Featured Member Project

Featured Member

King County, WA, Metro buses display poems written by local poets as part of Poetry on Buses.  Photo courtesy of 4Culture.

Public art has a unique ability to reflect a community. The attitudes, heritage, humor, or spirit of a community comes alive in public places through paintings, sculpture, text-based works, or electronic media. This mirror image is often a product of involving community members in selection panels or as part of design review. In some cases, however, the connection is deeper, stemming from the roots of the community itself. That is the case with Poetry on Buses, a biannual project of 4Culture, the cultural services organization of King County, WA, located in Seattle. Started in 1992, Poetry on Buses was conceived to acknowledge the region’s many readers and writers. It features poems submitted by local poets—amateur and professional, student and adult—posted throughout the King County Metro bus fleet.

This year the Poetry on Buses program received a record 3,000 submissions. After 15 years, 4Culture reports that the program has reached a tipping point of community ownership. The recent 2007 Poetry on Buses Launch Party and Reading filled the historic Moore Theatre in downtown Seattle with over 625 poets, supporters, enthusiastic poetry lovers.

All 55 of the selected poems were written on this year’s theme—dreams. Many different poets, and many different ideas, but each one has the ability to transport people out of their daily commute and into another world. Some ponder sleep, others dreams for a better life, and for others, the bus ride itself.

WE ARE THE BOBBLEHEADS
By Candace Jarrett
We sleepy bus riders have such small desires:
a window seat, the hope of no unfortunate sounds.
We drowse upright,uptight,nod and bob next to strangers.
Here, friends would be beloved and so useful.
We’d lean on them, sleep and dream we’re
cephalic toys for sale at Archie McPhee.

Imagine reading this poem on a Monday morning commute to work, empathizing with the author’s weariness, seeing a bobblehead or two sitting a few seats away, and feeling warmed by the thought that you are not so different than your neighbors. As 4Culture puts it, “The bus is a unique public space—never the same/always the same, mundane/alive with character—a space where, for a short while, all of us share a common direction.”