Clark Wessel’s 2018 recommended reading list.

  • THE END (Part One)

    Early drafts of the first 25 poems out of the 100 poems written for THE END, published by Magic Helicopter Press in 2017.

    Reviewed on rob mclennan’s blog; named in Lit Hub’s Favorite Poetry Collections of 2017.

  • Mississippi Walk Poems

    Letterpress and laser-printed chapbook of poems written for walking companions who took me to their favorite sections of the Mississippi River between Northeast Minneapolis and Hastings, MN. Made in 2016 as part of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts gallery show, “The River.”

  • Every Night in Magic City

    Collage poems inspired by early-to-mid-twentieth century experimental films, including those collected on DVD by Anthology Film Archive’s encyclopedic Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941, and those re-scored by Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip in their Music for Experimental Film. Published online by H_NGM_N in 2010.

  • Residential, As In

    Poems inspired by vernacular architecture and the concept of “home,” published online by Blue Hour Press in 2009.

Book Chapters

Women in Independent Publishing

I wrote the afterword for Women in Independent Publishing: A History of Unsung Innovators, a compilation of interviews with—and a sourcebook on—women editors of small, primarily literary, presses. My afterword takes the form of a letter to Stephanie Anderson, the volume’s editor. In the afterword, I attempt to describe and historicize the small-press world of the late-aughts and early twenty-teens in which Stephanie and I became friends and collaborators. I think about the growth (and the whiteness/slow racial diversification) of MFA programs around the turn of the millennium, the casualization of academic labor, the pressures of the #metoo movement on a heavily cis-gendered publishing scene, and I think about what a book on the contemporary small publishing might look like.

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Additional writing published online