T/HITHER / Christina Davis

T/HITHER

T/HITHER is an invitation to explore the literary history of West Cambridge and the presence of a plurality of times. While no tour could ever convey the area’s total artistic activity, we hope that the 15 featured sites—including the dwelling-places of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, Robert Frost, Vladimir Nabokov, and Adrienne Rich—provide you with what John Ashbery called “the mooring of starting out.” As you walk through a century of literary soundings, you will be encouraged to enter a temporal sensorium, where history brushes against eternity—a sonic landscape in which the poet’s “I” is the site of entrance into a “a psychic flow older than our own conscious memories and broader than our own personality.” Bring a notebook for your own observations, as you meditate on how the contemporary soundscape mingles with these inimitable archival voices. The walk will end at the Longfellow Garden, where we will release our words into the “world- breeze.”

This walk is part of LITmap, Christina Davis's ongoing project at Woodberry Poetry Room.

Time: Starting at 5pm
Duration: 60 mins., plus optional 30 mins. after-gathering at Longfellow Garden)
Meeting point: Radcliffe Yard sunken garden (corner of Appian Way & Concord Ave.)
Christina Davis is the author of several collections of poetry and serves as the curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, one of the earliest and largest archives of literary recordings in the United States. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Poetry. She began her LITmap project during the pandemic, when she had occasion to walk the streets of West Cambridge every day.

The Walking Festival of Sound

Walking Festival of Sound is a transdisciplinary event exploring the role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings. It combines a number of free and public events including walking performances, walking seminars and listening sessions, all taking place in diverse public spaces and online. Walking Festival of Sound facilitates a meeting point for the international network of practitioners and researchers interested in sound and walking. Through diverse events we explore how walking and listening practices can augment and challenge the way we perceive, navigate through, and care for our shared environments. In 2019 the festival took place in two cities, Stockholm, Sweden and Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. In April 2021, the festival moved to Krakow, Poland and Edinburgh, Scotland. In 2022, the festival visited Seoul, Korea and Vancouver, Canada. Zurich, Switzerland, was the festival's site in 2024. In 2026 the festival visits Cambridge and Boston in the USA.

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