Park Poems

Since 2023, the Poetry Society has partnered with public parks in New York City to create site-specific poetry installations as part of our Park Poems initiative. This year, we are thrilled to partner with The Alliance for Flushing Meadows Corona Park on a new installation called Community in Verse, which brings contemporary poems to Flushing Meadows Corona Park

A total of eight poems have been installed throughout the park’s Historic Core and around Meadow Lake, providing opportunities for contemplation and reflection, while also creating moments of surprise and delight.

Community in Verse features poets from New York City and around the world, including Queens residents. The installation includes poems in Spanish, Chinese, and Bengali, both the original language and English translation.

With the park’s rich cultural history and the Alliance’s commitment to supporting the arts, Community in Verse celebrates the park’s diverse and creative communities that make Flushing Meadows Corona Park the World’s Park. 

Installations will remain for one year.

Featured Poems

“Crossing” by Jericho Brown
 “Memory Sack” by Joy Harjo
"Tortuga / Tortoise" by Jorge Carrera Andrade
Translated from the Spanish by Alejandro de Acosta and Joshua Beckman
“Cara Aceitunada” by Nathalie Handal
“Acrobat” by Nabaneeta Dev Sen
Translated from the Bengali by Nandana Dev Sen
“They Loved” by Isaac Jarnot
“Spring” by Kimiko Hahn
"体验 / “Experience” by Xi Chuan 
Translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein
 
About the Poets

Jorge Carrera Andrade is recognized in Latin America as one of the most important poets of the 20th century. Born in Quito, Ecuador, Andrade was a poet, essayist, journalist, and diplomat who worked in Peru, France, Japan, and the United States. Among his books translated into English are Micrograms and Reflections on Latin American Literature.

Jericho Brown received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection The Tradition. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Xi Chuan is one of the most influential contemporary poets in China. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Bloom & Other Poems and Notes on the Mosquito. His honors include the Lu Xun Prize for Literature, the Modern Chinese Poetry Award, and the Zhuang Zhongwen Prize for Literature. He teaches at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and lives in Beijing, China.

Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten poetry collections, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems, Foreign Bodies, Toxic Flora, and Brain Fever. She has received thePoetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, and Shelley Memorial Prize. She will serve as New York State Poet from 2025-2027. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

Poet, playwright, nonfiction and literary travel writer, Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France, and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her poetry collections include Life in a Country Album, The Republics, and Poet in Andalucía. She is an editor of the anthology The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology and a professor at Columbia University.

Joy Harjo, the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate and member of the Muscogee Nation, is the author of ten books of poetry, several plays, children’s books, two memoirs, and seven music albums. Her honors include the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She is Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she lives.

Isaac Jarnot is the author of several collections of poetry, including Some Other Kind of Mission, Ring of Fire, Black Dog Songs, Night Scenes, and Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992–2012, along with Four Lectures from the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. He coedited An Anthology of New (American) Poets and is the author of Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus. Jarnot has been a visiting professor at Naropa University, Brooklyn College, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He lives in Jackson Heights, Queens. He earned a masters of divinity from New York Theological Seminary, is a PhD student in theology at Drew University.

Nabaneeta Dev Sen is the author of over one hundred books, including compilations of poems, novels, plays, stories, memoirs, academic essays, children’s literature, political columns, literary translations, and multiple volumes of her collected works. Her many honors include the Padma Shri, Bangla Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, Sahitya Akademi Award, and Lifetime Achievement Award of the Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Guild. Dev Sen lived a parallel life as a distinguished international scholar and feminist, and was the Founder and President of the West Bengal Women Writers’ Association, Soi.

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Installation 2024-2025

In April 2024, the Poetry Society and NYC Parks will place poems in five public parks, one in each borough: Jerome Slope (Bronx), J. Hood Wright Park (Manhattan), Torsney/Lou Lodati Park (Queens), 100% Playground (Brooklyn), and Richmond Terrace Park (Staten Island). The installations will remain on view for approximately one year.

Poets featured in the installations hail from both New York City and around the world, and non-English works are presented in both the original language and English translation. The five poems featured are “Regreso a la ciudad” / “Return to the City,” by Manuel Ulacia; “Trappings,” by Noelle Kocot; “Cut Shadows,” by Ron Padgett; “Slam, Dunk, & Hook,” by Yusef Komunyakaa; and “Wish,” by Hoa Nguyen.

The Poetry Society and NYC Parks first launched Park Poems in April 2023. Since its inception, the program has served as an inspiration for similar partnerships with state and national parks, including You Are Here, the signature project of Poet Laureate Ada Limón, which champions the ways reading and writing poetry can situate us in the natural world.
 

Featured Poems

“Regreso a la ciudad / Return to the City” by Manuel Ulacia
translated by Indran Amirthanayagam
“Trappings” by Noelle Kocot
“Cut Shadows” by Ron Padgett
“Slam, Dunk, & Hook” by Yusef Komunyakaa
“Wish” by Hoa Nguyen

 

About the Poets
 

Noelle Kocot is the author of several poetry collections, including Ascent of the Mothers, God's Green Earth, Phantom Pains of Madness, Soul in Space, and The Bigger World. They have received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, The Fund for Poetry, the American Poetry Review, and the Lannan Foundation. Kocot has taught at the New Writers Project at the University of Texas and currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the New School. They are the poet laureate of Pemberton Borough, New Jersey.

Yusef Komunyakaa's numerous books of poems include Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999; Talking Dirty to the Gods; Thieves of Paradise, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and most recently, The Emperor of Water Clocks. His honors include the William Faulkner Prize, the Thomas Forcade Award, and the Hanes Poetry Prize; fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, where he served as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross. He is a senior faculty member in the NYU Creative Writing Program.

Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry, including A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, winner of the Canada Book Award and a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, National Book Award, and the Governor General’s Literary Award; As Long As Trees Last; Red Juice; and Violet Energy Ingots, which received a 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize nomination. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Nguyen has lived in Tkaronto since 2011.

Ron Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has also received the Poetry Society’s Shelley Memorial Award and Frost Medal. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars’s Complete Poems. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson. New York City has been his home base since 1960.

Manuel Ulacia (1953–2001) was born in Mexico City. He was the grandson of Manuel Altolaguirre and Concha Mendez, members of Spain’s “Generation of ‘27.” Altolaguirre and Mendez became refugees of the Spanish Civil War, residing first in Cuba and then in Mexico. Ulacia was a protégé of Octavio Paz and later president of PEN’s Mexico chapter. His selected poems Origami was translated by Indran Amirthanayagam.
 
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Inaugural Installation
2023-2024

In this first year of the project, the Poetry Society and NYC Parks placed poems in five public parks: Clason Point Park (Bronx), Valentino Pier Park (Brooklyn), Sunken Playground (Manhattan), Clove Lakes Park (Staten Island), and Francis Lewis Park (Queens). Poets featured in the installations hail from around the world, and non-English works are presented in both the original language and English translation. 
 

Featured Poems

“Dark Light / Oscura luz” by Francisco X. Alarcón
“I Was Never Able to Pray” by Edward Hirsch
“Twilight” by W.S. Merwin
Six Tankas by Harryette Mullen
“I Sit Here” by Liu Xia, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Kronovet

 

The Poetry Society’s programs are made possible by the generous support of The Destina Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Leon Lowenstein Foundation, the Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Lyric Foundation, Humanities NY, Hyde & Watson, and the Bydale Foundation, as well as public support from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. We are also grateful for the ongoing support of our members and individual donors.