“I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t stay home
where the big dipper rises from, time”
-Heather McHugh, “A Night in the World” Poetry in Motion 2020
I was on the train, and my dad was tracing the headline in his crumpled Times for me to read out loud. The picture of the firefighters on the page had excited me. I wanted to know what they were doing. Read it for yourself my Dad responded. So I did.
I spent the next twelve years learning to read on the train.
On my way to school, the words were the advertisements displayed above my eye-line: shiny blonde women boasting their plastic surgery, men in gray suits selling their legal services, ballerinas in elegant costumes spinning mid-performance. On the way home, one hand on a pole, knees supporting my backpack on the floor, I’d do my homework. Plastic surgery became magical realism; lawyers became founding fathers; ballet became the French revolution.
But I got bored easily. Greasy ads didn’t occupy my commute if I didn’t have my headphones. Homework didn’t shrink the time if it wasn’t due the next day. Before I had social media, I had to look for stimulation around me when my mind wandered.
It was in these times, when I was too young to focus on nothing, but too amped to focus on anything in particular, that I first read Poetry in Motion — poems displayed in trains and train stations of New York City’s MTA. Hanging in glass frames immediately above the seats, gracing the walls of nearly every station or train I encountered, most of Poetry in Motion was, to be frank, terrible.
Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.
A self-conscious teenager obsessed with the idea of being post-artistic (I distinctly remember calling all literary criticism a “circle jerk”) I thought poetry, particularly the modern poetry featured on the train, was shallow, pandering, and melodramatic. Sure, I knew what a metaphor was, but why would you use one when you could just describe it literally? Yeah, line breaks are cool and all, but poems would be so much easier to read if they just flowed normally. Okay, your lover may be beautiful to you, but I’ve never met her, so why should I care? Whenever any of my friends pointed out one of the poems and asked me what I thought, my answer was always the same. Pretentious.
It wasn’t until fall break my freshman year of college, when I was taking the train home after Amtraking to New York, that I decided to read Poetry in Motion without immediately judging myself for doing so. I was still convinced that I was going to be an Economics major, but I was (a little) more self aware than I was in high school. I understood that I must, in fact, like poetry more than I think I do. After all, I was so willing to spend years agonizing about its purpose. So I looked up and read the poems in front of me.
I don’t remember which poems I read, exactly — probably a few pieces — but my willingness to enjoy what I had once assumed was pretension marked a huge change in my life. I won’t say Poetry in Motion precipitated this change, because it didn’t. (A combination of SSRIs, growing up, and a kick of humility after meeting my Hopkins classmates probably did). But, suddenly, I was able to recognize that I did not hate poetry. I wasn’t yet ready to love it, but I allowed myself to appreciate it.
The MTA is underfunded. Poetry in Motion’s displays take up prime ad space. Many people, often myself included, don’t appreciate or understand the purpose of the program. But the purpose of Poetry in Motion, much like the purpose of poetry itself, does not practical. Poetry exists to make you think. Even when the thought was What’s the point of this?, Poetry in Motion provoked more curiosity in me, an adolescent commuter, than much of my homework ever did. In that regard, I think, Poetry in Motion achieved its goal.
I spent the next twelve years learning to read on the train.
On my way to school, the words were the advertisements displayed above my eye-line: shiny blonde women boasting their plastic surgery, men in gray suits selling their legal services, ballerinas in elegant costumes spinning mid-performance. On the way home, one hand on a pole, knees supporting my backpack on the floor, I’d do my homework. Plastic surgery became magical realism; lawyers became founding fathers; ballet became the French revolution.
But I got bored easily. Greasy ads didn’t occupy my commute if I didn’t have my headphones. Homework didn’t shrink the time if it wasn’t due the next day. Before I had social media, I had to look for stimulation around me when my mind wandered.
It was in these times, when I was too young to focus on nothing, but too amped to focus on anything in particular, that I first read Poetry in Motion — poems displayed in trains and train stations of New York City’s MTA. Hanging in glass frames immediately above the seats, gracing the walls of nearly every station or train I encountered, most of Poetry in Motion was, to be frank, terrible.
Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.
A self-conscious teenager obsessed with the idea of being post-artistic (I distinctly remember calling all literary criticism a “circle jerk”) I thought poetry, particularly the modern poetry featured on the train, was shallow, pandering, and melodramatic. Sure, I knew what a metaphor was, but why would you use one when you could just describe it literally? Yeah, line breaks are cool and all, but poems would be so much easier to read if they just flowed normally. Okay, your lover may be beautiful to you, but I’ve never met her, so why should I care? Whenever any of my friends pointed out one of the poems and asked me what I thought, my answer was always the same. Pretentious.
It wasn’t until fall break my freshman year of college, when I was taking the train home after Amtraking to New York, that I decided to read Poetry in Motion without immediately judging myself for doing so. I was still convinced that I was going to be an Economics major, but I was (a little) more self aware than I was in high school. I understood that I must, in fact, like poetry more than I think I do. After all, I was so willing to spend years agonizing about its purpose. So I looked up and read the poems in front of me.
I don’t remember which poems I read, exactly — probably a few pieces — but my willingness to enjoy what I had once assumed was pretension marked a huge change in my life. I won’t say Poetry in Motion precipitated this change, because it didn’t. (A combination of SSRIs, growing up, and a kick of humility after meeting my Hopkins classmates probably did). But, suddenly, I was able to recognize that I did not hate poetry. I wasn’t yet ready to love it, but I allowed myself to appreciate it.
The MTA is underfunded. Poetry in Motion’s displays take up prime ad space. Many people, often myself included, don’t appreciate or understand the purpose of the program. But the purpose of Poetry in Motion, much like the purpose of poetry itself, does not practical. Poetry exists to make you think. Even when the thought was What’s the point of this?, Poetry in Motion provoked more curiosity in me, an adolescent commuter, than much of my homework ever did. In that regard, I think, Poetry in Motion achieved its goal.
“He told us, with the years, you will come
to love the world.
And we sat there with our souls in our laps,
and comforted them.”
-Dorothea Tanning, “Graduation” Poetry in Motion 2012