Dickinson on the bus

Emily Dickinson is now a passenger on the Wilkes-Barrie, PA, bus system, or at least her words are. On Wednesday, the first twelve placards in the Poetry in Transit program were installed:

The 12 poems used for the program are by well-known authors such as Emily Dickinson, William Blake and Robert Frost. For this year, they will use the popular poems that bus riders may recognize from reading in fifth or sixth grade, [Mischelle Anthony, an assistant professor at Wilkes University and the Poetry in Transit coordinator,] said.

Every 30 days, the placards will be switched from bus to bus, and next year 12 new placards will be made.

Which Dickinson poem was selected for the project isn’t indicated in any of the news stories.

This isn’t the first time Dickinson has been spotted on public transportation; the London Transport Poems on the Underground project has included three: “Much madness is divinest sense”, “I taste a liquor never brewed”, and “There came a Wind like a Bugle”. And the State-side Poetry in Motion project has included “Hope is the thing with feathers”, which appeared on buses and trains in New York City and Philadelphia. (Daily Dickinson World Headquarters is located just a few blocks from the Minneapolis LRT, but our Poetry in Motion branch featured some local poets like Louise Erdrich, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Bly, and Bob Dylan.)

When I went to Queen Mary College-London in 1989, I loved the “Poems on the Underground” series and tried to spot them all; I memorized On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer and Spring and Fall shuttling between the South Woodford and Mile End stations. It was much better than staring at the same old ads every morning.

Dickinson’s poems are, I think, uniquely suited for this sort of project: they tend to be short and sharp and surprising, just the thing to snap the weary commuter away from her cell phone or Blackberry for a moment of strange clarity.