KC Trommer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Off the Roosie

    after O'Hara

I get off the 7 and head home, past the Chase and the Jackson Heights penguin

            that, last week, someone dressed as a bunny, and I’m thinking

of Frankie’s I-do-this-I-do-that poems, and my phone is dead again and

            I can’t afford to replace it. All I want to hear is Spoon

singing got no regard for the thing you don’t understand

            but maybe, as Lorna said, it’s a gift and there’s a poem across the street

waving Yoo hoo! Over here! and trying very hard to get

            my attention. I get onto 37th, near what’s left of the Brunson Building

after the fire on Easter Monday and I head past the Met (not that one)

            which they renamed Foodtown but which Honor and Joe and I will

always call the Met (not that one), and then a left onto 77th

            and past our coffee shop where Afsal stands outside, talking, but

for once does not say hello even though he looks

            straight at me, and it’s fine, I walk past the Berkeley and over 35th Ave., and

I guess I’m home, considering that my keys have opened

            the door even before I realized I had them in my hand, and everything is

where I left it, even in the bedroom where I keep waking alone quite

            suddenly to find—yes, I left you. You’ve never even been here.

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KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and The Hasp Tongue (dgp, 2014) and is founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. Since 2018, she has collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein on a song cycle based on poems from her first collection. Since 2020, she has curated and run the Red Door Series, a reading and meditation series at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights, Queens. She has been poet in residence on Governors Island since 2021, first through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program, then through Works on Water, and now through the NYU Gallatin WetLab. She is the Director of Communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights with her son.   [To hear KC Trommer reading this poem, click here.]

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                                        1941 photo showing 37 Av W. at 90th St Jackson Heights Queens New York City

Comments

[Emily Fragos]

I love the savvy, powerful, gritty poems of KC Trommer. I am thrilled to see her and hear her on BAP's Pick of the Week.

[Martin Stannard]

Very cool. Love it.

[Grace Cavalieri]

Energy in language and motion!!!!

[Denise Duhamel]

Frank's spirit inhabiting a new generation and a new neighborhood! Love this literary lineage.

[Don Berger]

Love the extended, breathful lines and how fully TC speaks in the spirit of O'Hara, how she knows "The Day Lady Died" as well as you can. Good pick Terence!

[Eileen]

I loved this poem and the artwork. It was great being able to hear the voice of K.C. Trommer reading her poetry.

[Stacy Pies]

Kinetic music in each line! Thank you.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

“Off the Roosie,” the title of KC Trommer’s superbly tucked paean/poem to Frank O’Hara, is a slang reference to Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, where you can catch the “7” train. It is a peripatetic poem prompted by the undimmed influence of “Frankie’s I-do-this-I-do-that poems,” a phrase both echoing and skewering detractors of O’Hara’s assumed schematism while injecting the light but still piquant informality of “Frankie’s.” Trommer takes the intentionally quotidian inversion found in, say, “The Day Lady Died” (the title itself is an inversion of Billie Holiday’s sobriquet “Lady Day”), and applies it faultlessly and uniquely to her own journey on foot. She leads us expectantly through her inventory of sights, sounds, diversions, and, most importantly, ruminations on all. (I love her reference to “Spoon,” a/k/a Jimmy Witherspoon, a great blues-jazz singer born in Arkansas in 1923. His 1996 album, LIVE AT THE MINT, is a favorite of mine.) The last four lines of “Off the Roosie” are especially powerful, disturbing the familiarity preceding them, and jolting the aura of automatic behavior with a startling acknowledgment of an absence. Thanks, Terence, for introducing me to this gifted poet. Kudos, too, for your selection of artwork.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Earle. Great comment.

[Kctrommer]

Thank you all for your kind and generous responses to my poem!

I love the work of the poets who commented here and am honored that they took the time to read my work.

Dr. Hitchner--I was referencing Spoon's 2017 song "Underdog" but now I'm adding I am adding Jimmy Witherspooon to the playlist I made for my book: https://tinyurl.com/WCTBPlaylist

A million thanks to Terence for selecting the poem and the snap o Queens for this.

[Terence Winch]

Thank you, KC, for the wonderful poem. I think O'Hara would have been delighted.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

I actually Googled "Spoon" before leaping headfirst into another, familiar-to-me "Spoon," viz., Jimmy Witherspoon, in my previous comment. I got overexcited by the prospect of that latter "Spoon" being the one. My gaffe. And I like the song "Underdog," which I predictably couldn't find by Jimmy Witherspoon. You're too kind, KC, in forgiving my blunder. Adding Jimmy Witherspoon to your playlist may help to salve the wound I caused. On a brighter note: count me among Spoon fans. From what I can tell, that Austin-formed rock band has been plugging away since at least 1993. But most important of all, thank you for "On the Roosie." I agree with Terence: O'Hara would have been delighted.