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Report: Poetry in Motion / Poésie en mouvement
Carole Beaulieu, Endre Farkas & Carolyn Marie Souaid
EF: It began in 1979. Tom Konyves, one of the Vehicule Poets, a very active group of Montreal poets, conceived of the ‘poems on the buses’ project. It was to have 10 anglophone and 10 francophone poets’ poems traveling on 500 buses. It was also the time of the language wars in Quebec. English signs were banned from public places or if they appeared, they had to be 30% smaller than the francophone sign. I guess size mattered. It was a time of passionate debate over the fate of the apostrophe. It was a time for thinking about language. It was a good time for the project. And the law did have the proviso that cultural events were exempt from the law. However, the ad company decided to err on the side of caution and the day before the launch, word came down that there were to be no English poems on the buses.
I remember working all night on picket signs about no English on the buses and preparing a press release which was leaked to The (Montreal) Gazette. They were supposed to sit on it until we started our manifestation; however, being newspaper people, they wanted to be the first with it and called Mayor Jean Drapeau’s office for a reaction. Now what conversation transpired between the mayor’s office and the ad company, I know only as hearsay. Apparently, when His Worship heard about the potential bad PR, he got on the phone and told the company to get the English on the bus. So when Louis Dudek, F.R. Scott and Tom and Ken Norris and I showed up with our picket signs, the bus company lackey was there—all smiles—telling us that we had misunderstood and if we stepped aboard, we’d see all the poems on the bus. Sure enough, there they were. And there they stayed for about a year. And when the bus driver assigned to the PR bus this year for the launch was told what the project was, he said “Ah oui, je me souviens des poèmes.”
The idea to do it again arose during a get-together meal a year ago when Tom, who now lived in Vancouver, came to town and Artie Gold, Stephen Morrissey, and I began reminiscing. We thought it would be a good idea to do something for the 25th anniversary of the project and the 25th anniversary of the The Vehicule Poets anthology. We came up with the idea that since the Vehicule poets had operated out of an art gallery and had been involved in multimedia projects, then we should have a ‘Vehicule Week’ consisting of an exposition, readings, performances and the poems on the buses again. Then Tom went back to Vancouver, Artie to his apartment, and Stephen to love, leaving me to try to get these crazy projects off the ground.
I don’t know whether I contacted the Societé de Transport de Montréal (transport commission also known as the STM) or Carolyn Marie Souaid first. I do remember e-mailing Carolyn about a new literary theory I was working on: ‘The Past Post-Modern Theory’. It’s the theory of using the past as the future and being past post-modern. And this project seemed to fit. And so I asked her to join the project.
CMS: I jumped on board almost without thinking. The idea of putting poems on buses seemed like a good way to give some visibility to poetry, which often gets short shrift on the literary playing field. It also seemed a good opportunity to knock it out of the ivory tower where it tends to reside, impenetrably, much of the time. The week Endre e-mailed his ‘Past Post Modern’ idea to me, I had been reading a statement Philip Larkin made back in 1955, an explanation for why he wrote poetry. Basically, what appealed to him, he said, was the idea of rescuing an experience from oblivion. His drive to freeze-frame snippets of existence seemed to jibe with my own motives for writing.
Certainly, this notion of immortalizing experience is neither new nor revolutionary. But add motion to the formula, tack on a vector, and see where it takes you. I began to visualize hundreds of tiny rescued moments, like satellites, shuttling through town. Occasionally, even, crisscrossing one another en route. Factor in the passengers, multitudinous, and all their heart-stopping moments. Suddenly, a single ride to work becomes a venue for colliding worlds—the poet’s world intersecting with the traveller’s world for a brief blink in time. I immediately connected with this notion of poetry as both intimate conversation between writer and reader, and dynamic, kinetic experience.
