After more than fifteen years, the Poetry in Motion program that put poems by W.S. Merwin, Lucille Clifton, Lorine Niedecker, and Emily Dickinson—among many, many others—alongside ads for Dr. Z’s acne treatment and Lasik surgery on New York City’s subways, has ended.
The New York Times reported last month that the “Poetry in Motion” partnership between the Poetry Society of America and the Metro Transportation Authority would phase out in May and transform into a new SubTalk program entitled “Train of Thought.”
The new program will still feature one poem a year, but will focus more on quotations from history, philosophy, and science. The new quotations will be chosen by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for, according to their press release, “both their significance and accessibility.”
Alicia Martinez, MTA’s Director of Marketing & Corporate Communications, says, “New Yorkers have wide-ranging interests, and we felt that we could include material from a variety of other disciplines in addition to poetry to bring important, engaging, insightful quotes to our riders, and entice them to explore the author or subject further. We believe this approach will reach a broader and larger audience.”
Jim Dwyer wrote a eulogy of sorts last week for “Poetry in Motion” that has made the rounds via email and blogs, but for the most part it has been a quite transition.
The program has spawned similar programs across the country, from Los Angleles to St. Louis to here in Seattle, where we have a Poetry in Motion-inspired program called Poetry on the Buses. Since I only saw “Poetry in Motion” in fits and starts, my main experience with the response to poetry on public transportation has been through Poetry on the Buses, which is mixed to say the least.
It’s too bad this program has ended, but it had long ago lost its lustre I think. At least in my years of riding the subway I rarely found anything thought provoking. As far as I know the program is still underway in other cities–Toronto for example where there is often something worth reading.
More of this would be good. Much more. People read those poems. People who might not otherwise encounter poetry.
Thanks for posting about this. It made me very sad to read that this program was ending, as sad as I was happy to learn of its existence a little over a year ago, during my first trip to NYC, when I was riding on the subway and reading all the ads posted above the windows, and suddenly I encountered, also for the first time, that small, miraculous poem by Lorine Niedecker called Wilderness, which begins:
You are the man
You are my other country
And I find it hard going
She was a poet I had only really skimmed before. That changed very soon after. Something about the matter-of-factness of tone with which she delivered that third line really broke me. And then the end (so I’ve only omitted one line here)–to read this poem at all was an astonishing experience. To encounter it on public transportation, in the middle of rush hour, was a gift I’ll never forget.
You are the sudden violent storm
the torrent to raise the river
to float the wounded doe.
This is sad, perhaps inevitable. Years ago riding the E in midtown I came across James Merrill’s poem, “Autumn.” It so inspired me that the moment I got home I went online and bought his Collected Poems, the book cited in the Poetry in Motion “ad”. Merrill had other equally beautiful poems in his collection. I still have his book, still read Autumn maybe once or twice a year, and have shared his poem and others with my kids.
There were other poems, other poets, equally moving to me. In a world saturated with commercialism, it always was and is welcome to encounter the human voice doing nothing nothing more than describing the human condition.