The Triumphant Return of New York City's Poetry in Motion

I know, I know. BillyBlog has been all but dormant. However, one thing has been able to dust off the cybercobwebs and get the old blog moving again - Poetry in Motion.

Readers of this blog in the past can attest to my love of the project and I bemoaned the end of it in NYC a few years back. Documenting the not-as-worthy Train of Thought series was less satisfying.

Imagine my excitement then, dear readers, when I saw this news item earlier in the week.

And then, I saw the first new poster yesterday on the D train:

Welcome back, Poetry in Motion!

GRADUATION

He told us, with the years, you will come

to love the world.

And we sat there with our souls in our laps

and comforted them.

This from the MTA website:

A painter, sculptor, printmaker, novelist, and memoirist, as well as the author of two books of poetry,

Dorothea Tanning was known as a ceaselessly inventive visual artist first inspired by the Dada and Surrealist 

movements of the 1930s. Taking to poetry only in her late 80s, Tanning, according to the Washington Post, 

jokingly dubbed herself “the oldest living emerging poet.” Her poems appeared in theParis Review, The 

New Yorker, and The Best American Poems of 2000. She published two volumes of poetry “A Table of 

Content” and “Coming to the That,” which The New Yorker called one of the best books of 2011.*Born in 

Galesburg, Illinois, she attended Knox College there. Tanning lived much of her life in Europe amongst a 

veritable pantheon of 20th century artists. She was married for 30 years to the painter Max Ernst and 

counted among her friends and sometimes collaborators such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Dylan Thomas, 

John Cage, and Andre Breton. Her late-blooming love of poetry was further confirmed in 1994 when she 

created and endowed the Wallace Stevens Award, which each year grants $100,000 to an American poet.

and

Artist Joan Linder created The Flora of Bensonhurst for the 71st Street subway station in Brooklyn.Best 

known for her labor-intensive drawings that transform mundane subjects into conceptually rich images, 

Linder has exhibited throughout the US and in Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Japan and Korea at venues 

including White Columns, NY; the Queens Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Albright-

Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Kunsthallen Brandts, Denmark; and the Gwangju Art Museum, Korea. Awards 

include residency fellowships at Smack Mellon Studios, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony; The Foundation 

of Jewish Culture’s Ronnie Heyman Award; and a grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation.*Born in 

New York, Linder attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received and MFA from 

Columbia University and a BFA from Tufts University. Linder is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies 

Studies the State University of New York at Buffalo, and is currently represented by Mixed Greens Gallery 

in New York City.