By Janna Graham
Roving poets need not apply. Advertising, not poetry, pays OC Transpo’s bills.
Local poets are disappointed that poetry panels are being pulled from OC Transpo buses to make way for advertisements.
Transpoetry was a city wide poetry competition that attracted about 600 entries last year. Twelve Ottawa poets were selected by a jury to have their poetry printed and distributed on advertising placards on OC Transpo buses.
This public art initiative was a follow-up to a similar competition launched by the City of Ottawa and OC Transpo in 1999. Although the first round of poetry panels circulated for almost six years, the new poems rode the bus for a mere five months.
Faith Seltzer, a cultural planner for the City of Ottawa, says there isn’t a plan to renew Transpoetry for 2007.
She was, however, pleased to receive feedback from bus riders and poetry aficionados that noticed the vanishing bus poems.
“We need to relook at our resources and talk to our partners,” says Seltzer. “It is something that we do value and we will be looking at the future.”
Seltzer says Transpoetry is complex because it involves commitment and planning from various partners.
Canada Council for the Arts committed $9,500 to the project in 2006, but the biggest support came from Pattison Outdoor Advertising’s $85,000 in-kind donation of advertising space. Pattison is contracted by the city to find and fill ads for the placards on OC Transpo buses.
While Seltzer says that Pattison Outdoor Advertising will most likely recirculate some of the poems in February, Pattison isn’t making any commitments.
“When we require filler, we’ll use them, but there is no guarantee that they will stay up or down,” says Louise Dixon, Pattison’s general manager.
Dixon says that her company is swamped by paid advertisements that take priority over the poems. When asked about empty advertising spaces on many of the buses, Dixon blamed teenagers for stealing advertising placards, especially Ottawa Senators ads, from the buses to hang in their rooms or lockers.
When Michelle Desbarats, a 2006 Transpoetry winner, noticed the poems were no longer displayed, she was disappointed.
“I tried to console myself with the idea that maybe people were stealing our poems because they liked them so much!” joked Desbarats from her home in the Glebe.
“It’s been so gratifying to hear people talk about how meaningful poetry is to them,” says Desbarats. “Almost everybody can be touched by a thought or inspired by a phrase. Even someone you might think, it would be the last thing on their mind, sometimes the words go into their hearts.”
Desbarats says that a lot of work and energy went into choosing, designing and creating the 1,200 poetry panels that circulated in 850 OC Transpo buses.
“It really is disheartening to think of all the poems sitting in a warehouse somewhere.”
She adds that it’s not fair to blame teenagers for stealing panels.
Anita Lahey is a local poet that was commissioned in the 1999 run of Transpoetry.
She is also the editor of Arc, a national poetry magazine based in Ottawa.
“The Transpoetry idea, which happens in cities all over the world, is fantastic because it puts poems in the public and that doesn’t happen much otherwise,” says Lahey.
The idea of publishing poetry in a public space is almost 30 years old.
“On the Toronto TTC [subways], they are constantly updating poetry panels with contemporary and older poems,” says Lahey. “I don’t know why Ottawa can’t get it together.”