Imani Tolliver

Ode to the Commute
Local Poets Stage Rush-Hour Reading at Union Station
by Lea Lion

On Monday, April 30, Mike Casey was passing through Union Station when he stumbled across an unusual scene.

The bespectacled 30-year-old commutes roughly 30 miles from Los Angeles Community College to his home in Claremont four days a week. Usually he kills time during the more than half-hour wait between trains, but on this particular day he was crouched down against a curving marble wall listening to poetry.

In celebration of the last day of National Poetry Month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority collaborated with the Poetry Society of America for the latest installment of a program called Poetry in Motion. The event featured six local poets - Tony Barnstone, Elena Karina Byrne, Brendan Constantine, Teka Lark Lo, Rubén Martínez and Imani Tolliver - staging a live poetry reading during rush hour at Union Station.

The audience were the people who happened to be passing through the station. At an East Portal ticket booth, they included a young girl with a skateboard, a middle-aged woman in a police uniform and an older man in a light blue turban.

Each time a train arrived, a new batch of commuters flooded the atrium. Among the passersby were students, tourists and office workers. There was a boy with a shaved head and a woman whose high heels provided a beat for the poets as she passed. Occasionally, someone ducked out of the stream to stand against the marble wall for a few poems before rejoining the flow.

The poets sat in a semi-circle directly across from the culturally themed mural "City of Dreams/River of History." One by one, they approached a mic and wooden stool and launched into a poem of their choosing.

"Good afternoon travelers," Tolliver, a dreadlocked African-American poet dressed from head-to-toe in black, said. "It's really cool to be here in a train station because when I was in college I read a lot of poems on the train. First, I'd like to read a poem by Pablo Neruda, who is one of my favorite poets."

In addition to their own works, the poets read short pieces by Gwendolyn Brooks, Federico García Lorca and William Carlos Williams, among others.

Of course, Union Station is no library, and the poets knew that some of their words would get lost in the shuffle. But that is beside the point, said Byrne, who coordinated the poets for the Metro event.

"Most of these poems are very accessible and easily understood," Byrne said. "But even if the crowd didn't have the time to listen or understand the poem, they were able to get an experience of just the words washing over them."

Imani Tolliver was one of six poets who performed for rush-hour commuters in Union Station's East Portal to celebrate National Poetry Month on April 30. Photo by Gary Leonard.

The Human Story

Since its inception 10 years ago, Poetry in Motion has brought poetry to the public in many forms, including group performances on subway cars and one-on-one readings on buses. The program has also placed more than 60,000 poetry placards in trains and buses.

"Many cities have a Poetry in Motion program in their transit system, but nobody else has these live readings," said Maya Emsden, the director of Metro Art. "We just thought that was a really wonderful, immediate way of having transit customers meet poets."

The program connects poets and the public, but it also connects people to their inner poet, Byrne said.

"One of the benefits of this is that people will be reminded that the power of language is theirs," she said. "Communicating our thoughts about ourselves as human beings, our human story, is something that people recognize in these poems."

For regular riders like Casey, Poetry in Motion was a welcome break from the monotony of the daily commute.

"There should be more use of public space like this," he observed.

While most travelers rushed by the poets with confused looks on their faces, Casey knew he would miss a good thing if he did not stop.

On a recent trip to New York, he had come across a professional dance performance at Grand Central Station. He had also heard about concert violinist Joshua Bell's impromptu performance in a Washington, D.C., Metro station earlier this year.

"Nobody knew who he was," Casey said, "They even threw money into his violin case."

There is no telling who you'll bump into at a train station, he added.

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Contact Lea Lion at lea@downtownnews.com.
Page 24, 5/7/2007