(Transit)ory Poetry

It's with my great pleasure that Bob Stanley, president of the Sacramento Poetry Center, has lately been presenting me with a lot of creative projects. They've allowed me to put my design skills to good use in support of the literary arts. One project involves putting poetry placards into Sacramento Regional Transit buses.

Poems on Transit isn't a new idea. The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, for example, calls their project Poetry in Motion. In London, Poems on the Underground has been putting poems on subway trains since 1986. (According to their website, Poems on the Underground has been the inspiration for similar programmes around the world: in Dublin, Adelaide, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, Sydney, Barcelona, Athens, Moscow, St. Petersburg and most recently Shanghai.) And it's been done before in Sacramento. Several years ago, the Sacramento Poetry Center initiated a brief project to put poems on buses. Now, Bob Stanley wants to see SPC do it again.

While Bob works on sponsors, funding and RT approval, he's asked me to create a few mock-ups of what the poetry placards might look like. What you see pictured here are preliminary; a starting point towards creating the basic look, with each poem used getting its own unique design while the boilerplate information about the poetry center and sponsors along the bottom stays the same from placard to placard. Bob suggested Ezra Pound's In a Station of The Metro as a "test" poem something to build a first version around. I included a design that features Jack Spicer's First Catch the Rabbit to provide an alternative design. (We presently have permission to use neither in widespread use.)

Anyway, a taste of what I hope becomes a successful Sacramento Poetry Center literary-art-in-public-places project.

Pictured placards are 11" tall and 17" long. (RT permits placards as long as 28".) On the print version, and not clearly depicted here, the placards have a half inch white border. There's a glaring error in Mr. Spicer's poem. "if your going to build..." should, of course, read "if you're..."

APR 15 | poetry | Random Abiladeze

Random Abiladeze
Poetry Night at Bistro 33
Wednesday, April 15

Featuring a rare Open Mic poetic performance by poet Traci Gourdine.

Random Abiladeze (pronounced “Abilities”) is a 24 year-old Hip-Hop Artist and Spoken Word Poet from Sacramento whose work has been honored by the Hip-Hop Congress, a Grassroots International cultural arts organization. His debut CD with fellow artist Prozak Morris – under the name T.O.P. (The Other Poets) – was released in December.

Random won the 2008 Battle of The Bay Poetry Slam at Stanford University and Sacramento State University’s Word of Conscious Action Poetry Slam, was voted Youth Speaks Male Poet of the Month for October 2007, and is a two-time champion of the Got Spit! Poetry Slam, hosted by the Sacramento Chapter of the Hip-Hop Congress. He has also won several rap competitions on such radio stations as 102.5 (KSFM) and 103.5 (KBMB). He has performed at the California State Capitol, the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, Stanford University, the Mondavi Center, and numerous other locations in California.

Poetry Night at Bistro 33, in Davis, hosted by Andy Jones and produced by Brad Henderson, occurs on the first and third Wednesday of every month beginning at 9 P.M. with a 10 P.M. open mic. Please arrive early to ensure seating.