By: Jonah Lazar, SFU Student
On September 20, poets and poetry enthusiasts gathered to celebrate this year’s selection of poems for the Poetry In Transit program as part of the conclusion of the Word Vancouver Festival, which had been running since September 14. This event took place at Robson Square, where, between a cacophony of car alarms, fire trucks, and noises of the downtown, the ten poets selected for this year’s edition read a few of their poems to a crowd of about fifty keen onlookers.
Poetry in Transit is a program that aims to showcase local poets to Vancouver’s thousands of transit users, as well as to bring a touch of artistry to the local public transport scene by featuring a collection of poetry in the advertising spaces on SkyTrains and buses. It also aims to support small BC-based publishers by celebrating the authors with whom they work. The program, which has been up and running since 1996, is brought to life by the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, in partnership with TransLink and BC Transit, and has helped display hundreds of poems over its nearly three decades of activity.
Curating this event was Vancouver’s Elee Kraljii Gardiner, a renowned poet and author of Trauma Head and Serpentine Loop, who also serves on the board that selected the poems to be featured as part of this year’s Poetry in Transit.
Also present at the event was the Poetry Bus — a bus lent to the event organizers by the City of Vancouver with all of the selected works proudly displayed along its advertising spaces. Onlookers and passersby stopped by the parked bus to get a sneak peek at the selected poems, which will soon be displayed on most of the buses in the city over the coming weeks.
This year’s poems cover a wide variety of topics, with Vancouver-relevant themes such as the rain, rock climbing, and, of course, riding public transit. One poem I found especially moving was Susan Alexander’s book Berberitzen, which deals with themes of grief and loss of a loved one in the wake of personal tragedy. The line from one of the poems, “Our leaving out the deck furniture was optimistic / for encounters that will not come. Cushions sodden,” particularly resonated with the onlookers at the event.
For me however, the most captivating poem present in this year’s launch is a wonderfully constructed poem from the book Devotional Forensics, written by former Deer Lake Artist-in-Residence Joseph Kidney, which, through imagery of birds circling beneath seaside cliffs, asks the reader to confront their own mortality. This poem, through its uneven line structure and scattered perspective, commands the reader’s attention.
Next time you are on the jam-packed 145 after an evening class or an empty R5 at dawn, be sure to check between the mosaics of advertisements on their ceilings for these brilliant poems.
