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As a responsible citizen taking public transit home after a hard day, would
you rather read such ads as, currently in New York subways, that of a
dermatologist named Dr. Zitmor?
Or, would you prefer "First Infatuation" by Holly Phillips of Charlotte, a
senior honors poetry student at the University.
Through mid-May, this poem and those of Phillips' seven classmates in
Carolina's senior honors poetry class were displayed inside Chapel Hill Transit
buses in spaces usually occupied by ads. Similar to promotion by the Poetry
Society of America, the students' project, Poets in Transit, may be the only
one of its kind nationwide conceived and implemented by college students.
"There could be others, but none have contacted us to collaborate," said
Andrew Zawacki, coordinator of the society's Poetry in Motion project, which
posts work by well-known poets in vehicles of 10 big-city U.S. public
transportation systems.
The display of the Carolina students' poems, also posted in the Chapel Hill
Public Library, coincided with National Poetry Month.
But the young poets aren't interested in firsts, national tie-ins or plaudits.
Their 24-inch by 11-inch blue placards, circulated in 54 buses on all 15
routes, bear only poems, authors' names and "Poets in Transit."
"We didn't want to emphasize students or the University," said student Nina
Riggs of Beaufort, N.C., who designed and printed the placards with financial
help from Carolina's creative writing program.
"The idea was to have the poems speak. Poetry is an art form that's not widely
appreciated, so we welcome an opportunity to make it available to the world
around us and make it free."
So much so that the students all planned to chip in on the transit system's
regular $68 per month ad fee. When he learned about that, transit director Bob
Godding declared their money no good.
"We'll put them up free as a public service," he said, adding that he hopes
the system's 15,000 to 16,000 daily riders enjoy them.
Poets in Transit is one of three outreach efforts by a class intent on
convincing a poetry-shy public that folks don't know what they're missing.
Class poems and explanations of Poets in Transit grace its site on the World
Wide Web, http://metalab.unc.edu/poetry99 -- proposed, created and maintained
by class member Daryl Houston of Gastonia.
Also, class members will read from their work from 3:30 to 5 p.m. April 29 in
the elegant Dialectic Chambers, on the top floor of Old West. Naturally, it's
free and open to the public. This, on the last day of classes for graduating
seniors facing exams and completing their final poetry assignment: a book of
poetry 900 to 1,000 lines long, about 40-50 pages.
Lightweights they're not. To reach honors poetry, they've had to complete
three previous poetry writing courses and, after each, be recommended for the
next level by their professors.
These distinctive young people include, for example, a student on a full merit
scholarship, a male women's studies major, the coordinator of regular public
readings of creative writing by undergraduates and Luke Meisner. Currently of
Raleigh, Meisner lived 10 years in Bangladesh and is a double-major in
philosophy and religious studies, Student Congress representative, and co-chair
of a residence hall multicultural living and learning course.
In Meisner's poem, "Birmingham 1963," he describes his reaction to a
photograph of a woman whose house burned during the civil rights movement. He
saw the photo in the city's Second Street Baptist Church, where four little
girls died in a bombing during the same period.
Asked in class what he hopes will come of Poets in Transit, Meisner replies,
"I hope someone will walk home in a daze, thinking about the poem," drawing
laughter and jokes about poetry-obsessed transit riders repeatedly requesting
transfers.
Their teacher, poet and associate English professor Michael McFee, said he did
nothing to trigger the students' verve: "They are picking the poems, doing it
all. I'm just saying, `Go for it.' There's never been anything like this
before."
He did suggest that they consider ways to share their poems. Other classes
have collected them in anthologies. But this group had been fascinated by U.S.
Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's talk in October 1997, in which he advocated
bringing poetry to the public.
"Congratulations to the students at Chapel Hill," Pinsky said when informed of
Poets in Transit. "I'm delighted by the project that puts poems in the buses,
and I'm proud of any encouragement I may have given the students."
Classmate Mandy Holt of Sanford attributed the zeal for outreach to the fact
that, "as poets, we love poetry. It is probably one of our greatest passions,
if not the greatest. We want others to be passionate about poetry also. This is
our way to share our passion and our love of poetry without being too pushy."
Late last year, classmates Riggs and Ali Fischer of Miami hatched the transit
idea while riding a bus home from class. Fischer recalled the Poetry in Motion
project in Portland, Ore., where she'd had a summer internship.
Then Houston suggested the web page, and the class was off and running. Riggs
spent hours producing the placards. When she stopped briefly at a local print
shop to pick them up, no amount of explaining about a public service could
dissuade the police officer from giving her a parking ticket.
"We're all going to pitch in on the ticket," McFee said.
Besides the obvious, the project's name also means that "we are seniors making
the transition from the fairy world of academia to the real world or further
academia," Houston wrote on the web site. "And, our poems are changing and
growing along with us."
The transit idea resonated with the class, he wrote, because "our poems will
be seen by more people than if we put a small anthology for sale on a dusty
bookshelf. If passengers on the buses neither like nor particularly dislike our
poems, they will at least have read them, and that seems a step up from the
norm. Additionally, we are interacting very directly with the community rather
than remaining poetically in our isolated garrets."
Recent poet laureates, including Pinsky, Rita Dove and Robert Hass, "have done
a fine job bridging the real or perceived gap between a supposedly elitist art
and a supposedly poetry-phobic public," said McFee. He said his current class's
heightened interest in audience echoes an ancient poetic urge. "Wordsworth and
Coleridge, in their preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800),
said poetry should be written in `the language really spoken by men.' Walt
Whitman, writing in the mid-19th century, called for `the word Democratic, the
word En-Masse,' and said, `To have great poetry, there must be great audiences,
too.' "
The bigger and more diverse the audience, the better a poet must write, said
Ezzell; the poem must work on many levels, offering one clear message to the
hurried reader, but also something more to connoisseurs who reflect, dissect
and read aloud.
"A good poem says something interesting about the world," he said. "A great
poem says many things interesting."
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