ART REVIEW : Mixing Business, Pleasure : Corporations and artists, often thought of as antithetical, delightfully coexist in ‘Poets’ Walk’ at Citicorp Plaza.

Spring is upon us with a gentle vengeance. This season should come at the beginning of the year instead of sneaking in three months late. It makes us feel things are getting better. Well, the drought isn’t so bad after all. The mayor and the chief have made up, sort of. The weather is lovely. Garlanded breezes stir myriad longings.

Spring has inspired poetic thoughts through the centuries. Ah, the china-blue cup we call the sky. Ah, my love in a gossamer frock. Ah, corporation.

Corporation?

You have to admit

That doesn’t fit

Poetic inspiration.

Not usually, anyway. But as it happens one of the nicest things wafted in by the season is the new “Poets’ Walk” in downtown’s Citicorp Plaza. It consists of seven permanent sculptural projects produced by as many teams of artists and poets.

Oh sure, the usual self-serving exercise in institutional chest-thumping. Forty-foot-high ingots of intimidatingly abstract brushed aluminum emblazoned with some such motto as, “Prudential Is Essential.”

Wrong. Happily wrong.

One of the most endearing things about this project is that it’s a little hard to find. Actually, you can easily sit on it by accident. Pardon me, madam, I didn’t realize you were an artwork.

Citicorp Plaza is owned by Prudential Insurance and located at the southwest corner of 7th and Figueroa. The forecourt of the building is marked by 10 low circular drums of polished stone that look a bit like massive truncated columns. Passers-by frequently rest their posteriors upon them. If they look down, they find the arts are supporting them. Surfaces bear rhymed words and pictures by artist James Surls and the renowned poet Robert Creeley. All 10 are nice but if you’re having a bad day, the one with a picture of a sailboat is particularly comforting. Its verse reads:

It’s not a

Final distance

This here

And now.

Elliptical presentation animates the experience. Every time someone bumbles across this work, a very public thing becomes intimate. It’s like spotting a magically attractive person in a crowd.

Hardly anyone will overlook “Corporate Head,” but it still surprises. Right next to the revolving entrance doors stands Terry Allen’s life-size bronze cast of an account-executive type with his hallmark briefcase. Looks perfectly normal except his head seems to have disappeared into the polished stone facade.

Philip Levine’s verse reads:

They said

I had a head

for business.

They said

to get ahead

I had to lose

my head .

They said

be concrete

& I became

concrete.

They said

go, my son,

multiply,

divide, conquer.

I did my best.

A corporation that makes serious fun of corporations is a real surprise.

Most of the work is located in Citicorp’s inner courtyard, where things are a bit more pastoral. On a ledge, pigeons contemplate a fried egg and sheets of paper by David Gilhooly. All bronze, of course. The inscribed verse is by Robert Mezey and the work is called, “Pigeons Acquire Philosophy & The Public Abandons Philosophy.”

You have to look twice to spot Joe Fay’s polished bronze silhouettes. Placed low on some pilasters, they’re collectively titled, “Natural Instincts” and depict a bird, cat and dog. One of Gary Soto’s verses says:

The business of stray dogs is to trot through rain,

Bark and roll on grass. They follow smoke and leaves .

They sleep on flowers, which each morning spring back .

Lovely, that.

George Herms’ structure for “Portal to Poetry” is as unpretentious as a Zen monk. It’s just a kind of four-winged bulletin board made out of old steel door frames topped by a rusty metal sphere and set into a foundation bearing the artist’s L O V E signature. One of Charles Simic’s verses tells us how to enter:

The door opens by itself

While you sleep.

All the keys you ever lost

All the rusty keys

Lie behind it unused.

The door opens by itself .

Hard-nosed art buffs may find all this a bit too easy, a bit too accessible. Well, the piece by Lawrence Weiner and Carolyn Kizer looks rather tough. It’s a big steel slab with macho bolts called “Overall.” On one side Kizer’s inscription reads, “Time Over / Over Time.” On the other it says, “Under & Over / Over & Under / & Under & Over / & Over & Under.”

What is this? Semiotics? Textual analysis? Gertrude Stein?

Nope. Just a description of the escalator.

What about “Walk Earth Talk” with stone tiles by April Greiman and words by Lucille Clifton? You have to look about 50 times to see this one. It’s set right into the pavement with one word on oblique insets, but not on every one. We just see occasional eruptions of, “Earth, talk, walk, here, hear, you, me, touch, us, hold.”

Perhaps an exercise in deconstruction?

Maybe, but when I saw it, a dad and his toddler son were having fun trying to make a sentence out of it.

“Poets’ Walk” is the brainchild of art consultants Kathy Lukoff and Helen Alameda Lewis, who deserve due credit for a project that goes a long way to solve a besetting problem. Ever since public art became popular, its sponsors have faced the nasty puzzle of how to keep it aesthetically respectable while giving its man-in-the-street audience something he can get a handle on. Is there an authentic middle ground between something as fine but alienating as Richard Serra’s ill-fated “Tilted Arc” and the amusing but kitschy figures of J. Seward Johnson?

This project proves there is. It gives a leg up to poetry--that most endangered of artistic species--and reminds a gluttonous art world where its real values lie.

Perhaps best of all, what we now see of “Poets’ Walk” is but the first phase of a three-part project. There’s more to come. It’s all enough to make one think that some corporations are more than heartless abstractions. It’s enough to make you suspect the existence of corporeal corporations.