The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round: Poetry and Transportation

One of the things we try to do here at Paradise Tossed is dispel the notion that poets are somehow behind-the-times. People tend to imagine so-called "great" poets as stodgy old white men in smoking jackets, but that's just not how it works. Many poets are not luddites in the least, and the best way to demonstrate this is by showing how new technologies tend to show up in poetry pretty quickly. Case in point: last week's binary poetry. But another way that poets incorporate technology into their work is by showcasing a particular kind of transportation that didn't exist in the past.

My favorite example belongs to one of the oldest and whitest American poets, Walt Whitman. Though he spent a great deal of time writing about nature [Leaves of Grass, anyone?], he didn't shy away from choosing as a topic one of the most exciting new technologies of his day: the locomotive. In his poem "To a Locomotive in Winter," Whitman captures the zeitgeist by praising the train as a "type of the modern--emblem of motion and power--pulse of the continent". Here's the poem in full to consider.

If Whitman, of all people, can embrace something seemingly at opposition to the natural world, which he so loved, then poets have a powerful example of ways in which new technologies can be incorporated into poetry.

A contemporary example of someone who picks up the ball with this idea is James Grey. Here he is reading his poem "Muses Do Not Ride the Bus" with accompanying conceptual art:




Unlike Whitman's poem, which praises trains nearly unconditionally, Grey's poem takes a much different tack with the bus. He brings up exactly the question we're discussing: Can a banal mode of every day transportation, like the bus or the train, be a source of poetry? What makes this piece so ironic is that while insisting that "the bus is not for muses," the very fact that he's written a poem about the bus proves the opposite. The bus, for Grey at least, has become a muse itself: the source and object of the poem.

Poets don't have to limit themselves to discussing trees and bees and flowers, and they don't. Whenever a new technology comes along, something that changes every day life, you can be sure that a poet somewhere will write about it. Whitman and Grey are two great examples of poets who took modes of transportation and morphed them into the last thing you'd expect a bus or a train to be: a poem.