SUBWAY POETRY

The essence of the project was to adorn the stations and train cars with quotations from, or even lengthy rhymed texts of, mostly French poets. Of course, only where there is still space left free of advertising or next to the ads or even mixed with them. After all, advertisement is nothing but the poetry of our day. The poetry of sound teeth, dry sanitary napkins, quenched thirst, flying cars, and fresh smells. A little degraded poetry of total consumerism. But so much for that. I mean here poetry in the traditional sense.

Statistics knows how many people descend daily into the underground of, say, Paris. Statistics do not know but can only guess how many millions of these are not, or do not want to be, interested in poetry. But most of them, as a rule, spend 5-10 minutes on the platform waiting for a train. The time is filled with a stupid scrutiny of the interior and chance fellow travelers (of both sexes), with flash-like flirtations, half-grins, and, of course, involuntary reading of graffiti. Incidentally, one might read a stanza by Rimbaud, a calligramme of Apollinaire, or a line from PrОvert. And something might even make somebody twinge and respond. Thus the subway is transformed into a most democratic poetic reading room. You catch on the run, in the corner of your eye, Paul Гluard's two words woven in chimerical fashion into a verse, and poetry hits and breaks into your life, stopping you in your tracks.

The Parisian idea was picked up in other cities endowed with, and punished by, the subway. Last fall in Toronto, the man next to me drew my attention to the fact that the subway car we were riding in was decorated with the verses of a young author. This was part of a town hall project to encourage poetic beginners. Before their first book comes out, they can get published - literally! - in the subway. This has a substantial advantage of its own: the print-run of such a publication may be measured by the millions. Poetry is mutual understanding.

The Moscow town hall does not lag either. It immediately picks up what the West invents and adjusts this to its own, mostly political, requirements. This also carries poetry, although with a more pronounced patriotic load. The papered-over verses should be about love of Moscow. As reported by an independent informant, a certain Nikolai Vinnik decided on April 1 to stick alternative poetic lines to subway walls. The surfaces were adorned with the lines by well-known maverick Vsevolod Nekrasov ("death was caused by our life in the world, and the immediate cause of death was that we lived in Moscow") and a no less well-known classic Aleksandr Griboedov ("Away from Moscow! I no longer belong here!").

Kyiv most often begins for me with the subway. Early in the morning, the Railway Terminal subway station, horror and excitement. The endless human lines for pass-through counters (Ukraine on the march), crammed cars, squelching mud underfoot. A situation pregnant with non-stop conflicts and trivial squabbles. But why pregnant? It gives birth to these every other minute! Luggage carriers named after Kravchuk and Kuchma, the police, the squeals of country women wearing soldiers' overcoats, the jammed turnstiles, the chock-full escalators, bustling and buffeting, walking over dead (drunk) bodies, and gnashing teeth. Starting from the subway alone, I begin to feel I hate Kyiv. It is here that you understand how sick the city is and how neglected its ailments are. It is not strange that the poet Neborak once dreamed precisely in the subway that his reflection in a car window was being cut to pieces by cables on the wall, and his severed head spins in free tunnel flight.

I would like to decorate these walls with verses. Pavlo Tychyna would be appropriate: "Wiped out a hundred times, Kyiv still stands." Or a paraphrase of Andriy Malyshko: "How can I bomb you out, my Kyiv?" However, I should not joke like this. All the same, it is still our capital!