No one really knows when poems started appearing in the metro, underground and train stations all around the world. Some cognoscenti’s swear the first poems surfaced in Moscow during the mid eighties in the Electrozavodskaya in the Moscow underground. Others credit the British who once ran a crazy project simply called Poems in the London underground.
The idea was simple enough. Over a few experimental months, the London Arts Council and two poetry publishers would support some posters with poems to be read by commuters and exhausted shoppers, alongside adverts for duty free cigarettes, cars or holidays in Spain. The commentators were pretty vitriolic,
“Far-fetched if not preposterous….” said one.
“The exposure of an obscure and esoteric passion” wrote another.
But curiously, the public loved it. Now, the scattering of poetry about in public places has been adopted by mass transport systems in New York, Paris, Dublin, Tokyo, Shanghai, Moscow, and in capital cities in Scandinavia. Poems on the underground are now assumed to be part of the urban landscape, a model for primary school projects and a subject for Ph.Ds in media studies and semiology. Read the rest of this entry »
THE INTELLIGENT SINGAPOREAN 