(ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/01)

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jul 2 1996 (IPS) - For a visitor to New York, few experiences are as unpleasant as a ride on the century-old subway system: hot, crowded and slow, the New York subway for years has been a symbol of urban decay.

In recent years, however, one innovation has helped to charm New York’s subway riders despite the rides’ many pitfalls: poetry.

This month, riders can look up from the tangle of arms and heads to see a new poster on the subway wall, featuring Rainier Maria Rilke’s ‘The Panther’: “It seems to him there are/ a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.”

If that passage sounds too much like the subway experience itself, the New York subway offers other examples of poetry that can actually cheer riders about their trips.

Ogden Nash, the United States’ most esteemed writer of doggerel, can be found exclaiming, “Let each man make haste to indulge his taste,/ Be it beer, champagne or cider;/ My private joy, both man and boy,/ Is being a railroad rider.”

May Swenson’s ‘Riding the A’, describing the voyage of the famed A train to Harlem, even carries an erotic charge when it describes how “Wheels/ and rails/ in their prime/ collide,/ makie love in a glide/ of slickness/ and friction.” No wonder she concludes, “The station/ is reached/ too soon” — a phrase few New Yorkers would accept.

Whether they have verisimilitude or not, the poems presented on New York subways and buses by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) have been a success since the MTA and Poetry Society of America first introduced the project in 1992.

At the time, then-MTA President Alan Kiepper says, both the MTA and the Poetry Society had been inspired to enliven the subways with poems. Kiepper had taken the idea from riding on the London Underground, and being enchanted by the poems offered there.

Kiepper and the Poetry Society’s president, Molly Peacock, thus began the “Poetry in Motion” project, selecting dozens of short poems and excerpts, in vivid typefaces, to place throughout the MTA system.

After the first four poems — by Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and William Butler Yeats — appeared in October 1992, the project took off. Soon, the poems were appearing in 4,000 subway cars and 3,700 buses citywide, with two new poems added each month. By 1994, the same poems also showed up on the public educational network, Crosswalks TV.

Part of the secret of the poems’ success is that there is something for everybody: excerpts from Shakespeare, modern minimalist verse, haikus, American Indian blank verse and Broadway show tunes.

But an equally important part of the poems’ success is the simple ability of poetry to transcend the monotony or frustration of urban commuting.

“In the hurly-burly of urban life, nowhere more concentrated than in the New York City subway and buses, it is an extraordinary experience to lift your eyes and, for a few minutes, be captured by some lines of poetry,” Kiepper contends.

The poems have been so succesful that Norton Books has now published a collection of 100 poems that have appeared in the subways and buses, also called ‘Poetry in Motion’ (which costs 11 U.S. dollars). The book, edited by Peacock, along with Elise Paschen and Neil Neches, vividly recaptures the delight of seeing the short bursts of poetry while riding the train.

Here, for example, is a translation from Hebrew of Yehuda Amichai’s poem ‘To My Love, Combing Her Hair’: “you’ve shampooed your hair, an entire/ forest of pine trees is filled with yearning on your head.” And here too is an Inuit poem, titled ‘Magic Words’ : “A word spoken by chance/ might have strange consequences./ It would suddenly come alive…”

Peacock notes with pride that the poems try to reflect every nationality and point of view contained in New York itself, and to prsent as many poets as possible. So far, she says, only Edna St. Vincent Millay has appeared more than once — while a vast range of poets, from John Keats to Louise Gluck, Pablo Neruda to Audre Lorde, have taken their turns.

Today, Peacock estimates, the poems reach five million riders each day. A Poetry in Motion programme is in the works for Chicago, while other cities, including Boston, Washington and Los Angeles, are contemplating their own poetry projects.

But, no matter which cities add poetry to their subways, it’s safe to say none will be able to include as effectively such charmers as an excerpt from Lorenz Hart’s ‘Manhattan’: “The great big city’s a wondrous toy/ Just made for a girl and boy./ We’ll turn Manhattan/ Into an isle of joy.”