Kerouac, the Intangibilty of Poetry, and An Examiniation of the MTA's Infamous Heaven Poem

In looking for religious artifacts in New York, the main thing we seem to find is attempts at the miraculous or the beautiful in the mundane: the mural in a poor neighborhood, the cross on the sidewalk. It is fascinating to examine this cross-section of secularism and religion in the world around us. On a trip up to Spanish Harlem, I found some beautiful imagery: run-down churches, fruit sellers, bustling people playing great tunes outside. But it was on the subway, far Uptown, that I re-examined something I've seen a lot: the MTA's use of poetry in its subway, specifically the "Heaven" poem, written by Patrick Phillips, installed on many trains. It is a little different from something spotted on the street, but this is the first time I had really stopped to think about the poem, its connotation, its setting, and its irony.

The MTA's Poetry in Motion campaign, launched in 1992, is not by any means an awful idea. Poetry is a nice thing. Reading a poem on your commute can be wonderful; there is something inherently spiritual and intangible about poetry, the way it sits in the mind and comes off the tongue. It can make you feel alive, it can transport you, it can entertain you, it can move you. The fact that we use the word "poetic" to describe certain kinds of events or experiences or even objects is testament enough to the power of poetry. There is something truly religious about it, in that it gets at something ethereal and deep down. Kerouac and the beats were poets. They compose haikus in the mountains in The Dharma Bums. They attack the world through this lens, seeing the poetry in everything: a Mexican sunset, a breakfast of eggs.

So it's fascinating to me to see this quite beautiful art form placed in the most mundane and commonly accessed place for New Yorkers: the subway. An underground pot of stories in itself, it's full of dirt and beauty, making you simultaneously feel like a rat packed into a lab experiment and a part of the breathing organism that is New York City.  In particular, riding this train far uptown, I saw a group of kids, perhaps young high schoolers, presumably a part of some sort of program. (It was on a Sunday around 4pm and there was an advisor of sorts.) They were yelling and screaming and making jokes, and seemed to have come from one of these far uptown neighborhoods (having gotten on the train there), many of which are poorer than some of the more affluent, white neighborhoods in Manhattan. And thus there was this endlessly compelling juxtaposition, of an old, dirty train packed with people of wide varieties—homeless, kids, business people, students—who each have something to do, somewhere to be, an intent, and then a little installed poem in the corner with the title, "Heaven."

The poem itself is actually quite beautiful, but its placement is so odd. (This isn't even to mention that the poem's talk about death is unsettling when a common fear of New Yorkers seems to be getting struck by a subway.) The MTA is the bane of many New Yorkers existence, given recent price hikes and their overall attitude, but it's also how so many of the over 8 million people that live in New York City travel, and thus it takes the interesting place of an essential and necessary instutionalized evil. And so there is something off about reading a poem about heaven in what many would consider to be the complete opposite of Heaven, an underground sweaty train hurling forwards on rickety tracks. The Heaven depicted in this poem is surely a fairly secular one, and not particularly religious, but it is still Heaven: that transcendental place that is so present in every religion, not just Christianity, and is a common topic, thus, for many of our texts. I find it very interesting to examine the MTA's insertion of this poem under the lens of Kerouac, since much of his writing is so poetic, and since he and Japhy Ryder tried to achieve some sort of transcendence on this earth. (Though I don't think they would have found it in a subway car.) Kerouac's writing is a stream of consciousness "spontaneous prose" which tries to capture the immediacy of experience with complete, 100% personal honesty. His writing captures simple things—the beauty in sleeping outside—and, through his writing, captures something intangible, poetic, and spiritual.

But the MTA, a reviled company, putting a poem about heaven in the midst of the business of the subway, the travel method of the working class? It stinks of condescension. Whereas Kerouac's attempt to find a sort of heaven, or transcendence, is found in a natural and romantic enthusiasm for putting this miracle into the mundane, the MTA seems to be floating this spiritual beauty in a way that feels awkward; like a forced attempt to insert Kerouac or any poet's intangibility into the overtly tangible, a cross-point of the most explicitly non-religious (the subway car) and the spiritual (Heaven). I couldn't help thinking, watching the kids playing and laughing below the poem, that the poem felt neglected: the intangible was right there in front of me, in the beauty of human interaction. So though the poem's placement feels condescending, it is irrelevant. "Heaven" in the Subway is relegated to being put next to advertisements for Seamless and Lawyers. It's nothing more than just noise for New Yorkers.