A Poet’s Call to Re-Discover and Re-Imagine Central Park

By Claudia Gohn

Five years ago, Aaron Poochigian was lost in cocaine addiction. The COVID lockdown was in full force; he was isolated and filled with past regrets and anxiety about where he would get the money for more drugs.

Eventually, Poochigan found himself uninspired—his cocaine addiction zapping all of his creativity. He didn’t interact with anyone, didn’t see anyone, aside from the occasional trip to the deli. Addiction left him lonely, starved of the outside world.

In desperation, Poochigan started going for hours-long walks through Central Park to take him out of his own head and into the real world, where he could find creative inspiration again. He began taking pictures and jotting down notes. He made a rule for himself that he couldn’t be high while on those walks. Then it turned into no drugs while writing about his walks, either. Turns out, he had a lot to write about.

The result: “Four Walks in Central Park: A Poetic Guide to the Park,” published this fall by Familius Books. In its pages, he takes readers through the park, highlighting in prose-style poems fan favorites such as the Great Hill, the Diana Ross playground, and the Turtle Pond. The poems, he says, are intended to teach readers about the park and how to rediscover it in a way that is healing and calming, especially in a city like New York.

As he writes in the prologue:

We struggle, but there’s always Central Park,
offering water that upholds and bark
to lean on. People need its long, lake-flecked recovery, 
its routes and shoots and birds.

“Mostly when people think about poetry nowadays, they think about short lyric poems that are confessional, where somebody’s talking about their intense emotional experience. And I love that kind of poetry, and I write that kind of poetry,” said Poochigan, 52, who holds a master of fine arts in poetry from Columbia University and also is an acclaimed translator of Greek poetry. “But this is a different kind of poetry. It’s didactic, it teaches—teaches the park.”

On this particular freezing-cold day in December, he’d taken a brief walk in Central Park before settling in for an interview at a cafe near Hunter’s Gate at West 81st Street and Central Park West – the start of one of the four walks in his book. The park today is not the green, lush park he describes in the poems, but Poochigian says it still provides a respite; in fact, in some ways it’s better than it is in the summer.

“The vistas are better in the winter because there’s less foliage on the trees,” said Poochigian, who lives in the East Village. “You get a further, wider, vaster vista during the winter than you can during the spring.”

“That’s what I was appreciating earlier today. And so if you want to get a good sense of the extent of the park, the winter is better in terms of viewing the park from some promontory or precipice.”

Poochigian’s book is broken up into four parts, each a walk meant to address a different plight: for the overworked, the fallow, the melancholy, and the disillusioned—all conditions he identified with while writing the book, and each of them cured with imagination, curiosity, and “play” as Poochigian described it.

“We stop playing when we reach a certain age, and Central Park is there for that play,” he explained.

“[The walks are] meant to revitalize, and that’s what the park is there for. It’s there for recreation, it’s there to be admired. And I want to remind people of that and some of the parks like that as well, that it has signs that encourage you to rediscover some area in the park,” Poochigian explained. “It assumes you’ve seen it before, but it’s new now.”

Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here. And you can Support the Rag here.