EF: We decided to time the event so that it would coincide with National Poetry Month. But I wanted it to be more than just a poetry event. I started to think of the bus project, not only as a literary event but as a conceptual piece as well: a site-specific installation or, to be more precise, an 800-site-specific installation. And this site-specific installation would be kinetic. Also, it would achieve what no individual poet or his/her books could—have an audience of thousands a day. I asked Carole Beaulieu, a visual artist, if she would be interested in designing the poster. Carole designed the cover of my book “From Here to Here” and she had done public installation projects.
CB: It was exciting to be given the opportunity to collaborate with poets and to once again place art in a public place. This time, though, the work would be in hundreds of public places at once, in constant motion, and would be exposed to a mass of viewers in continuous flux. The poems were given to me one or two at a time, over a few weeks. I began to take the poems with me on my almost daily bus rides, reading them, looking at the riders as potential readers, and examining the space inside and outside he bus. At first, Endre said that we would have an image for each poem, so I made a lot of sketches, giving each poem its own image while keeping a visual thread running through the series. When I learned that we could only afford one image for all the poems, I reversed the exercise, gathering in that thread, finding common ground among the poems. Still riding the bus everyday, mostly on one of my favourite cross-town streets, it seemed to me that Montreal architecture would make the most site-specific image, and would touch people on a physical level.
I have placed art in public places many times; sometimes the projects were clandestine (anti-arson grafitti, sheet music on the street, ice sculpture in the park) and sometimes the projects were official or at least organised (sculpture in a subway station and in a university campus, a few murals, one in support of the Innu of Labrador and another in support of the James Bay Cree). The artful dodger aspect of the clandestine work makes it really intense and memorable for the artist, but the work itself is ephemeral and rarely far-reaching. The more organised public projects, where someone takes care of permits and materials, are really an artist’s dream, with promises of respect and free rein (let’s hear it for artists being given the “means of production”!) No matter how well planned or official the projects are, though, there is always a point at which negotiations take a fairly ugly turn, where earlier intentions are questioned, and someone with power decides that one can’t really let artists do whatever they want, because it is just too frightening. This time, the poems—not the image—were put in question, and I was left alone to enjoy my work. Positions eventually shifted somewhat, and the project lived. As I ride the bus these days, I take great pleasure in re-reading these poems, some of which I now know by heart, and I am grateful to have been part of that reaching for beauty.
EF: The STM had extreme reservations about two of the poems: Tom’s “Into This Space” and Mohamud Siad Togane’s “Now That I’m Civilized.” Tom’s contained the word “orgasm” and Togane’s “fornication.” I guess you can’t fornicate or have an orgasm on a Montreal bus. But, seriously, neither was used in a way that was pornographic. However the STM felt that it had a responsibility to protect passengers from these words. I tried to convince them that there were ads a lot more provocative and with no redeeming social values on the buses. They responded by saying that those were paid for; saying, in essence, that if you pay the bill, then you call the shots. However, if you are a “cultural event” then you are dependent on the kindness of others. I asked Tom and Togane whether they wanted to fight this or consider other poems. They decided not to endanger the project and submitted other poems. I am not sure whether we did the right thing, but I appreciate their generous gestures.
In Montreal, to get funding from the city, you have to be a charitable / numbered organization. We weren’t, so we approached Blue Metropolis Foundation, which runs the annual International literary festival in Montreal. They agreed to take us under their umbrella. We applied for the grant. We also contacted the transport commission. They were also enthusiastic about the project and agreed to give us their public announcement space on 800 buses for a month. The money we got from the City was not enough for our grandiose twenty individual graphics plan.Within a short time, we were down to a single image for all the poems and thinking about cutting back on the print run.
We also learned from a friend at CBC -- always good to have friends at the CBC-- that Members of the National Assembly (provincial MNAs) had end-of-year money to spend. Carolyn was inspired to hit them up and while we were at it, bookstores, and publishers.
