Started in 1992, Poetry in Motion was a partnership between the Poetry Society of America and the MTA New York City Transit Authority. It replaced ads in buses and subways with poems.
The program spread to 14 U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Over 13 million people were exposed to the poems daily.
The goal of Poetry in Motion was to make riding public transportation enlightening and more enjoyable. Educational facilities and nonprofit organizations are given free poster representations of the Poetry in Motion placards.
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation primarily supported Poetry in Motion. Donations from local and regional transit authorities also funded the programs.
Unsolicited poetry was not accepted. Rather, the Poetry Society of America, along with local transit authorities, periodically discussed possible poems and selected the ones that ultimately appeared.
Poetry in Motion inspired local artists to create visual representations of the lines they read during their commutes. Cinematic, photographic and other artistic interpretations of the poems were made, including a mural still on display in New York's 149th Street subway station.
The first four poems that launched the program were "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by Walt Whitman, "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson, "When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats and "Let There Be New Flowering" by Lucille Clifton.