London Underground<\/a> passengers have seen posters adorned with poems nestled among the advertisements on their daily journeys.<\/p>\nMore than a dozen poets whose work has featured in the project gathered Friday in \u2013 where else? \u2013 a subway station to celebrate the milestone and pay tribute to Chernaik, who started it all.<\/p>\n
The New York native moved to London in the 1970s and fell \u201cabsolutely in love with the city \u2013 including its transport system,\u201d which she found compared favorably to her home city\u2019s subway.<\/p>\n
\u201cI used the subway all the time in New York,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was not one of my pleasurable activities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chernaik, a novelist and essayist, also reveled in London’s rich literary culture and history.<\/p>\n
\u201cPoetry,\u201d she said, \u201cis part of the heritage of every Londoner.\u201d<\/p>\n
Along with two poet friends, Gerard Benson and Cecily Herbert, she hatched a plan to combine literature and transit. The subway operator was supportive, and the first poems went up in January 1986.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomehow the idea of it worked, and here we are, 40 years on,\u201d said Chernaik, now 91.<\/p>\n
The first year\u2019s poems included works by William Shakespeare, Robert Burns, W.B. Yeats, Percy Bysshe Shelley \u2014 \u201cOzymandias,\u201d a reflection on the transience of power \u2013 and William Carlos Williams\u2019 imagist poem \u201cThis is Just to Say,\u201d with its famous opening:<\/p>\n
\u201cI have eaten<\/p>\n
the plums<\/p>\n
that were in<\/p>\n
the icebox\u201d.<\/p>\n
The choice soon expanded to include poems from around the world, by Wole Soyinka, Pablo Neruda, Derek Walcott, Anna Akhmatova and many more.<\/p>\n
The selection is changed three times a year, and Chernaik is still on the panel that chooses the poems, alongside poets George Szirtes and Imtiaz Dharker.<\/p>\n
The offerings mix modern verses with centuries-old classics \u2013 from \u201cShakespeare and Sappho to poets that are really contemporary,\u201d said Ann Gavaghan, who oversees cultural projects at Transport for London.<\/p>\n
There have been sonnets and haikus, love poems, tragic poems, funny poems, and highly relatable-to-commuters poems such as Hungarian poet Katalin Szlukov\u00e9nyi\u2019s \u201cOvercrowding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nick Makoha, whose poem \u201cBOM\u201d \u2013 the airport code for Mumbai \u2013 featured on the Underground in 2020, said the program drags poetry into the everyday world.<\/p>\n
\u201cPoetry can often be taught as if it’s this thing that you need to have high intellect, but we\u2019re normal people,\u201d he said. \u201cPoets are normal people, writing about sometimes normal things, sometimes amazing things.<\/p>\n
\u201cPoetry belongs to the community,\u201d Makoha said. \u201cIt should be part of our daily lives, and the Underground is part of daily life. So, as it connects us to places, it also connects us to people. You could be sitting at Turnpike Lane (Tube station), and all of a sudden I\u2019ve taken you to Bombay.\u201d<\/p>\n
London’s transit network is far from perfect \u2014 commuters often gripe about delays, overcrowding and dirty trains \u2014 but it has long been recognized for its artistic flair. Its map<\/a> is considered a design classic, and for a century it has enlisted top artist to design its posters.<\/p>\nPoems on the Underground is now a much-loved fixture of the system that has produced several books and inspired similar projects in cities including New York, Dublin, Oslo and Shanghai.<\/p>\n
Gavaghan said the key to its success is giving travelers something that \u201cjogs them out of their commute.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019ve had a hard day and you\u2019re wrapped up in your own worries and cares, being able to see something on the Underground that makes you think, that kind of shocks you out of that, is a real nice thing to have,” she said. “And it could make you laugh, it could make you think. It really makes you empathize.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s really powerful. And it\u2019s important to have, and that\u2019s why it\u2019s still going after 40 years.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON — Can a few lines of verse, make commuting less worse? That, in essence, is the question…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[139182,127,5927,114,146,122,85,46,231,1511,37256,1510,126],"class_list":{"0":"post-265866","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-139182","9":"tag-article","10":"tag-books-and-literature","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-general-news","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel","16":"tag-lifestyle","17":"tag-mass-transit","18":"tag-poetry","19":"tag-transportation","20":"tag-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}