From now until the end of June, passengers on various MTD buses around Champaign-
Urbana will have more than just advertisements to look at while on their daily

commutes.

Champaign­Urbana Mass Transit District has announced that it will display public poetry

on its 40­foot buses from April 1 through June 30 in collaboration with the Champaign-
Urbana Poetry Group for a public art project honoring National Poetry Month in April.

“(The project is) really a product of MTD’s commitment to partnering with community

organizations in a variety of ways, and working with the Champaign­Urbana Poetry

Group was a great way to share public art, which we’ve done in the past with our

support of the Public Sculpture Program,” said Jan Kijowski, marketing manager at

MTD.

MTD has supported public art in the past by collaborating with other local arts and

culture organizations, such as 40 North.

According to Kijowski, MTD and 40 North solicited artwork from local artists, featured

four artists every three months and displayed the winners on buses and in the Illinois

Terminal lobby. However, this is the first year the C­U Poetry Group has been added

into the picture.

James O’Brien, organizer of the C­U Poetry Group, was the first to reach out to MTD

with the idea of bringing poems to the community in hopes of giving poetry a higher

profile.

“I knew that MTD has been doing a program called ‘MTD Art’ for a couple of years,”

O’Brien said. “So as soon as I saw the first (40 North winner), I thought, ‘We have to get

poems on the bus’ and ‘How are we going to do it?’”

C­U Poetry Group decided to hold a contest encouraging submissions from residents of

the C­U area. The contest ran for three to four weeks and received 20 submissions. It

was open to people of all ages. The poems had to be written in English and had to be

appropriate, and all poems had to have a maximum of eight lines.

“I emailed all of the high school English teachers I could find and had it announced

heavily on Facebook and Twitter. I even put an ad on Craigslist,” O’Brien said. “We just

promoted it as much as we could around town, directing people to do it.”

The three judges, who are part of the C­U Poetry Group — Will Reger, Steve LaVigne

and O’Brien — evaluated the poems for their content, picked their top five favorites and

chose one winner from there.

Ann Hart, research coordinator for the University, was chosen as the winner of the

contest. Hart is coincidentally a member of the C­U Poetry Group and said poetry has

always been a favorite pastime of hers.

“(O’Brien) had brought it up several times in the group’s meetings and had done the

advertising for it,” Hart said. “So it was definitely something we were talking about.”

Hart said her inspiration for the eight­line poem came from her past experience on

public transportation.

“The idea that we sit on these buses and try so hard not to look at people around us

because we don’t want to seem rude or intrusive, but we all do, right? You can’t help it,”

Hart said. “You have to look at the people there, and it gives you something to look at

when they look back at you and you have to quickly look away.”

Both MTD and C­U Poetry Group have hopes of continuing this project annually and of

opening the contest for a longer amount of time to allow more entries.

“It has the benefit of making a pleasant riding environment for our customers,” Kijowski

said. “You get to share in the poetry and enjoy the creativity of our local residents.”

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