A Turn fo the Verse

Susan Martin has been a publicist for 20 years and always nurtured a small fantasy that someday she’d get a client who would say, “Please keep my name out of the press.”

“You know, like the first family, or someone really famous,” she said. “I wondered what that would be like.”

Now she knows. A month ago such a client walked through her door. Actually, it was a group of clients, although Martin will not be specific about the size.

Calling themselves Poets Anonymous, the visitors announced their plans to give a gift to the city of Los Angeles.

For the month of January they wanted to place 60 billboards with poetry excerpts at high-profile locations around the city. The idea, they explained to Martin, was to use the medium of billboards for something meaningful--for art.

“The billboards are an antidote to the commercial spectacle that bombards all of us as we travel around the city,” Martin said.

They were hiring Martin to publicize the project, but they insisted on anonymity.

“I was very surprised,” Martin said. “I’ve never met a group of people who didn’t want publicity.”

Her clients are not stipulating anonymity because they are celebrities, she added. “They’re just down-to-earth people who love poetry and want to share it.”

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One day last week, Martin was sitting in her office, a cubicle tucked behind the Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station, a complex of art galleries and related businesses. And though she showed up for the interview wearing a Lone Ranger mask to dramatize the spirit of anonymity, she was happy to talk about poetry as public service announcement.

(However, she was not going to spill any information about the cost of this artistic undertaking.)

She loves the idea that billboards might provide a kind of instant window for reflection.

“This is material I understand right down to the core,” she said. “I think all art is political and ultimately has the power to elevate us and change our minds, if you will. The Buddhists believe there is a bardo, a pause where change is possible.”

The Poets Anonymous were not people she’d known before: “Someone who knows us all recommended we speak to one another.” But Martin, who specializes in fine arts and popular culture, finds it a happy partnership.

“I like the cutting edge of culture and the way this project interfaces with society. If I look at my own history, I see this is the kind of thing I do well. “

Martin is managing editor of Smart Art Press, which, like Track 16 Gallery, is owned by TV producer and art collector Tom Patchett, who focuses on flamboyant avant-garde pieces that clang, gong and glow.

“We’ve published more than 50 books and catalogs and other weirdness,” she said.

She also has her own public relations business. She shares her small office with her assistant, Danielle Lesniewski, and dog, MacArthur, a terrier-collie who sits in on all the meetings and is “an important part of the operation, very busy.”

Martin is working on a book about Winnie-the-Pooh with performance artist Karen Finley, and other projects have included the Long Beach Opera and architectural photographer Julius Shulman’s new book on Los Angeles for Taschen Books.

“I like people who are doing it their own way,” she noted. She serves on the board of the Santa Monica Museum of Art and gives her time pro bono to certain groups, but that’s not what was asked of her by Poets Anonymous.

“This is not a nonprofit organization,” she said.

And although she was hired on short notice, the sponsors had put a lot of care into selecting both the poetic excerpts and the billboard locations, she said.

The poets chosen for the billboards are Charles Bukowski, Lucille Clifton. e. e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Helene Johnson, Pablo Neruda, Wallace Stevens and Mark Strand.

Poets Anonymous had hoped all 60 would appear on New Year’s Day, in a spontaneous flowering; however, the appearance has been more sporadic. Most of the billboards have now sprouted.

The chosen excerpts (“very interesting, very curatorial,” noted Martin) offer a range of succinct images, from psychic aggression to serenity. But all are arresting. For instance, driving east on Beverly at Poinsettia, one can read:

like an eyelid held open hideously

I am watching.

--Neruda

Or at Florence and Raymond:

You are too splendid for this city street.

--Johnson

Driving east on Sunset at Occidental:

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

--Eliot

The billboards are white on black, to emphasize the impact of the words.

“It’s something to change the day a little bit as they zoom around the city in their cars,” Martin said.

“I want to give full credit to these people. It was not my idea. I am delighted that I can communicate, in some small way, what they were after. It took a lot of groundwork. They did all the research to make sure the billboards covered every part of the city and bought the space. It was a huge, huge task.”

Considering that U.S. outdoor advertising has become a $1.1-billion-a-year behemoth, can a handful of billboards make a dent in commuter consciousness?

David Stewart, chairman of USC’s marketing department, doubts it. Billboards aren’t the most effective medium for inspiration, he said.

“They tend to be a good medium for reminders, but not for getting people to think deeply, because we pass them so briefly,” he said. “Nevertheless, they might raise some general awareness.”

And if they do, it will be at a premium, he said, noting that billboard prices probably run between $10,000 and $20,000 per location.

“It’s not something one would do lightly,” he said.

Social critic David Shenk, author of “Data Smog” (HarperCollins, 1997), thinks the promise of an “antidote” to commercialism is a shade optimistic: “A real antidote to all those commercial billboards is blank space, or silence, or trees.”

However, he salutes the poetry as an interesting experiment.

“Probably the most important thing about them is they’re not trying to sell you something. Presuming this is not some hidden marketing ploy,” he said, suddenly doubtful. “Could they all be poets with the same publisher?”

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To the poetry community, something beats nothing.

“I think having the poetry excerpts on billboards is a wonderful idea,” said Elena Karina Byrne, regional director here of the Poetry Society of America. “They inspire us to think.”

The society sponsors a Poetry in Motion campaign that has placed poems on placards in public transportation, from subways in New York to MTA buses in Los Angeles and Big Blue buses in Santa Monica. The local effort is financed by the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities.

“We discussed billboards, but the cost was enormous,” she said.

She thinks Poets Anonymous did a good job of selecting a range of poets, including period, voice, race, gender and diversity in linguistic style. Byrne also approves of the quote chosen for each poet.

“I think they’re terrific,” she said. “They have that sort of colloquial combination of metaphor and wit: Each one is a little snippet of what keeps us alive.”

Martin, who’s a poetry lover herself, said promoting her anonymous clients is an easy job.

“This is one of the most altruistic projects I have done, and also one of the most fun,” she said.

As for the critics, she and Poets Anonymous can point to a Wallace Stevens quote, now gracing six Los Angeles intersections:

After the final no there comes a yes

And on that yes the future world depends.