Poetry in Transit

It's been 23 years since poetry and Vancouver's buses started hanging out together. In the early days, poems were printed onto 11x17 sized cards and placed alongside commercial advertising above the windows inside the bus. If you squinted, you could read them from your seat.

The buses I ride on these days (mostly the #19 and #22) still have these advertising strips, and occasionally I'll see a Poetry in Transit poem. A step up from poems on buses are poems in bus shelter windows.

The picture above was taken at the northwest corner of Fraser and Knight. One can see that the window of this bus shelter is occupied by Poetry in Transit, and to a lesser extent, its sponsored poem (an excerpt from Pamela Porter's "Moon, owl, stone"). Great to see -- but to see it like this?

Is it right that a space reserved for poetry should have its poem compromised (imprisoned?) by so much additional textual information? Can't this information be made smaller and placed at the bottom of the page? And with the additional space, can't the poem be made a little bigger?

In lines 3 and 4 of Porter's pastoral, she writes:

Each day I try to be grateful
for what is around me. The apple tree

What is around Porter's poem, in this case, is enough informational bramble to fence-in that apple!