This collective disdain, born of class warfare and the American obsession with cars, does buses a disservice. They’re democratic institutions, sight-seeing stalwarts, and the delivery system for poetry—both 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’re late. But it’s the gap between their purpose and their product, their design and their delivery, that tells the story, in miniature, of the U.S.’s efforts to fulfill its obligations to us all.

I’ve 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’ve lived in rural Indiana. There are no buses. And so I am nostalgic for a time when cosmopolitanism and contagion-free air were commonplace.

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—formal or free—thrives on patterns. And it reminds me of the poetry of my fellow passengers: “Nope, you’re good,” a woman reassures a man, “we could eat off your face.” (Was his beard mangy? His brow stained?) Later, a few seats over, a daughter shares a cookie with her dad: “Daddy, don’t eat the crumbs!” (He stops.)

Such found poetry flourishes just below a published kind: those colorful signs, linked up like train carriages, that line a bus’s 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—in a spatial sense only—right over our heads. They called it Poetry in Motion, and it recast the poem, that most highbrow of literary artifacts, as a public good.

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.

What was the first Poem in Motion? Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” It’s there that the poet declares, to riders of ferryboats past, present, and future, that he too “was one of a crowd.” It’s 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’s disparate parts. Poetry thrives on it, and short poems rely on it more. Here’s the most famous Anglophone poem about public transportation, as it first appeared in 1913, by Ezra Pound:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Metaphor makes dissimilar things seem suddenly, surprisingly alike. These ghostly faces, for instance, and “[p]etals on a wet, black bough.” In Pound’s poem, the colon unites these opposites. Among American democracy’s disparate elements, it’s the franchise, the social contract, and—I like to think—public transportation. Is it any wonder that the literary critic I.A. Richards named the second half of any metaphor, the imagined part (here, “petals”), the vehicle? It’s where the imagination goes.

In America, Whitman saw this link first. Plenty have seen it since. The rush hour crowd is a stand-in for the demos. The confines of the carriage are a metaphor for the country. Poems about public transportation are always already poems about ourselves. “[M]ingled / black and white / so near / no room for fear,” Langston Hughes writes in “Subway Rush Hour.” Where urban density meets urban diversity, Hughes argues, racial acceptance stands a chance.

In “Flat American Waltz,” a double sonnet that replicates, in its elaborate, circuitous syntax, an urban bus route, Kevin González reminds us that bus riders enter an American experiment that’s still hurtling forward, herky-jerky and unsure. “Let’s all believe,” he writes, “in the place, / these hard plastic seats are taking us.”

That’s harder to do these days, what with the republic in peril, and I wonder if my nostalgia for buses isn’t 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—people of color, white liberals, urbanites—that looked a lot like my fellow bus riders.

That’s when my belief in ex omnibus unum—what I’ve come to call this rumbling urge, this latter-day hope, that public transit can rejuvenate public life—was 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’re already there.

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’s “In the Baggage Room at Greyhound,” a poem in which the poet—depressed, working as a luggage clerk—“realized shuddering / these thoughts were not eternity.” 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’ minds.

Or I rewatch Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, a movie that taught me how riding a bus is like reading a poem. Both take you, once you’re 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 “verse” comes to us from the Latin versus, “a “turn of the plow.” Every stop is a stanza break. Every segment shows you a little more of your world.

That movie helps me to remember that I’ve 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’s Threnody. Or I’ll reread Terrance Hayes’s “Woofer (When I Consider the African-American).” It begins when the poet forgets his “father’s warning about meeting women / at bus stops” and ends, well… I’ll let you read the poem.

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’re forced to watch it, bracing for an impact that you cannot avert, poetry reminds you that others lived through worse. “I am with you,” Walt Whitman writes in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “[j]ust as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt.” This from a guy who survived a Civil War. Who saw the limbs piled high.

But it’s not Whitman that I’d choose for a seatmate on a long bus ride. No, that’d be Elizabeth Bishop, whose shoulder I’d look over, sharing her prismatically sure vision of the world.

Take “The Moose,” the poem where she and a busload of passengers spot the eponymous beast in the middle of the road. The driver stops. No one moves. “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?” she writes, as the moose loiters, majestically unaware. Because we’re in this together. Because we’ll soon be moving on.

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Walt Whitman once compared Broadway to a river, and that’s what it seemed to me when I finally walked along its path a year later. Broadway really was a noisy, urban Mississippi overflowing with people, cars, and trucks, its shoreline lined with skyscrapers and bathed in electric light. Right next door to Times Square and its peep shows were churches (St. Mary the Virgin, on 46th Street, and Holy Cross, on 42nd Street) and in the middle of everything a statue of a Roman Catholic priest (Francis Patrick Duffy, decorated World War I chaplain and Holy Cross’s pastor). Coming from Gainesville, I thought the contrasts were rather extreme, and that Broadway was the most perplexing, distorted place I’d ever seen.

For many years, visitors have been thinking exactly the same thing: Illustrator Valerian Gribayedoff, a Russian immigrant, thought that Broadway was “a kind of animated mirror, looking back at you with its myriad faces in the same mood in which you regard it.” That was way back in 1893.

