Rapid Transit of Poetry to Public Places

“Great poets need no gentle reader; they hold him captive, however unwilling or hard to please.” Thus (more or less) spake Ovid, the Roman poet who, were he alive today, would surely be among the first to clamber aboard one of the Santa Monica transit system’s Big Blue Buses.

As of today, those girdle and bail-bond ads gracing the buses have been replaced by 12 (count ‘em, 12) poems, culled from among 200 entries and designed to pique the curiosity of 18 million daily riders.

“It’s all part of Santa Monica’s desire to bring art out into the open so everyone can enjoy it,” says Christine Anderson, spokesperson for the Santa Monica Arts Commission. “They’re short, generally 12 lines or less: poems suitable for a bus ride, not necessarily simple but not too abstract either. Call it ‘poetry in motion.’ ”

Not Just for the Brainy

“Poetry shouldn’t be a pastime only for the intellectual elite,” she continued. “It should be something everyone can enjoy and participate in. It’s an experiment--they’ll be on the buses for a year.”

Asked for an example, she cites a poem by Terry Wolverton of Los Angeles, entitled, “This Woman Is a Wishbone/ Just That Easily Pulled/ Just That Lucky.”

Perhaps more accessible and surely more ephemeral is the poem that launched the city’s first public “reading,” a David Antin work poofed out last year by sky-writing planes high over the Santa Monica pier: “If We Get It Together/ Can They Take It Apart?/ Only If We Let Them.”