Stop and hear the poetry: spoken words beckon to bustling New York City

Writers wax poetic at the Tuesday night Word for Word poetry series, bringing some wordplay into the lives of harried commuters and summertime loungers

If you haven’t heard of the now-extinct platypus frog, Jenny Johnson is prepared explain why she had to put it in a poem. “The female had the ability to transform her stomach into a womb. Then she would swallow her own eggs and after several weeks, birth fully formed froglets out of her mouth. It’s amazing!” Dressed in a short-sleeved green shirt and tie, Johnson was one of four readers at Bryant Park’s Tuesday night Word for Word poetry series. She was joined by Anthony Carelli, Aracelis Girmay, and Roger Reeves, her fellow recipients of this year’s Whiting Foundation awards, which gives a valuable $50,000 prize to 10 early-career writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

Bustling Bryant Park has become New York’s summertime rec room, with areas devoted to board games, table tennis, juggling and boules. The Reading Room offers carts of books and magazines for browsing. It’s a revival of the Open Air Library that debuted in 1935, a Depression-era extension of the neighboring public library, which allowed the unemployed to pass their time reading outside. To pull in more of the crowd, the Room tries to be eclectic in its choices of readers. “Tomorrow, we’re going to have Al Roker!” the host informed the crowd. “Who knew he was a writer?”

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