Even George M. Cohan, the prolific song-and-dance man who sold Broadway to the masses in the form of sheet music and traveling musicals, and more than anyone cemented the street as the epicenter of American popular culture, couldn’t quite get his head around it. “Nobody understands Broadway,” one character in Cohan’s 1912 production Broadway Jones proclaims. “People hate it and don’t know why. People love it and don’t know why. It’s just because it’s Broadway.”

Through the 19th century, Broadway was a continuous source of American civic pride, a “Path of Progress” where everything promising about the country’s future came together in one long allegorical strand. “Broadway represents the national life,” journalist Junius Henri Browne wrote soon after the Civil War. In order to see America, he suggested, all that was required was a station point along Broadway. “Take your stand there,” he advised, “and Maine, and Louisiana, the Carolinas, and California, Boston, and Chicago, pass before you.”

Herald Square, 34th Street and Broadway, undated. Photo courtesy of New York Public Library.

To understand its history, follow the street from south to north.

Broadway begins at Manhattan’s southern tip, where it forms the spine of the financial district and provides a stage set for ticker tape parades. Skyscrapers, including the majestic Woolworth Building, cloak the street in shadow. At the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street, administrative assistants and stockbrokers lunch amid the graves of Trinity Churchyard, where Alexander Hamilton rests beneath a monument close by a wrought-iron fence along Rector Street.

Continuing to the north, Broadway pierces SoHo, where cast-iron buildings from the mid-19th century look down on a district that 50 years ago was so desolate the city’s fire chief nicknamed it “Hell’s Half Acre.” Now it’s a mall of expensive shops for tourists.

At 10th Street, Broadway suddenly bends to the north on its way to Union Square, which began in the early 19th century as the “Forks,” the rural intersection of the Bowery and Broadway, and was enclosed as a public park in 1833. Union Square became the most fashionable district in the city—in 1865, the six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt watched Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession pass below the window of his grandfather’s mansion at the corner of Broadway and 14th Street—and by the 1890s, the old mansions, having been torn down or converted to sweatshops, had become the main gathering place for labor unions, socialists, and anarchists.

Six blocks to the north, Madison Square was the site of riots in 1901 when the city arranged nice new chairs in the park and tried renting them for a nickel. Now you can sit for hours, for free, in folding chairs arranged in the wedge of space between Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Once that narrow space was a perpetual tangle of trolleys, trucks, and cars and on election nights, crowds pressed into the hectic intersection to watch as vote tallies were projected onto a giant screen attached to the Flatiron Building. Now that same storied section of Broadway is nothing if not peaceful, a place of beautiful, trendy people and Shake Shack burgers.

Madison Square was the original starting point of a lurid playground bathed in the glow of electric streetlights and billboards that by the early 1900s had been nicknamed the “Great White Way.” That section of Broadway became so famous, and its stores, theaters, hotels, and restaurants so profitable, that every small-town chamber of commerce had to have its own version. “[Let us] get together and have a Great White Way as soon as possible,” urged the editors of the Richmond, Kentucky, Daily Register in 1919. “It is an indication of a prosperous condition, and a progressive spirit.”

City councils in El Paso, Pensacola, Topeka, and Albuquerque were soon busy carefully planning new downtown business districts in emulation of Broadway, but the original Great White Way was an accident; even those weird, interstitial trapezoids (not squares) that became Herald Square and Times Square, two of the most vibrant public spaces in the world, were nothing more than the byproducts of the misalignment of Broadway’s angled path with the later straight avenues of the city grid. Broadway’s transformation from colonial cowpath to cosmopolitan thoroughfare was nothing if not organic.

At Columbus Circle, Broadway brushes past Central Park’s southwest corner, widens, and becomes something else entirely, a remnant from the Gilded Age that was originally called the Boulevard and was meant to put New York City on par with Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s grand boulevards of Paris. That ambitious section of Broadway was carefully designed, with a planted “mall” running up the center and whimsical apartment houses in the Parisian Belle Époque mode on either side.

The old Boulevard continues up the West Side, past restaurants, delis, and dry cleaners, all the way up to 168th Street, where in the midst of a predominantly Dominican neighborhood it takes over the narrower path of the former Kingsbridge Road, which dates to the early 18th century. At the island’s northern tip, Broadway crosses over the Harlem Ship Canal by way of the Broadway Bridge, continues through the Bronx, and, as Route 9—not so much Great White Way as Adequate Grey Highway—winds its way to the Canadian border.

“Broadway,” Whitman also wrote, “will never fail in riches, arts, men, women, histories, stately shows, morals, warnings, wrecks, triumphs—the profoundest indices of mortality and immortality.” That’s another way of saying that Broadway is much too long and varied to understand in one lifetime. Stephen Jenkins, writing in 1911 in The Greatest Street in the World, thought that Broadway was the place where New Yorkers felt most at home.

I’m not sure I’ll ever feel at home on Broadway, but at least I understand it a bit better than I did when I saw it for the first time almost 30 years ago. Perhaps Broadway resonates because it’s a place where anyone, native or immigrant, can freely wander, like the cable cars Stephen Crane described in 1896 as plying the street “up and down, up and down, in a mystic search.” For some, Broadway might even reveal the key to happiness.

“I guess Broadway, for me, was everything in life I’ve never had,” George M. Cohan once said. “My education, and the friendships, games, adventures, and just plain fun of boyhood and growing up.”

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