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Would it be a good idea to …
… pepper more of our public spaces with occasional dashes of poetry?
For 10 years, riders aboard the Luzerne Country Transportation Authority’s buses occasionally have spied poems appearing in those ad slots normally reserved for lawyers’ come-ons and other marketing appeals. “Poetry in Transit,” as this community art project is called, spotlights brief works by area writers.
Their words invite contemplation, adulation, inspiration. Maybe mockery. And insult. Always insult.
Such is the curse of the writer intrepid enough to release to the world what begins within. In this case, doing so in six lines or less.
Yet the decade-old project’s mobile poetry, like any verse that pops out at unexpected places and times, can pierce people’s everyday routines, compelling them to think. To interact. To discuss. A fleeting poem can make a lasting statement. Witness, for instance, the impact of the late Maya Angelou’s “Human Family,” as presented in Apple’s commercial during the Olympic Games.
I note the obvious differences
between each sort and type,
but we are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
We are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
Properly executed, a poem can slip more sorrow (or shame, or hope, or passion, or glee) in a stanza than gets revealed in an entire mediocre novel.
Amid lives of shallow daily exchanges, poems push us deep.
In this milestone year for “Poetry in Transit,” might area residents consider other ways to enliven the places we congregate with thought-provoking words? Can poems appear more routinely in our museums and libraries? In store windows and on scrolling message boards? On posters and restaurant placemats?
Can we find more room in the Greater Wyoming Valley for art and expression?
And, if we don’t, is anything lost?
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