South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Odes to subway riders’ resilience
‘Poetry in Motion’ hopes to comfort people as they resume commuting
NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will use many tools in the coming weeks in its effort to restore faith in a subway system that has been seen as a vector for infection.
Disinfectant, the backbreaking work of dedicated employees, public relations strategies and the advice of medical professionals are likely to be vital.
But the agency, it seems, will also employ poetry.
The people who pick the verse routinely displayed inside subway cars as part of the “Poetry in Motion” series are already thinking about which works might lift up riders and speak to the city’s place at the center of a global crisis.
“We are very aware that when people begin using the subway and buses again in greater numbers, there is going to be this sense of anxiety,” said Matt Brogan, executive director of the Poetry Society of America, which runs the subway program with the MTA.
“The poems have always played a role in making the space welcoming.”
Sandra Bloodworth, director of the MTA’s arts and design program, said that beginning last month, people involved with Poetry in Motion began thinking about how to make sure that the next works are “thoughtful and mindful.”
Beyond elements of happiness, she said, the new poems should reflect the complex reality brought on by the coronavirus and the difficulties the city has endured.
“What we present is more important than ever,” Bloodworth said. “We knew it was going to be a daunting challenge to find just the right thing to speak to, but also comfort, people.”
Nothing has been chosen yet, but Brogan said they were looking for poems that might match the tone of “Separation” by W.S. Merwin, a three-line poem that has previously appeared in the subway:
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
“It’s a beautiful poem,” he said “But (it’s) also really powerful at this moment because it’s about what happens when you’re absent from others and what you take with you.”
The Poetry in Motion project began in 1992 with four works. One was an excerpt from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman that described a 19th-century trip across the East River, with lines that seemed to speak directly to contemporary commuters: “And you that shall cross from / shore to shore years hence are / more / to me, and more in my / meditations, than you might / suppose.”
Brogan said the society looks for works that are no more than 10 or 12 lines and that every subway rider would be able to appreciate. They have steered clear of poems that are recondite while avoiding anything that smacks of greeting card sentiment.
It’s important that selections have depth, Brogan said, adding: “Many of the most complex poems are written in the most simple and colloquial language.”
Over the years poems from the program have appeared in transit systems in more than 30 cities. These days it is active in New York; San Francisco;
“When people begin using the subway and buses again in greater numbers, there is going to be this sense of anxiety.”
— Matt Brogan, executive director of the Poetry Society of America
Los Angeles; Nashville, Tennessee; and Providence, Rhode Island. More than 200 poems and excerpts by writers including Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Sylvia Plath and Robert Frost have been displayed in New York subway cars, Brogan said.
The Poetry Society and MTA collaborate on choosing the poems, and since 2012 the MTA has paired each poem with art from its permanent collection to make the posters that are installed inside
trains.
The aim, Brogan said, is to provide an illuminating experience and opportunity to pause in an environment where riders often feel distracted or rushed.
In its earlier years, the poetry program did not shy from messages that could occasionally be grim. At one point, for instance, it published an excerpt from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, including the lines:
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
But in 2014 the authority and the Poetry Society began focusing more on works that communicated discovery and joy, Bloodworth said.
Some poems that have appeared in New York City, like “Grand Central” by Billy Collins, and “Awaking in New York,” by Maya Angelou, were chosen because they were likely to be meaningful to local riders.
Others have universality, said Brogan, and have appeared on trains or buses across the country. One that has appeared in more than a dozen cities including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Missoula, Montana, is “Luck” by
Langston Hughes.
That poem was something of a model for the program, Brogan said, because it “condenses and crystallizes” an experience, adding: “It’s a poem about joy and how it comes to you.”
Generally, two new poems are introduced into the subway system every few months. The next pair may appear this summer, Bloodworth said. Brogan said he and his colleagues at the Poetry Society would be looking for works that include a sense of solace and, perhaps, that evoke the feeling of having come through adversity.
“People are crowded into the subway, they’re going to work and they’ve got other things going on in their lives,” he said. “And we’re trying to bring a kind of bright moment into their day.”