CMS: Inspired is a rather nice word for what I was actually feeling-- desperate. I knew that National Poetry Month would be upon usbefore we knew it, and with the time factor breathing down my neck, I felt pressured to branch out beyond the usual suspects for potential sources of funding. I thumbed through phone books and newspapers, trying to scare up a list of partners. In the excitement of the project, I left no stone unturned— I contacted department stores, pharmacies, micro-breweries, even dollar stores. At the same time, I felt ambivalent about the idea of marrying culture with corporate money. I hated the thought that donors might participate not because they believed in the project as a cultural step forward but because they knew they were going to get something from us in return—probably their corporate logo on the posters, a relatively inexpensive way to advertise. Meanwhile, in the eyes of the community, it would look as though they were selfless patrons of culture.
Frankly, it had never occurred to me to hit up our provincial politicians, but once that bee was put in my bonnet, I rounded up the names of every MNA whose geographical riding housed a Montreal bus route. While using private corporate money to subsidize public art left a bad taste in my mouth, it was infinitely easier for me to reconcile the idea of using the public purse to help get the poems on the road. Wasn’t it, after all, the people’s money, anyway? I counted on the fact that politicians would go for a little positive exposure.
Then Endre came up with an ingenious way to package the request. He called it ‘Adopt-a-Poet’. After calculating how much money we still needed to make the project a go and dividing it by the total number of participating poets—20—he came up with the round figure that we would ask for in our request letter. The idea was that for so many dollars, one could adopt-a-poet. What this succeeded in doing was to rein in the project, putting a more personal spin on it. Rather than simply sending us their cheque, sponsors could become a little more involved by choosing which poet they wanted to ‘adopt’, whose poster they wanted their logo on. In the end, two publishers, two bookstores, and three MNAs believed in the project enough to grant us funds.
And I can live with it. Because for me, the objective was Beauty, a momentary reprieve from all the dehumanizing effects of war and consumerism. I wanted the poems on the buses to give the commuter a breath of fresh air from the usual dose of visual pollution coming at him in the form of advertisements seducing him all day long to buy, buy, buy. Wallace Stevens defined poetry as “that which helps us live.” It was my hope that this sampling of poetry on the buses would afford Montrealers an opportunity to pause, reflect, take in a little food for the soul, get reacquainted with themselves. That on a small scale, this moving anthology would help people ‘live.’
EF: And the project lives on and keeps on rolling. After the launch at Paragraphe Bookstore, a number of us went to La Cabane (the local after-event hangout) and somewhere in the din after a few beers, we came up with the idea of a “Poem Spotting” contest. We thought that this would certainly make the event interactive. I announced in a mass e-mailing that the first person to spot all twenty poems would win a bus pass for a month. The competition would be run on the honour system with “spotting standings” posted on my website. Vanessa Landry, a college student, ended up tracking all twenty posters barely three weeks into the contest. Because commuters were so receptive to the project, the bus company decided to extend the run for an extra month, allowing poets attending June’s annual general meeting of the League of Canadian Poets an opportunity to experience poetry in motion. And, in October 2004, the posters were exhibited in a small town outside Trois-Rivières as part of the city’s prestigious Festival International de la Poésie. Last, but not least, the poems live on in this issue of Rampike. When we began, Carolyn and I had no idea of the myriad of directions this project would take. We encourage others to go for it. I think projects like this are important artistically, as well as socially. It is a way of reclaiming public space for the public and the arts. And being on the bus, we contribute to the quality of the ride.
-- May 2004
The poets on the buses were:
Martine Audet, Jean-Paul Daoust, Claude Beausoleil, Hélène Dorion, Élise Turcotte, Denise Desautels, Émile Martel, Jacques Brault, Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, Ruth Taylor, Artie Gold, Ken Norris, Mohamud Siad Togane, Claudia Lapp, Stephanie Bolster, Stephen Morrissey, Tom Konyves, Endre Farkas, and Carolyn Marie Souaid.
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Carole Beaulieu, Endre Farkas & Carolyn Marie Souaid. "Report: Poetry in Motion / Poésie en mouvement." Ampersand. Ed. Carolyn Marie Souaid. Montreal: Editorial Poetas de América. May 2, 2006.
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