The Poems in the Subway campaign was launched on September 26, aiming at promotion of contemporary poetry. Its core activity is posting of Polish poems in the capital’s subway stations, from the classics Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Tadeusz Rozewicz and Zbigniew Herbert to the talented youths, such as Jacek Dehnel and Krzysztof Siwczyk. It will be accompanied by meetings with authors, haiku (short poem) competition, theater-going poets’ festival Spoke’n’Word on Tour, and seminars on preparation for slam tournaments. Simultaneously, the poems appeared on the walls of the Dynamo stadium, one of the Mariinsky park walkways, and the walkways that connect the Red Building of the Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University to the university’s botanical garden. In addition, the campaign’s organizers plan to arrange a video flash mob event for Kyivans that would go on online even after the project itself would move on to Beijing, Tokyo, Brussels and Luxembourg.
The campaign was conceived by the Book Institute in Warsaw and the British Council and motivated by similar campaigns that had taken place in Dublin, Paris, New York, Barcelona, Stockholm, Stuttgart and Moscow. The Poems in the Subway campaign was organized under the auspices of Warsaw’s mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz and Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski on the occasion of Poland’s presidency in the Council of the European Union.
“Due to the fact that Poland currently holds the EU Council Presidency,” the director of the Polish Institute Jaroslaw Godun says, “we have organized a special program in ten capitals, including Ukrainian one. We are glad that more than 100 events are projected to be held in Kyiv. Actually, the campaign in question is only one of them. Obviously, we are delighted when high art appears in the public space.”
By the way, chief manager of the Kyiv subway Volodymyr Fedorenko informed us that his company carried 1.6 million passengers per day.
“The subway is primarily associated with immense throngs of people,” poet Wojciech Bonowicz says. “All of them are moving according to their predetermined routes. I hope that quite a few of them will put that hurry-scurry aside for a minute and read a poem, for that hurry-scurry is death, while we, the artists, are promoting life.”
“There are a lot of signs in the subway,” he continues. “One of them reads ‘Do not lean!’ But they still lean. Yesterday, for example, I saw a pair of lovers who leaned and clung to each other so tightly that the rest of the world meant nothing for them. Apparently, they did not need poetry. But the rest of us do need it, of course.”
