{"id":21559,"date":"2022-02-25T13:31:55","date_gmt":"2022-02-25T21:31:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=21559"},"modified":"2022-02-25T13:34:13","modified_gmt":"2022-02-25T21:34:13","slug":"ode-to-the-american-bus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2022\/02\/25\/ode-to-the-american-bus\/","title":{"rendered":"ODE TO THE AMERICAN BUS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Where Found Verse Meets Democracy in Motion<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Illustration by Be Boggs<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

by<\/em> DEREK MONG | FEBRUARY 24, 2022 (Zocalopublicsquare.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How many of us grow rapturous in the presence of a bus? The number, I\u2019d guess, is relatively small. Hulking metal loaves of the urban landscape, buses do not, when rattling past, draw voices down to a reverential hush. Heads don\u2019t turn. Some buses are admittedly charming. Think of London\u2019s double-deckers. Think of a school bus, first day of class. Others, though, are comically awkward, like the long bendy kind, their waistlines accordioned round corners. Only a few are truly memorable: Rosa Parks, Montgomery, Alabama, 1955; Ken Kesey, Merry Pranksters, the \u201960s; Keanu Reeves, Los Angeles, Speed<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This collective disdain, born of class warfare and the American obsession with cars, does buses a disservice. They\u2019re democratic institutions, sight-seeing stalwarts, and the delivery system for poetry\u2014both found and made. To ride one among neighbors, the stamp of your municipality affixed to its hide, is to bind the communal and the commuter. Of course, buses break down. Of course, they\u2019re late. But it\u2019s the gap between their purpose and their product, their design and their delivery, that tells the story, in miniature, of the U.S.\u2019s efforts to fulfill its obligations to us all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve missed countless buses. More than a handful have missed me. I know the taste of exhaust, the bite of the rain. And yet I still swoon over the routes and the timetables, the stops and the seats, of my bus-riding life. My swoon grew only more swoony after a pandemic and a move reduced my ridership to near nil. Since 2016, I\u2019ve lived in rural Indiana. There are no buses. And so I am nostalgic for a time when cosmopolitanism and contagion-free air were commonplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do I love about buses? Repetition comes to mind. Eavesdropping too. I love watching the glass shelters of bus stops sail by like diving bells. I love knowing, by the sound of a speed bump or the scrape of a pendulous branch, how near I am to home. This reminds me of verse, which\u2014formal or free\u2014thrives on patterns. And it reminds me of the poetry of my fellow passengers: \u201cNope, you\u2019re good,\u201d a woman reassures a man, \u201cwe could eat off your face.\u201d (Was his beard mangy? His brow stained?) Later, a few seats over, a daughter shares a cookie with her dad: \u201cDaddy, don\u2019t eat the crumbs!\u201d (He stops.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such found poetry flourishes just below a published kind: those colorful signs, linked up like train carriages, that line a bus\u2019s interior. They usually advertise bail bondsmen or prohibit loud music. Their language is boilerplate or cant. At least it was until, 30 years ago this year, the Poetry Society of America and New York City collaborated on a series of poems that went\u2014in a spatial sense only\u2014right over our heads. They called it Poetry in Motion, and it recast the poem, that most highbrow of literary artifacts, as a public good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That project spawned other projects in other cities. All offer a respite from the hectoring advertisement or the moralizing drone of the PSA. In the era before smart phones, the bus poem gave us a little entertainment. Now, it releases us from our screens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was the first Poem in Motion? Walt Whitman\u2019s \u201cCrossing Brooklyn Ferry.\u201d<\/a> It\u2019s there that the poet declares, to riders of ferryboats past, present, and future, that he too \u201cwas one of a crowd.\u201d It\u2019s a democratic statement, and democracy, to my mind, is what makes poetry and buses so symbiotic. Metaphor is an equal sign, a union, a democracy of the world\u2019s disparate parts. Poetry thrives on it, and short poems rely on it more. Here\u2019s the most famous Anglophone poem about public transportation, as it first appeared in 1913, by Ezra Pound:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a Station of the Metro<\/strong><\/p>

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Metaphor makes dissimilar things seem suddenly, surprisingly alike. These ghostly faces, for instance, and \u201c[p]etals on a wet, black bough.\u201d In Pound\u2019s poem, the colon unites these opposites. <\/em>Among American democracy\u2019s disparate elements, it\u2019s the franchise, the social contract, and\u2014I like to think\u2014public transportation. Is it any wonder that the literary critic I.A. Richards named the second half of any metaphor, the imagined part (here, \u201cpetals\u201d), the vehicle? It\u2019s where the imagination goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In America, Whitman saw this link first. Plenty have seen it since. The rush hour crowd is a stand-in for the demos<\/em>. The confines of the carriage are a metaphor for the country. Poems about public transportation are always already poems about ourselves. \u201c[M]ingled \/ black and white \/ so near \/ no room for fear,\u201d Langston Hughes writes in \u201cSubway Rush Hour.