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The MTA's Poetry in Motion program, which features bits of poetry on the "Subtalk" posters in subway cars, has expanded its offerings to include quotes from history, philosophy, literature, and science. The Train of Thought first selections are quotes from Galileo, explaining the role of math in science and E.B. White, from his wonderful book Here is New York.
Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is in charge of choosing the extracts, and the MTA's Director of Marketing & Corporate Communications Alicia Martinez explained why the program was expanded, "New Yorkers have wide-ranging interests, and we felt that we could include material from a variety of other disciplines in addition to poetry to bring important, engaging, insightful quotes to our riders, and entice them to explore the author or subject further."
You can see some recent PiM poems here. One of the 2008 poems is from Grace Paley (PDF).
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I like this. Poetry, now prose. And the Galileo passage sounds as if he is intimately familiar with the subway himself.
I really like the poetry on the subway. I wish there were more of it. These quotations are nice too, I guess, but there's just something special about rolling the sounds of the lines inside your head as the train sidles along.
This so so much better than looking at the ads on the subway.
Screw this, we need more Dr. Z.
The last time there was "poetry" on the subway was during David Dinkins. Those were some awesome bombers.
word. Dr. zizmore helps keep your skin clean. seriously, I don't know who the fuck would ever use anything advertised on the subway. I personally think it's a bad thing to advertise on the subway.
What's striking about the Galileo quote is that he's wrong. Nature can be described (quantified, predicted) with mathematics, but the writing of its metaphoric book self-proceeds not through mathematics, a tool of sentience, but through the operation of The Innate Compellingness of the Intrinsic.