New York’s subway, from its founding, was dreamt as a public good in all senses, to provide a useful and reliable service that was also a pleasant place to be. City train stations were filled with decorative ornamentation, public art and monuments, and other luxurious touches. The act of putting art in train cars was formalized in 1985, when the MTA’s Arts & Design program was launched, initially to incorporate original pieces of art in large, capital projects. The department has since evolved to include public art initiatives on trains, buses, and platforms—nearly every surface the MTA controls.
Anyone who has taken the subway has likely come across Arts & Design’s most popular program, Poetry in Motion, which pairs poems with artwork. For me, each poem is a respite from the crowd, the commute, the bleating of advertisements. Recently I have been reflecting on how central this program was to my conception of my city. Who’s behind this poetry? Who brought these moving, 35 words by Danez Smith to me on a sleepy morning commute? Who knew I would be reassured by Timothy Liu on my way home after a too late night? How do such excellent poems end up on the New York City subway?
I spoke with Tina Vaz, the head of the MTA’s Arts & Design team, and Matt Brogan, the executive director of the Poetry Society of America, who are the big decision makers behind the Poetry in Motion program.
“There’s no other publishing project,” Brogan told me, “that comes anywhere close in terms of reaching readers, and particularly readers from all kind of walks of life.” It’s not an exaggeration to say Poetry in Motion might be one of the largest venues for contemporary poetry.
Modeled on a similar program in the London Underground, the Poetry in Motion partnership between the MTA and Poetry Society of America launched in 1992 with four poems by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, and Lucille Clifton. The program has been refreshed a few times since then, but the central idea remains the same: “To make sure that poetry feels like part of the infrastructure,” as Brogan put it.
A government organization picking out poems for a readership of millions feels like the set-up to a bad joke, but the actual process behind these poems is much less bureaucratic. It’s refreshingly analogue and, as Vaz said, a bit “intuitive.”
The process starts with Brogan and the Poetry Society of America, who search their vast library of over 10,000 books.
“It’s not systematic,” Brogan told me, “We go to the library and start looking at poets.” Staff members pull books down and make photocopies, which get passed around and debated.
“In some ways, it’s like poetry itself,” Brogan said, “it’s about being creative within constraints.” The first constraint is length—usually 12 lines or less—given that poems need to fit onto the subway’s wall and still be legible. And nothing too racy, as you might expect. There is no specific kind of poem they’re looking for, though Brogan noted that the selections are generally “uplifting.” Brogan and the staff tend to gravitate toward work that might create “a sense of meaning for people, something that they kind of want to hold on to.”
While it’s not a strict rule, Brogan and his team also have “a strong preference” for living poets, which is different than in London, for example, where you’ll see a lot of Shakespeare in the Underground. This is to make sure the Poetry in Motion selections are emphasizing poetry as “something alive, something that’s happening now,” Brogan said, especially when “there are fewer ways for people to have a kind of on-ramp to contemporary poetry.”
“Even people who like poetry,” he said, “often what you’ll hear them say is, ‘Oh yeah, when I was in college, we read poetry and I really liked Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.’ I’m like, that’s great. I really liked them too. But have you read Terrence Hayes? Have you read some more contemporary poets?”
Once the Poetry Society has selected six or eight standouts, they pass them to Tina Vaz and the team at the MTA, who are also operating without a strict set of criteria. Potential art pairings might help inform the decision. Topicality might play a role in the final picks, too.
“They’re informed by, I don’t want to say seasonality,” Vaz said, “but they can be relevant to the time of year.” For instance, during this year’s Hispanic Heritage Month, the MTA debuted their first poem in two languages, “Instantánea de Harlem” by José Olivarez, alongside an English translation by David Ruano González.
But like Brogan and the Poetry Society’s poets, the goal is an emotional density, something that makes the most with the little space offered. They all have an insistence, especially important since they’re asking for a bit of a New Yorker’s most coveted resource: time. A poem succeeds when it manages to break through “the noise of the environment,” disrupt the routine.
It’s trite to reduce everything to just the phones, but spaces of pause in public “are very hard to get nowadays,” Vaz said, “And so if we can support that interior moment, whether the feeling is joy, or calm, or even wistfulness … it’s just creating space for that to happen.”
I was also curious about the installation of the poems, and in particular, whether certain poems were paired with certain trains. When a rider sees “Threads” by Essex Hemphill on the NQRW line, for example, is that intentional? Is there an N-train-ness to “Threads”?
“That would be make our job harder,” Brogan said with a laugh.
“Oh I love that,” Vaz said, “I love that it feels that way.” But any overlap in a poem and a train line’s energy is coincidental; new Poetry in Motion selections go out in the entire subway system at once.
The program is immensely popular. A recent MTA survey found that 74% of people surveyed knew about the Poetry in Motion program, and 80% agreed that “seeing art in the subway improves their experience.”
“For many people,” Vaz told me, “the artwork that they see in the transit system may be one of the few encounters with art that they are having in a typical day, week, month.”
The selected poets—who, Brogan said, “frankly labor in obscurity much of their lives”—love it too, of course.
“We joke,” Brogan said, “that if you get your poem in there, you’re definitely going to hear from your high school boyfriend or girlfriend.” Brogan estimated Poetry in Motion spans 5,500 posters and 22,000 screens, so the reach is unprecedented (and bound to reach an ex or two).
The MTA hopes to expand the program, bringing more poems and art the transit system. They’re also recording celebrity readings of the In Motion poems—so far just Robbie Hoffman and Jenny Slate—to go out on the MTA’s social channels.
The Poetry Society is also expanding, and are currently hoping to blanket the neighborhood around their Brooklyn storefront in poems to create what they’re calling “The Poem District.” Their own windows are already covered in poetry, “but then we started thinking,” Brogan said, “why should we just do it in our own window? Let’s start putting them on the walls and windows all around the neighborhood.”
“Making poetry part of daily life ultimately is our goal,” Brogan said.
Poetry in Motion, according to Vaz, turns “the everyday necessary routine of traveling into time and space that actually belongs to you.”
In fact, this was how Vaz first encountered the program she would someday run. She recalled seeing “The Good Life” by Tracy K Smith right when she moved to New York. The poem is “a little bit about the grind and the struggle,” she said.
