‘Hear the bread talk, but the kopi tiam’: More than 100 S’pore poems take over MRT trains, stations

SINGAPORE – You have seen the advertisements for mala fish, or the many AI-generated posters calling for recruits to one organisation or another in MRT trains and stations.

Now breathe: Something less commercial – and decidedly more lyrical – is taking over.

For a whole year from Nov 1, commuters will find in these public spaces the humour and wit of Singapore poets – Wong May catching a glimpse of her lover at the train terminus, or Lee Jing Jing bidding readers “Hear the difference between/Shut up, and/Shut up, lah”.

And lest First World Singapore forget its origins, there is migrant poet M.R. Mirzan reminding the commuter that “My sweat turns villages to metros/and metros into civilisation”.

Bound to elicit a grin is Ng Yi-sheng’s humorous Roti Chatter, a hark back to the Republic’s multicultural heritage. He writes: “The prata knows Malay,/The mantou mumbles Mandarin...You’ll hear the bread talk, but/The Kopi tiam.”

In the largest effort to promote Singapore Literature (SingLit) to date, more than 100 poem snippets have been stuck on trains and stations of the SMRT-operated North-South, East-West and Circle lines.

This translates to more than 150 panels of poetry in 30 trains, but the campaign also includes 1,920 screens, looping animations on SingLit and video interviews with poets.

One concept train, plying the North-South and East-West lines till Feb 20, 2025, is decked floor to ceiling with SingLit stickers – containing graphical maps of bookshops still in operation across the island, an aid for those who want some direction in keeping book culture alive after

a year of bookstore closures.

The Poems On The MRT campaign is a collaboration between the National Arts Council (NAC), SMRT, the rail operator’s advertising arm Stellar Ace, and non-profit organisation Sing Lit Station, which was engaged to produce the material in late 2023.

Sing Lit Station chair Fiona Chan, whose first encounter with Singapore poetry was on the MRT during a more limited campaign in the 1990s, says her team saw an opportunity to allow poetry to “enter the mainstream on a much larger scale”.

Some 3.2 million people – Singaporeans and tourists from all walks of life – tap in and out of MRT gantries daily.

Though poetry may sometimes be revered as the highest literary form, Ms Chan insists: “People will see that, actually, poetry is not something esoteric. It’s something you can engage with on a daily basis. It lifts your mood.”

Curators working with Sing Lit Station whittled down the entries from a longlist of more than 1,000 poems. Some 60 per cent of the 104 that made the final cut are in English. The rest, displayed with English translations, is split evenly among Chinese, Malay and Tamil ones. 

Ms Chan says the team looked out for “uplifting, positive elements in the excerpts” that can offer tired commuters “a small ray of sunshine”.

Asked if the committee steered clear of more controversial poems, she says the chosen snippets had to be appropriate. However, “this wasn’t too difficult. A lot of the poems are already quite nostalgic or have a certain feel about local culture”, she adds.

During the Nov 1 launch, Sing Lit Station set up a pop-up library at Dhoby Ghaut MRT station and distributed free poetry zines. There were also spoken word performances – in a reprisal of a previous guerilla initiative – by 11 poets including Yeow Kai Chai and Arunditha.

This is the third initiative as part of NAC and SMRT’s three-year agreement in 2023 to enliven spaces of commute through the arts.

The first was I Play SG Music launched in 2023, in which home-grown music is broadcast at train and bus stations via a playlist updated every quarter. The second allowed those with disabilities to busk in SMRT train stations.

On whether this large-scale project will go some way towards creating a Singapore literary canon, Ms Chan says she hopes “people will start to develop their own personal canon of the works that appeal to them. Then their own personal library of poems can be established”.

Guest of honour MP Darryl David, who was a literature and film student, said this was a change from the early trains which were purely functional.

“In the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s, it was economic pragmatism – getting things functioning, keeping things moving – and sometimes things that didn’t form part of that were just cheerfully thrown over the side,” he said.

“Our Singapore body is fine. Our mind is also pretty good. While we have achieved tremendous economic growth and in the area of nation-building, there is so much we need to do in the area of the Singapore soul.”