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.

 

MC Hyland, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge

 

In a museum in Oslo, we found a whole room of cloud studies. The small painted clouds transferred the light of another time and country directly into our faces. Though O’Hara thought that the clouds get enough attention as it is, it seemed as though we had never properly perceived their indexical charms. (“Essay on Weather”)

I’m very pleased to see a new title by St. Paul, Minnesota-based poet, editor and publisherMC Hyland—following THE END (Sidebrow Books, 2019) [see my review of such here] and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press, 2010) [see my review of such here], as well as a handful of chapbooks (including one through above/ground press)—their full-length The Dead & The Living & The Bridge (Chicago IL: Meekling Press, 2025). “My language possessed by adverbs of suddenness,” she writes as part of “Essay on Weather,” “of incremental change.” Through seventeen extended sequences, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge exists as a suite of prose poems within the nebulous space of short stories by Lydia Davis and the essay-poems of poets such as Anne Carson, Benjamin Niespodziany, Lisa Robertson and Phil Hall. “Against the onrush of history,” the sequence “Essay on Weather” continues, “I sought the register of clouds, of breezes, of minute shifts in actual or perceived temperature. Against the dying present, I accumulated a small log of instances.” Directly citing Canadian poet Anne Carson infamous Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992), the back cover offers: “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.”

With titles such as “Essay on Paper,” “Essay on Ophelia,” “Essay on Labor and the Body (Gender I),” “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets” and “Essay on the Prose Poem,” the collection holds as a single, book-length unit, offering echoes of structure and titles to contain an absolute array of multitudes. Through spellbinding prose, Hyland offers sentences across vibrant thinking, attempting to connect disparate thoughts and the chasms between, as she writes, the dead and the living. “In a poem addressed to either a lost lover or an unborn child,” the four-page, four-stanza poem “Essay on the Optimism of Attachment” ends, “I wrote I didn’t want to make you the referent of my theological longings. The space of either love or belief: a space of absence, of silence. A dazzling cloud into which I lean.” Hyland holds the form of the prose poem as complex as Carson’s suite of talks, offering the prose lyric as capable of containing entire realms of complex meditation, weaving multiple threads on reading, writing and experience, and even the limitations through which one attempts to examine through writing. “Which is to say: the experience of pain cannot be reliably witnessed,” Hyland writes, in the third part of “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets,” “at least not through language.” As well, there’s a shared element of Carson’s, as well as evident through Phil Hall, of the poem as a means through which to discuss, through a kind of collage or weaving, the very act of attempting to understand how best to live in and experience the world. I’ve long been an admirer of Hyland’s work, but if this is an example of where their work is going, I am very excited to see what might come next. As Hyland writes as part of “Essay on Vocation”:

Lewis Hyde writes When we are in the spirit of the gift we love to feel the body open outward. Perhaps this is the narcotic condition produced by certain of the windowless rooms. The body blooms into one set of relationships, while at the same time the person is fixed by larger systems into a position of contingency and debt. To step away, as I stepped unwillingly away from my old love, is both heartbreak and survival.

Meet the Presses’ Indie Market (part four,

[post-fair drinks with Andy Weaver, Ryan Fitzpatrick and (out of frame) MC Hyland]

Seemy first post here! And my second post here! And my third post here! And my posts on the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market here! And my first post from the 25th anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair! And still with the yelling!

Toronto ON: From Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Press comes The New Alphabets, a collection of centos (a structure, in case you are unaware, built either in part or in full via the lines of others) by Virginia Konchan (who also had an above/ground press title earlier this year). Over a dozen lyric theses that utilize phrases-as-prompts from an array of poets, thinkers and philosophers, Konchan’s meditations are curious in how she fills in the distances between thoughts, between points; jumping from point to point yet including the details, even through this system of selected and assembled collage. And is this volume, composed via a sequence of prompts, singularly a self-contained chapbook unit, or the opening salvo of a potential full-length manuscript?

“Name me transient”

Name me transient, name me obligatory.

Name me hindsight, name me plenty.

The theme of this place is savagery.

The river’s mouth needs something.

It’s a drama. An interrogative sentence

wells up inside me. Have you grown

accustomed to a lifestyle

no one can provide?

She had no need of fox furs.

She had ceased to exist.

No one ever asks whether flowers

should be permanent.

I should be permanent.

Name me lost wages.

What does it feel like

to have a voice that carries

without making a sound?

Count your fingers.

Count your calluses.

Count the miles to the state line.

I will sign my name in Cyrillic.

I will shut my eyes like a sad man.

Name me modesty, name me vexation.

They said it would hurt, and it does.

This is the black, shot with blue.

