MC Hyland, Walks & Weathers

 

You said I’m trying
to keep this walk light
because you are generous
and did not want
to tire me. We saw
your old bicycle still
chained to the fence.
How does it feel
I should have asked
to have left that place?
Not the crisis but
the aftermath to leave
rooms you love in &
came home to. Last
night the story how
you lost your way
in Tokyo & the woman
who guided you home.
Today a day of places
we had been before
was this the place
you brought those
doughuts the morning
after your wedding? (“A Walk / For Stephanie Anderson / Logan Square / Chicago IL / August 19, 2015”)

Very good to see a new poetry title (and a second full length collection by the same author this year alone) by St. Paul, Minnesota-based poet, editor and publisher MC Hyland, her Walks & Weathers (Beauty School Editions, 2025), following THE END (Sidebrow Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press, 2010) [see my review of such here] and The Dead & The Living & The Bridge (Chicago IL: Meekling Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], as well as a handful of chapbooks (including one through above/ground press). Subtitled “(Publishing Experiments 2015-2019),” Walks & Weathers is constructed in two sections—the lengthy assemblage “PART 1: WALKS” and shorter “PART 2: WEATHERS.”

The opening section, making up three-quarters of the collection, is an accumulation of twenty-nine walks, each with dedication, date and location. Hyland’s notes at the end of the collection reaffirm what the book already suggests: a durational influence from the work of the late American poet Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022), a poet that has come up before in Hyland’s work. I find it interesting how Mayer’s influence of writing from an immediate activity, whether walking, or simply the diaristic/journal poetic, is so prevalent in the work of both Hyland and her DoubleCross Press co-hort, Anna Gurton-Wachter [see my review of Gurton-Wachter’s latest here]. As Hyland’s poem “A Walk,” subtitled “For Amelia Foster / Hidden Falls Park / St. Paul MN / June 28, 2016,” begins: “Sometimes finding / your way to / the river is the / problem: does the / river curve like / a question / made passing / through the / cities? Finding / the question is / a kind of / listening / which is what / you say you / do.” There is something uniquely interesting in this kind of poetic, one of attending, and listening, as opposed to declaring; one that follows what seemed foundational for Mayer, for example, so well. And the poetics of walking is well-trod, variations including the flâneur of New York City poet Frank O’Hara and Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire to more recent examples, including Hudson Valley, New York poet Stacy Szymaszek’s ongoing work [see my review of their latest here], Vancouver poet Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005), Leicestershire, England poet and sound artist Mark Goodwin’s Steps (Sheffield UK: Longbarrow Press, 2014) [see my review of such here], Cole Swensen’s On Walking On (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2017) [see my review of such here], Jill Magi’s SPEECH (Nightboat Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], Edmonton poet Matthew James Weigel’s Whitemud Walking (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022) [see my review of such here] or Laura Moriarty’s Which Walks (Nightboat Books, 2025) [see my review of such here]. Still, Hyland’s walks offer an immediacy, even an intimacy, through such meditative walks, composing through a series of prompts closer to Meyer through her own projects walking and writing, a sentence per block. “The sky / so empty & so blue.” she writes, for the poem for Deborah Stein, composed “Prospect Park / Brooklyn, NY / September 5, 2015” “I want to know / how to be in the world, / how to make a space / where being with someone / is the only agenda. Love / hasn’t taught me this / but maybe my feet will.” Further in the same poem, as she offers: “Adultery / is one way women / our age declare / their brilliance in / literature.” Given how each piece through this structure is dedicated to a different friend, many, if not most or all, are also writers, I would be curious to know if there are trace elements from any of the work of these writers, although certainly a trail of responses from that immediate walk, offering threads of story, geography and conversation. Each extended lyric, with poems continuing along three or four pages or more, through this opening stretch exists as a response to that walk. As her walk for Maria Damon, “Flatbush Avenue / Brooklyn, NY / Setpember 21, 2017,” begins: “A whole new / economy / is a temptation. / I have been / thinking, twisting / Bernadette Mayer / to my own uses. / In Feminist / Reading Group / at the Project / we go around / naming our utopias. / Mine is a set of / practices geared / to peel me back / from cash economies, / through the / small-change / detournement / you practice is / I think maybe / another small / kind.”

I’m curious as to how this particular collection cites itself as “Publishing Experiments,” beyond my own speculations upon a potential uncertainty or unease by the author as to how this might hold together, between one section and the next, a concern doesn’t hold. The only real information comes through the notes at the end, suggesting that certain of these pieces might have been composed for the possibility of particular publication, whether in limited edition chapbook form or something other, but that doesn’t appear to have made any overt or obvious difference upon the writing itself, beyond the possibility of prompt, such as her “Essay on Weather,” a piece written from email prompt, that begins: “I wanted to know about time, about change. My body had acquired certain ongoing pains. An effect of normal wear and tear, said the physician. On the bedside table, a history of extinction and a phone that imbibed one crisis after another from the seemingly neutral air. Even slow violences hurled toward reckoning, time puckered and creased under many ineluctable pressures.” In certain ways, the pieces in the second section—an essay that opens into an extended, lyric sequence—a response to a particular temporal moment, offering a meditative aggregate open enough to allow the whole of the world, in that particular moment, in. As the poem begins, opening:

I wanted a language for passion
            that involved no touches
to a body. The day gave me
            A calmly breathing sky.
Husbandmen’s and Mariners’
            confused mass of simple aphorisms.
Something like a silence
            composed of many quiet songs.
Thin wisps of cirrus striate
            the north. This record keeping
inadequate to the fluidities
            of time. A man’s voice urged me
to carry this awareness. Ocean’s
            shooting pH. Buoy’s semi-regular moan.
This stillness felt empty, but was filled
            with progressions.
Into the eighteenth-century gap
            between aphorism and system,
a philosopher’s Methodical nomenclaturearrives. Some part
            of the day still opens
inside your breath. Cargo ships
            like small cities on the horizon.
As in the paintings of Claude Lorrain,
            bright distance pulls the eye.