The secret to a better commute? Ride the rocket with Margaret Atwood and Rupi Kaur

Every day, Toronto Transit Commission buses, streetcars and subways help more than a million passengers travel across the city. But can you recall the last time a TTC journey transported you to a place of self-discovery? 

Starting this month, public transit riders can find poems by renowned authors such as Margaret Atwood, Rupi Kaur and Mustafa pasted in spaces usually occupied by print advertisements across most of the TTC fleet. Local heroes, historic greats and emerging voices are all represented, with 17 verses in total to keep an eye out for. 

Their presence is a gift to Toronto commuters from Poems in Passage, a project launched by childhood best friends Latif Murji and Addesse Haile. They were inspired by the now-defunct Poetry on the Way project, an initiative spearheaded by poet Denis Deneau that ran from 2008 to 2012, then disappeared after funding from a Canada Council grant dried up. 

Denied similar grants, Poems in Passage launched in 2024 partly through self-funding as well as a partnership with the Aga Khan Museum, which has returned as a key supporter for the project's second season.

Recounting what spurred the friends to resuscitate the program, Murji says, "We were just reminiscing about how there used to be poetry on our bus rides to school, and how impactful that was, and the joy we felt, and how that contrasted with what we were seeing in the post-COVID era. Transit was kind of gloomy." 

In their revamped version of the project, Murji and Haile's ambition was to turn the program into a platform for emerging artists as well as a wide-reaching source of inspiration for Torontonians. "It's a love letter to our city," says Murji.

Similar programs exist in other urban transit hubs worldwide, notably MTA New York City Transit's Poetry in Motion, which was launched in 1992 and has inspired 30 other U.S. cities to follow suit, and its progenitor, Poems on the Underground, which first appeared on London's tube in 1986. Each city's transit system aims to reflect a vast yet distinctive array of identities in the rhymes and verses chosen for display –– and Toronto's lineup is no different.

"Toronto is the most diverse place, and that diversity is also represented in the type of poetry we get as submissions and what we decide to put up," says Murji. Authors range in age, race, cultural background and gender expression, and the collection includes haikus, sonnets, lyric poems, couplets and even ancient Persian ghazals. 

Last year, Poems in Passage's featured poet was 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi, whose work was presented in the original Farsi alongside an English translation. "The Iranian community and Afghan community, Farsi-speaking people, noticed this," says Murji, "and not only are they feeling proud, but it's also fostering cross-cultural dialogue and understanding." 

This year, there are ancient poems in their original and translated forms from Persian lyric poet Hafez of Shiraz and Andalusi Sunni sage Ibn 'Arabî. There is also a contemporary poem by Jadyn Hardie-Bardy that integrates words in the Mohawk language with English text. 

"This past year, we had 1,000 submissions, which was really exciting," says the program's poet-in-residence, Britta Badour, better known by her stage name, Britta B. Badour is a prominent spoken word artist in Toronto and a teaching assistant at OCAD University where she's currently shadowing Lillian Allen, Toronto's seventh poet laureate. 

Badour was instrumental in whittling down the project's submissions –– a fivefold increase in quantity from the inaugural year –– to arrive at the final 17. The chosen poets received a cash stipend as well as the opportunity to have their work on display for more than a million sets of eyes each day. 

"I was personally looking for something on the page that would almost appear as a constellation," says Badour about her judging criteria. "It could be this constellation of language and sounds and beauty and images that would work and speak together, but also be distinct on their own."

She and Murji both say that public engagement with the project has been high and positive, despite smartphones threatening to monopolize people's attention. 

"I actually noticed one of the poems on my commute the other day," says Lucy Lynch, an urban planner who regularly takes the 63 bus down Ossington Avenue to get her three-year-old son to daycare. "It caused me to stop and pause and read it, and it took me outside of myself and outside of my commute, and inspired me."

Badour says she is "forever chasing the dragon of that feeling" she first had as a young reader decoding the secret puzzle of a poem. "I love when something symbolic within the poem now replaces the meaning of what that was to someone in real life." Her poem Cream Soda, displayed on a candy-pink background, is one of the works on view this year. She hopes that people will see the sugary beverage differently after reading her poem. "It has this narrative; it has a story; it has this legend behind it," she explains.

"Our true calling as artists is to gather the people," says Badour. "These people will come broken and confused, and you will help them to leave better off than when they had come to you or your work." 

Murji uses similar health-related metaphors when describing the intended effects of Poems in Passage. Fittingly, he also happens to be an emergency medicine doctor, as well as a musician in the band Parachute Thieves. "This is not just a mental health intervention," he says. "It's a public health intervention." 

"There are 1.5 million rides taken per day on the TTC," Murji says, "and everyone's having their own journey — physically, but also emotionally. We're choosing certain poems that are meant to uplift people or to resonate with people who are in different situations."  

"In medicine," he continues, "with any intervention, there are benefits, risks and side effects. But with poetry, you don't have to worry about that." Instead of "putting an antidepressant in the drinking water" to improve people's mood at scale, he jokes, how about quenching your thirst with a can of cream soda?