A Moving Experience : Poetry: New Yorkers love a program that posts verses in public buses and subways. Now other cities, including San Diego, may follow suit.

In a society where Howard Stern’s innermost thoughts top bestseller lists for weeks on end and Danielle Steel triumphs over Jane Austen, the success of Poetry in Motion in this city’s subways and buses is a pleasant surprise for the literary minded.

“You don’t expect Americans to become so moved and so excited by poetry,” says Elise Paschen, director of the Poetry Society of America. “But it turns out that they’re just gulping it down.”

Soon others in St. Louis, San Diego and the Pioneer Valley north of Springfield, Mass., will be able to read Emily Dickinson en route to work:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops at all. . . .

Such stanzas have appealed to an unusual mix of people, says Neil Neches, the New York Transit Authority’s coordinator for the program. For example, a nun received copies of the posters for a home for the elderly. A 16-year-old girl called to say one poem had inspired her to write a story her teacher thought was good enough for publication. A minister used one in a Sunday sermon.

Neches says he receives letters and phone calls from commuters every day, thanking him for a break from signs offering a solution to drug addiction or foot pain.

“This morning I read Robert Frost’s ‘The Armful,’ ” began one letter from Brooklyn. “I have been juggling and preparing to juggle a lot of responsibilities lately--my wife is pregnant and I am in a new job--so the poem spoke to me as both a metaphor and as literal truth.”

Poetry in Motion is “finding culture where you usually find misery, trash and indifference,” says Mary Dietz, who has a doctorate in English. Dietz says she will use Poetry in Motion as an example of how businesses can incorporate the arts in everyday life in “The Metropolitan Experience,” a course she teaches at New York University.

Since October, 1992, the transit authority has selected works by Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore and other well-known poets with help from the Poetry Society of America. The poems are printed on placards and displayed inside the city’s 6,000 subway cars and 3,700 buses. Fresh verses replace the old ones every five or six weeks.

Interest in offering poetry to the masses is sprouting nationwide, inspired by the effort here.

“Poetry could give riders something to think about, something unusual,” says Emily Blumenfeld, community program coordinator for Arts in Transit, a group that serves as both architect and interior decorator for the new MetroLink train system in St. Louis. “We don’t want people to say ‘yuck,’ ” she says.

Blumenfeld plans to solicit help from the International Writers Center at Washington University and the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club in East St. Louis.

“They know a lot more about poetry than I do,” she concedes. While the poetry is likely to be donated, Blumenfeld hopes the Missouri Arts Council will agree to pay production costs.

A city council member is promoting the idea for San Diego’s trolleys and buses.

“It seemed like a natural to me,” says Ron Roberts, who serves on the city’s Metropolitan Transit Development Board. “We want to recognize famous poets, but also give local people a chance to be published.”

The board wants to have local businesses underwrite the costs of the program, scheduled to start in March, Roberts adds.

An English doctoral student returned home after a visit here with the urge to bring Poetry in Motion to western Massachusetts, where there is a five-college consortium. “It’s not an urban center, but it’s an intellectual center,” says Elizabeth Bachrach Tan, who is finishing her dissertation at the University of Massachusetts, one of the five schools linked by bus in the Amherst area.

Tan was on a subway when Galway Kinnell’s “Blackberry Eating” caught her eye. “I was there at the time of the Long Island Rail Road killings,” Tan recalls. “And it was wonderful to encounter Poetry in Motion at such a bleak moment.

“I hope people here see that it can be valuable and enriching for the community,” she says. First, she must find sponsors of a program that would give 20,000 daily bus riders an alternative to advertising.

Although reading during travel is nothing new, an excerpt from John Keats or Adrienne Rich can offer a different kind of respite from the daily grind.

“With all the problems we’re having, I’m not going to say this will change the world,” Roberts says. “But it can make an otherwise monotonous routine a little more positive.

“To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words.’ Even politicians can learn something from poetry.”