Separated by oceans but equally inflamed by fires of creativity

At a monthly reading session in 1986, the group chuckles over the lovesick hero in As You Like It who puts up odes on trees. Quite suddenly, a member exclaims, “Why don’t we put up poems? Not on trees, but on the tube maybe?” Imagine her surprise when her impulsive letter to the Director, Transport for London (TFL), gets an official nod.

That is how, with friends and fellow poets Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert, novelist Judith Chernaik started selecting poems for the subway, editing anthologies of those poems for publication, holding poetry readings at train stations, parks and libraries. The response has been overwhelming. Commuters memorise a sonnet on the Piccadilly line, hum Paul McCartney’s melody for Thomas Dekker’s Cradle Song, smile at The Loch Ness Monster’s Song (Zgra kra gka fok! Grof grawff gahf?). Poets across the world support the movement which has now spread to cities from Shanghai to Sao Paolo.

Enchanted by the elegantly designed posters on my first visit to London, I wandered in the subway, hunting for poems on trains, and wondered: who could have thought up such a unique lighting scheme for the cavernous gloom? When a TLF officer disclosed that it was the brainchild of an American living in London, I made my way to Judith Chernaik’s home on Mansfield Road.

Over coffee and homemade apple pie, Judith explained that a hundred years ago, pastoral verses by Milton and Byron — printed below pictures of idyllic meadows — had advertised the joys of train travel! In wartime, patriotic lyrics bolstered flagging energy. However, to Chernaik, Herbert and Benson, poetry is the expression of truth, a stringent critique of culture. Their choice remains eclectic, featuring poets from across the world, ancient and modern, in a bewildering range of themes and styles. Hearing her children talking “fluent English” and “broken Kurdish,” a first generation immigrant asks herself, “Will I be a foreigner in my own home?” But Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare cries out against fear — “I sing of the beauty of Athens/without its slaves… I sing of a world reshaped”. Judith sums up, “Everything changes. But poetry shows us that our relationship with nature and fellow human beings does not change.”

“Yes, our oldest poets often sound most contemporary,” I laughed, and recited the famous Sangam poem, Englished by AK Ramanujan, with its striking erotic image of love in the mingling of “red earth and pouring rain.” Illustrated with my grandmother’s kolam, it became the first Tamil poem featured on the London Underground (2001). 

In 2011, I directed Subverse, a multi-genre theatre performance celebrating 25 years of Poems on the Underground. Why remind ourselves of the colonial heritage, you ask. But as we matched poems in English from the London Underground with poems we chose from 9 Indian languages, we discovered how pastoral landscapes exhilarated Marlowe and Shakespeare, just as they mesmerized Indian poets who sang endlessly of Brindavan.

Sun, moon, wind and rain inspired minds divided by oceans and centuries. Wonder infuses visions of both infant Krishna and baby Jesus. Ernest Dowson and Bahadur Shah Zafar share the same desolation. Chilean Neruda and Andhra’s Ismail are equally inflamed by the violent fires of creativity.

Akhila Ramnarayan, my actor/script writer, has another answer: “In 27 years, the ‘Underground’ collection has assembled eternal and everyday experiences across continents and cultures. To perform them is to assert that poetry is essential for human survival, healing and hope.” An Underground poster-poem says it all for me. “The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow/that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.”

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician, and journalist writing on the performing arts, cinema and literature.