The poems chosen to mark the 150th anniversary of the capital's tube system reflect both the history and diversity of London
It's quite a challenge to choose poems for display on the tube during the 150th anniversary year of London Underground. All our poems in the coming year will relate to London and its history, and many will be by London poets. We hope the poems will also reflect the city in its diversity, a refuge for exiles and immigrants and a beacon for visitors from all over the world.
Our first set of Poems on the Underground appears on the tube next week. It includes work by the young Ghanaian poet Nii Ayikwei Parkes and the distinguished Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison, as well as WB Yeats at 50 ("a solitary man, / In a crowded London shop"), all writing about aspects of London that might not be familiar to the average tube traveller.
Nii Parkes describes the longing of a Ghanaian youth for comradeship in a cold city indifferent to his plight: "With reluctance I accepted the faux / deafness and odd looks my Accra greetings / attracted, but I couldn't quell my deep / yearning for contact, warmth, recognition." Lorna Goodison writes about a Jamaican teacher forced to work as a charwoman in the West End: "She sings 'Jerusalem' to herself and / recites the Romantic poets as she mops hallways and / scours toilets."
Some tube travellers will relate to these experiences directly; others will see their city in a new way. Jo Shapcott's Gherkin Music and Connie Bensley's wry ode to the Northern line, Station, add their own contemporary notes to the general mix.
Wordsworth, too, will be appearing on the tube next week. Only a poet born and raised in the Lake District could describe London at dawn with the enthusiasm of his famous sonnet: "Earth has not anything to show more fair". Upon Westminster Bridge circled the tube in an earlier series of London poems; this time we chose lines from The Prelude describing the poet's impressions as a youth of 18, intoxicated by the city's ceaseless activity: "The river proudly bridged, the giddy top / And Whispering Gallery of St Pauls … Streets without end and churches numberless, / Statues with flowery gardens in vast squares."
Visitors, exiles, immigrants – these are among the voices we hope to offer the travelling public, along with the more familiar voices of native Londoners. I love to imagine Karl Marx, thrown out of every country in Europe, making his way from his Soho lodgings to his usual seat in the British Museum reading room, using government Blue Books to document the inevitable collapse of capitalism. His later follower, Bertolt Brecht, in flight from Nazi Germany, described his London experience in The Caledonian Market and Buying Oranges: "In yellow fog along Southampton Street / Suddenly a fruit barrow, and an old hag / Beneath a lamp, fingering a paper bag. / I stood surprised and dumb like one who sees / What he's been after, right before his eyes. / Oranges! Always oranges, as of old!"
London's underground, like the Paris metro and the New York subway, has always fascinated writers, both in its own right and as a metaphor for travel, transport, being underground, and emerging into the light. Ezra Pound's Japanese haiku, In a Station of the Metro, applies equally well to the tube: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough." In anthologies of prose and poetry about London, the obvious names recur: Dickens for prose, Betjeman for verse, Byron for satire ("A mighty mass of brick and smoke and shipping / Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye / can reach… A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown / On a fool's head – and there is London town!"). Blake, the quintessential London poet, writes as a biblical prophet raging against his own tribe: "I wander thro' each charter'd street, / Near where the charter'd Thames does flow / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe." This is probably too strong for the tube, but we might feature the visionary lines from Blake's Jerusalem: "The fields from Islington to Marybone, / To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood, / Were builded over with pillars of gold, / And there Jerusalem's pillars stood." One of the earliest London poems, attributed to the Scottish poet William Dunbar, is even more glowing: "London, thou art the flower of cities all!"
The city is large and various enough to contain multitudes, paradoxes, love and its opposite. It's exciting for us to find a Chinese dissident poet, Yang Lian, celebrating the Lee Valley, Hackney and Stoke Newington in Chinese, with English translations by half a dozen UK poets. ("Hackney is like a short Chinese verse" the poet writes – a thought that might surprise many Hackney residents.) It's moving to discover a novel-in-verse by the native Londoner Bernadine Evaristo, recreating the pilgrimages of her Nigerian father, Irish mother, and their ancestors. For poetry – especially English poetry – is global in its reach even when it celebrates the local and particular.
Cities across the world have started programmes similar to ours. Poems now appear on public transport in Paris, Barcelona and St Petersburg, Warsaw and Shanghai, São Paulo, New York and Toronto. London Underground has supported our own programme for more than 25 years. It's a simple idea that appeals to a wide swathe of the travelling public, an implicit contradiction of the assumption that poetry is an elitist art, the preserve of Milton's "fit audience, though few". The tube poems are popular because they offer an escape from the combined pressures of advertising and daily work. They invite the traveller to share the dreams and visions of another human being, speaking across time and place. The best poetry belongs quite naturally in a public space.
Judith Chernaik is the founder of Poems on the Underground.
