Colloquial Circulations: The Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion Public Transportation Project

Abstract:Much fanfare surrounded the recent twenty-fifth anniversary of the Poetry in Motion public arts program, established in 1992 by The Poetry Society of America and the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority to display poems on New York’s public transit. This article examines Poetry in Motion as a useful miniature portrait of recent evolutions in American poetic culture, focusing on its most long-standing instantiation in New York City and drawing on scholarship on American verse-reading practices and on interviews with program officials. By doing so, it argues that Poetry in Motion has since its origins served conflicting aims: in certain ways bolstering the authorizing force of official verse culture and subtly propagating conservative interpretative practices, yet also advocating ever more diverse poets and allowing readers to engage their work subversively. To attain those unstated goals that are sometimes in tension, the program overtly frames featured poems in ways that encourage old-fashioned lyric reading practices mirroring those still disseminated in many classrooms. However, Poetry in Motion also increasingly acknowledges readers’ agency, which makes it unlikely those will be the only approaches applied. Its contours thereby elucidate how all institutions of verse culture have evolved in recent decades, whether willingly or begrudgingly.