No. 21 on New York magazine’s list of “Reasons to Love New York”: “Because we fight over poetry.” The fight, as it were, concerned revision to the Poetry in Motion campaign which has prettified the New York subway ad space with classic and contemporary poetry since 1992. Selections have ranged from Robert Frost’s “Fireflies in the Garden” to Alicia Partnoy’s “Communication”; from Ogden Nash’s elegiac “Old Men” (with those startlingly sad “unshocked eyes”) to Vera Pavlova’s “If there is something to desire.” The poems hovered above your commute, providing something seemingly light and literally easy on the eyes (by nature of its brevity), but deceptively so, as each line, each word, gained weight in your consciousness.
Along came the “Train of Thought” series to bump Poetry in Motion above-ground and into the buses (courtesy of Alice Quinn’s determination and pocketbook); now straphangers get snippets from great thinkers. Certainly poetry remains: not only does Train of Thought occasionally feature a poem, but the words of Abe Lincoln, Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton, et al. have creaky poetic lift, with all their whithers and withereds and whilsts. Such historical musings have heft and likely make more sense to more people (and as a people, we cling to sense like it’s our dying grandmother). Whilst a poem can drop you into a fugue of nostalgia, or sweep you into a romantic distraction, quotations tend to instruct—and, in case you haven’t heard, we’re information-based now.
I could attempt to demonstrate here how Train of Thought v. Poetry in Motion is a “fight” that’s very of-the-times: like the commonsensible populism of Sarah Palin v. the charming erudition of Barack Obama, perhaps. Or Successories v. a poetry broadside. Consider, even, the sounds of the names of the two projects. Train of Thought is all tongue against the teeth, a locomotive clackety-clack forward, while Poetry in Motion is kept to the lips—more train-whistle than train tracks.
Or maybe this argument’s mis-skewed—maybe poets should bristle at the notion of any poetry crammed in among the huddled masses. Maybe we should most pride ourselves if we’ve written a poem completely unfit for subway ad space. Maybe the evacuation of Poetry in Motion is a tribute to the divinely prickly nature of a form that defies mass consumption.
But I’m not a New Yorker, so it’s not my fight. But the magazine’s quote of MTA’s director of marketing—“we really did run through most of the selections you could take that would fit on a card”—has the thump of an anti-preciousness campaign (kinda like Willa Cather’s practical-minded attacks on Oscar Wilde’s celebration of beauty), as do her press releases: “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.” It’s a schoolmarmish coaxing: Poetry is fine, little Billy, but there are more serious things in life. Put aside your darling songbook and do your lessons!
On this blog, and on the blogs of others, we’ve lately found ourselves speaking to a similar debate. Now that the internet can speedily link poets with readers, what use is the esoteric delivery systems of old? In one breath, literature is finally as dead as print—and for real this time—and in another breath it’s the life of the party—martini in hand and lampshade on head. The debate often amounts to either a call-for-the-death of the obscure, or a defense of the obscure, in the face of mass internet distribution of intellectual goods.
“I wish to be published and read,” Katherine Anne Porter wrote to Fred Warburg, her English publisher, in 1958, distressed over her poem’s rejection by a magazine, “and though certainly I have my preferences for certain kinds of magazines, if the editor printed my writings on a six-foot bill and pasted it on a wall board on a vacant lot, I shouldn’t mind.”
There are many contemporary writers who would kill for that six-foot poem in that vacant lot—in the highly distracting 21st century it is not unheard of for an outsized literary marketing scheme to get more buzz than the work itself. In the face of this, obscurity may become the new popular—to have the privilege of composing in peace (writing, say, a poem on the bottom of your shoe as you ride the subway), indifferent to the cultural conversation, composing work that is unreadable (as opposed to “usable,” which is reportedly an MTA mandate for Train of Thought compositions) may become more enviable than a mass-dissemination of your work.
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