Count yourself among the counted.

That spark reminds me of you.

Hamilton ON: From Okanagan, British Columbia poet kevin mcpherson eckhoff comes an excerpt from BABYLON AD PROPHECY (2019) produced through Gary Barwin’s serif of nottingham press. As the note at the offset of the small chapbook informs: “This version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story ‘Babylon Revisited’ renovates the punctuation, spacing, and capitalization of the original story, but not its letter order.” As with many of eckhoff’s projects, this is both fascinating and extremely odd, a delightful twisting of something familiar (in this case, the cadence and narrative of straight prose) in such a minor, yet foundational, way that accumulates into something unrecognizable, and entirely new. How is it eckhoff keeps discovering new ways to refresh perspective? Although I would love to hear him read aloud from this, in part, simply, due to how difficult it might actually be. As his story opens:

“And where’s Mr. Campbell, Charlie?”

“Ask Ed.”

“Gone to Switzerland. Mr. Campbell’s a pretty sick man, Mr. W.”

“Alesim.”

“Sorry? To heart—ha!”

“Tand?”

“George Hardt?” Charlie inquired back.

“I name Ric.”

“Ago, net. O work.”

“And where is T? He’s now bird?”

“Hew a sin here, last week anyway, his friend, Mr. Schaeffer.”

I sin, Paris.

MC Hyland, The End

THE END

Some things I think of as outside and inside that might be only ambient. Open an aperture onto the morning. Tinny feeling all under your skin. Autoeroticism as autodidactics. Infant-size noise-cancelling headphones. I lost all my footage when the phone crashed. The prism disrupting its own light beam. Filmed the sky out the train window again. Tell me about your secret job. The shushes of cars make clear it’s still raining. In one of several possible futures I hear you exhale from the shower. Try not to think of all the things you touch. Bells in the background. Sprung up before the light. A vocabulary of no-longer-quite-right words. The scarf smells like her for years after her death. Are you bleeding on your new leggings. New people in the lobby waiting for their movers. The second old-fashioned made me puke on the tiles. One light box to another. The prescribed situation of video projection. You practice conversation to make it perfect. Walked to the post office. About the effects of late capitalism. Sometimes facts get melodramatic. I’ll probably never see him again. kiss on the cheek I notice her teeth. Then a voice says crazy ass Brooklyn ass shit. We cunningly decorated our need to make money. Knowing in advance how the collaboration will sour. Everyone’s getting sober or divorced. No one wants another disposable tote bag.

Brooklyn poet, editor and publisher MC Hyland’s second full-length poetry title is the accumulative The End (Sidebrow Books, 2019). The End is composed as an assembly of ninety single-page stand-alone prose poems each titled “The End,” all of which seem to be constructed from a collage of found material, overheard lines and other strays and threads that might cross her path. “Most of these poems contain direct quotations,” she writes, at the end of the collection, “from speech, music, texts, or films. Where a word-for-word quotation is from a reliable source, I’ve tried (though with only incomplete success) to track and name the source below.” The list she provides is extensive, and include numerous overheard lines, and phrases pilfered from movie posters, graffiti, and postcards. There is an element to her compiling that feels akin to attempting to capture a portrait of a particular time and space, even as she writes early on in the collection: “This is a kind of timekeeping.” And the beauty of her form is that it could be potentially endless, and include anything and everything.

As I’ve written prior, this sequence of poems with the same title is reminiscent of works by Noah Eli Gordon, including his collection The Source (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2011) [see my review of such here] and more recent Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2018) [see my review of such here]. Hyland’s chapbook The End: Part One (Magic Helicopter Press, 2017), which I wrote of here, included a small handful of poems from the manuscript, as well as the occasional “response,” each seemingly written by a small handful of other poets, an element not included in this final collection. “Finally, I should add that these poems often deal with conversation not only as a source of nourishment,” she writes at the back of the Magic Helicopter title, “but also of (to borrow Sianne Ngai’s book title) ‘ugly feelings.’” Further in the notes at the end of the chapbook, Hyland writes: “While these poems started as an attempt to find a form through which to think about all the challenges of living in New York and starting a PhD after a long break from both the East Coast and this kind of reading-intensive academic setting, they ultimately ended up taking me in a different direction: an attempt to think about the role of feeling in forming and re-forming an aesthetic and political consciousness.”

While The End: Part One wove her epistolary prose poems with the lyric essay, attempting a call-and-response with her reading, her environment and her friends, The End allows the work, in a certain way, to speak more for itself, without the response or the editorializing. I would argue neither form is better or more effective than the other, but simply a difference in approach; given The End sits at ninety prose poems, perhaps the call-and-response element simply isn’t required.