\u201d Where urban density meets urban diversity, Hughes argues, racial acceptance stands a chance.That\u2019s when my belief in ex omnibus unum\u2014<\/em>what I\u2019ve come to call this rumbling urge, this latter-day hope, that public transit can rejuvenate public life\u2014was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cFlat American Waltz,\u201d a double sonnet that replicates, in its elaborate, circuitous syntax, an urban bus route, Kevin Gonz\u00e1lez reminds us that bus riders enter an American experiment that\u2019s still hurtling forward, herky-jerky and unsure. \u201cLet\u2019s all believe,\u201d he writes, \u201cin the place, \/ these hard plastic seats are taking us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s harder to do these days, what with the republic in peril, and I wonder if my nostalgia for buses isn\u2019t just a nostalgia for better times. From 2008 to 2016, I lived in cities and rode buses all the time. Violent insurrections felt foreign and a skinny Black guy from Chicago was president, buoyed by a coalition\u2014people of color, white liberals, urbanites\u2014that looked a lot like my fellow bus riders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s when my belief in ex omnibus unum\u2014<\/em>what I\u2019ve come to call this rumbling urge, this latter-day hope, that public transit can rejuvenate public life\u2014was born. But ours is an era of the MAGA caravan and the Google bus, the Uber infiltration and the airplane mask fight. Today I wonder if we can pull the stop cord on our current predicament, hop off, and walk home. The trouble, of course, is that we\u2019re already there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I wallow. I detour. At such moments, when I get lost in the now, I remind myself that any good poem exists in the now and the after. I think of Allen Ginsberg\u2019s \u201cIn the Baggage Room at Greyhound,\u201d a poem in which the poet\u2014depressed, working as a luggage clerk\u2014\u201crealized shuddering \/ these thoughts were not eternity.\u201d Or I consider the school bus, which is, for so many, the first taste of shared transit. All across America, school buses are pressing a connection between jostling rides and dense reads into the hot pleather seats of kids\u2019 minds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or I rewatch Jim Jarmusch\u2019s Paterson<\/em>, a movie that taught me how riding a bus is like reading a poem. Both take you, once you\u2019re on board, wherever they go. And the poet, like the driver, played here deftly by Adam Driver, leads you around its turns. And Driver here is both a poet and a driver; he writes poems at lunch. And the word \u201cverse\u201d comes to us from the Latin versus<\/em>, \u201ca \u201cturn of the plow.\u201d Every stop is a stanza break. Every segment shows you a little more of your world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That movie helps me to remember that I\u2019ve lived a privileged life, a life where the bus is a study not a slog, while Michael Spence drove a Seattle bus for 30 years, then documented his experience in The Bus Driver\u2019s Threnody. <\/em>Or I\u2019ll reread Terrance Hayes\u2019s \u201cWoofer (When I Consider the African-American).\u201d It begins when the poet forgets his \u201cfather\u2019s warning about meeting women \/ at bus stops\u201d and ends, well\u2026 I\u2019ll let you read the poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GET MORE Z\u00d3CALO<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Poetry lifts us and persists past us. It time travels. It makes you miss your stop. And when the era seems hellbent on collision, and you\u2019re forced to watch it, bracing for an impact that you cannot avert, poetry reminds you that others lived through worse. \u201cI am with you,\u201d Walt Whitman writes in \u201cCrossing Brooklyn Ferry,\u201d \u201c[j]ust as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt.\u201d This from a guy who survived a Civil War. Who saw the limbs piled high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s not Whitman that I\u2019d choose for a seatmate on a long bus ride. No, that\u2019d be Elizabeth Bishop, whose shoulder I\u2019d look over, sharing her prismatically sure vision of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take\u00a0\u201cThe Moose,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the poem where she and a busload of passengers spot the eponymous beast in the middle of the road. The driver stops. No one moves. \u201cWhy, why do we feel\u00a0\/ (we all feel) this sweet\u00a0\/ sensation of joy?\u201d she writes, as the moose loiters, majestically unaware. Because we\u2019re in this together. Because we\u2019ll soon be moving on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DEREK MONG<\/strong> is a poet and critic, and the Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College. His latest collection is\u00a0The Identity Thief<\/em>, excerpts of which can be found on his\u00a0website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where Found Verse Meets Democracy in Motion Illustration by Be Boggs. by DEREK MONG | FEBRUARY 24, 2022 (Zocalopublicsquare.org) How many of us grow rapturous in the presence of a bus? The number, I\u2019d guess, is relatively small. Hulking metal loaves of the urban landscape, buses do not, when rattling past, draw voices down to a reverential… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21559"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21559"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21562,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21559\/revisions\/21562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}