This essay is the third in a series for National Poetry Month on Pittsburgh’s literary history and the role of poetry in public published in conjunction with the International Poetry Forum.
Every few years, a local paper publishes a piece reminding Pittsburghers that the city does not, in fact, have the most bridges in the world (or even the country—or even the state). Every time, it breaks my heart. As with many Yinzers, I grew up hearing various versions of the faux superlative—“Pittsburgh is third in the world after Paris and Venice;” “Pittsburgh is first in the world, since the Parisian bridges are outside city limits”—which are still circulated as truth by some tour guides and politicians. Pittsburgh’s bridges are, of course, essential to its identity, and I often find myself telling visitors that the claim “Pittsburgh has more bridges than any city in the world” is spiritually (if not factually) true.
In my own role at the International Poetry Forum, a soon-to-be-sixty-year-old nonprofit organization, my professional concerns include spreading the good word about Pittsburgh’s other (factually true) literary superlatives. In last week’s article, I expanded Mona Van Duyn’s insight to argue that Pittsburgh has maintained (very likely) the only consistent tradition of reviewing poetry readings in the country. One other superlative I am keen to highlight—and one that’s a bit harder to pin down—is that Pittsburgh invented the tradition of featuring poetry on public transportation.
Over the past two years, I have asked dozens of colleagues across various literary professions to guess the oldest poetry-on-the-buses program in the country. In every instance, the answer was either “no clue” or “Poetry in Motion,” the national transit project that launched in 1992 as a collaboration between the MTA New York City Transit and the Poetry Society of America.
But in this case, Pittsburgh did do it first—back in 1974. The vision was to bring poetry to the public in the most unpretentious way possible—to make poetry a part of the city’s infrastructure, placing poems in place of ads on 200 city buses. Initially launched as “PAT Rhythms,” this collaborative project brought together funding and support from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University Press (formerly Three Rivers Press), the University of Pittsburgh Press, the International Poetry Forum, and local poets and artists.
The second iteration of the Pittsburgh project launched in 1976 as “Poetry on the Buses,” with Philadelphia following our lead. By 1978, Carnegie Mellon began receiving funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to expand nationally, reaching cities from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. The project expanded to two dozen cities by 1980 and eventually moved from Carnegie Mellon to Chatham University (then Chatham College), reaching a projected sixty million people each year. The poetry placards featured poets like Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore alongside artists like Andy Warhol.
The Pittsburgh-born project, in all its iterations, was a hit. One article from Allentown’s The Morning Call (Nov 2, 1980) even remarked (with bafflement) that “for some reason, the graffitists don’t deface the poetry.”
After “Poetry on the Buses” fizzled out, a variety of spiritual successors followed. These included Pittsburgh’s own iteration of “Poetry in Motion” in 1996; the “Greater Pittsburgh Poem Chase,” sponsored by Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, Carnegie Library, and Sun Crumbs in 2001; and the “I Am Too Pittsburgh” poetry contest in 2019. This tradition has also encompassed projects like City of Asylum’s “House Poem” (2004), one of Pittsburgh’s many efforts to bring poetry to the public in a permanent fashion.
Pittsburgh has long been a leader in featuring poetry in public, and yet this fact is far from common knowledge. In 2019, KDKA ran a piece highlighting a new poetry-on-the-buses project, which began: “Poetry on PAT buses. It will be a first in the city of Pittsburgh and possibly a first nationwide.” The claim was half a century off, but (likely) factually true: the practice of poetry on public transit in this country seems to have been born in Pittsburgh.
I hedge because this is an almost impossible claim to prove. Were there poetry postings on omnibuses in New York in the 1820s? If anyone has information to that effect, I’m actively on the hunt. In the meantime, our talented students interns (thank you, Shanti!) have not yet uncovered an earlier origin. In any case, this is a superlative that, like the bridges, should live in Pittsburgh’s cultural heart.
All images courtesy of the collection of Diane Samuels and Henry Reese.
