By Saara Myrene Raappana, Motionpoems

When I first saw a motionpoem, I’d been out of graduate school for a year or two; I was working a lot of hours at a demanding office job; and I was tired. I was sure I loved poetry. I’d spent years reading and studying and scanning it. I recited Gerard Manly Hopkins in my head to calm myself in the dentist’s chair. I subscribed to at least five poetry journals. I read Verse Daily and Poetry Daily daily. I must have loved poetry, right? But it had been awhile since I’d read something that made me feel a thrill of excitement. Poetry and I were going through the motions. I spent most evenings sitting on the couch next to a stack of unread poetry collections, watching Netflix.

Enter Motionpoems—a new poetry-film company that specialized in taking contemporary poems and turning them into brilliantly rendered films. Here was a marriage of the world I loved—poetry—and the world I actually lived in (and also loved)—moving pictures. That first motionpoem—Angella Kassube’s animation of Todd Boss’s “Constellations”—chased stars and comets and rockets across a night sky and disappeared into daylight, and I felt the word-inspired delight that I hadn’t accessed in months.

In the years since, I’ve used motionpoems—produced by Motionpoems, now entering its sixth season—to discover new poets; find fresh meaning in poems I already knew; inspire poetry fandom in teens, children, and my poetry-averse friends; and teach English to non-native English speakers. My favorite motionpoems transform the way I see the poem: They’re tender, like “Old Astronauts”or infectious, like “Western Civilization” or creepy, like “Karl” or haunting, like “This Is Not a Fairytale.”

This month, Motionpoems expanded its mission to include innovative works of public art with “Arrivals and Departures at St. Paul’s Union Depot.” On October 10 and 11, Motionpoems transformed the block-long façade of the newly renovated, historical St. Paul Union Depot into a giant movie screen, and, in the midst of St. Paul’s biannual Art Crawl, they showed four new Motionpoems created specifically on the theme of “Arrivals and Departures” by Minnesota poets and filmmakers. The project—which will repeat for the next four years—is about poetry and film and poetry-films, but it’s also about transforming the Union Depot, an iconic station that’s been recently remodeled and reopened as the intermodal hub of Twin Cities transport.

Union Depot, once a monolith of transportation, commerce, and communications, ended service in 1971 when Amtrak service officially moved to The Great Northern Station in Minneapolis. The building, with its Doric columns and expansive concourse, was home to a few businesses and the U.S. Postal Service for the next forty years. It was placed on the National Registry of Historic Places in 1974, but the city had, for the most part, moved on. Twin Cities citizens transported themselves from different hubs, inhabited different spaces.

Until a series of citizen, municipal, and county initiatives set a restoration process in motion. The Depot underwent $243 million-worth of renovations in 2011 and 2012 and reopened in 2014 as of the hub of the METRO Green Line, Amtrak, Greyhound, and numerous other modes of public transportation. The first Amtrak train to enter the renewed station arrived in May of 2014. The refurbished building gleams from tiled floor to domed ceiling, housing more than bus, train, and light rail hubs; it also offers Greek fine dining at Christos, a candy and snack kiosk, free yoga classes, game nights, and events like free ballet concerts.

Train stations, for me, have always been echoey, bustling symbols of renewal and transformation. When I was eleven or twelve and living in the isolated forests of Upper Michigan, my grandma gave me a slim, leather-bound copy of Leaves of Grass. I read “To a Locomotive in Winter,” and Whitman’s bounding, rumbling cadence lit a fire in me to ride a train across America. As a teenager, I entered an Amtrak station in Wisconsin as a girl who’d never left the Great Lakes region. Two days later, I emerged from the train’s iron capsule as a girl who’d seen every state between Wisconsin and Florida via New Orleans; who’d spent hours talking with people from Louisiana and Germany and the island of Kiribati; who’d awoken at dawn as the train rumbled through a swamp lined with Cypress trees that rose like long, elegant creatures from the water’s surface, heavy garlands of moss waving lazily from their branches. I emerged in a Florida train station having seen things I’d never even imagined, blinking in the sun of a new world.

As the Union Depot returns to her former glory, poet and public artist Boss—also Motionpoems’ Executive and Artistic Director—wanted to do something to transform the building in the public’s imagination as well: “This project is an opportunity to reclaim this place—give it our prayers, give it our dreams, make it mean something again.” “Arrivals and Departures” will reclaim St. Paul’s Union Depot next year with films based on poems from a national contest by filmmakers from all across the U.S.; the following year with international offerings; and will close out with a final year that returns to Minnesotan poets and filmmakers.