A bus driver uses his experience traveling the streets of Seattle to pen this collection of poetry
In my mind I needed to write. Pull out
And head for the waterfront, the
instructor nodded;
Make sure to check your mirrors. I gripped
The slick black circle, leaned toward the road (. . .)
“Training Wheels”
Poet Michael Spence passed his bus-driving test and became a metro bus driver in Seattle. He continued as a bus driver for 30 years and also spent that time creating and polishing the poetry that makes up this collection, “The Bus Driver’s Threnody.” It was a choice he sometimes regretted:
What stupid calculus
Told him driving a bus
Would be the way to reach
A writer’s life?
“The Bus Driver Considers His Choice”
Still he kept going, creating poems using everyday language but a complex structure, something Robert Frost also did particularly well. Even the title of this collection indicates that: A threnody is a poem mourning the dead, a form that dates back at least to the “Iliad.” While many of us meet bus drivers every day, “Jake on Wheels” takes us into the spiraling thoughts of a bus driver about his life:
I got a lot of bills to pay,
That’s why I work so much O.T.
But I’d drive these buses anyway—
This job means everything to me.
That’s why I work so much O.T.
My wife said, Jake, we’ve hit the skids,
This job means everything to me.
The judge gave her the house and kids.
The poem reads easily, like the circling thoughts many of us have while considering our lives, but the way Spence executes it actually involves a specific form, one from Malay culture, the “pantoum,” in which the second and fourth lines of one four-line stanza, or quatrain, become the first and third lines of the next quatrain. The use of this sophisticated form works perfectly to tell Jake’s story, and tell it in a way almost any reader can understand.
Spence invited Real Change to contact him via email, and we did. Here’s what he had to say about “Jake on Wheels:”
“I wanted to take a driver who basically likes his job, then proceed to complicate his life with domestic troubles. (Though Jake isn’t based on anyone in particular, I knew several drivers for whom their job put pressure on their home lives. And there was a driver who in fact did live in his camper in the parking lot for a while.) My intent was to have the first and third lines in the first stanza take on a different kind of color and weight when they appeared again in reversed order at the poem’s end.”
His poem “Myrtle Talks” is from the point of view of a woman who became a driver primarily because it was one of the few jobs where she knew she’d be paid as well as the men.
It’s thirty years since we were “liberated,”
Yet the dough the doe receives is still around half
The buck the buck is paid.
This volume of poetry ends with the powerful story of Mark McLaughlin, the driver shot and killed by a passenger while driving his bus over the Aurora Avenue bridge on Nov. 27, 1998. Spence told us in his email, “The event definitely made more real to me the possible dangers of driving a public-transit bus.”
“I didn’t think of trying to deal with the incident in poetic form till many years later,” Spence wrote. “And I knew that, though I wanted to be basically as accurate and truthful as possible, I was writing a poem, not journalism or history — I wanted to be able to assume the perspective of all the characters I put aboard the bus that day, even inventing some of them or some of their thoughts and motivations.”
The story is told from six different points of view: the driver, the shooter, a police officer who responds, and three passengers: a teenager, a teacher and a Vietnamese immigrant.
“For me, perhaps the most surprising aspect was that of the immigrant: the man who decides, based on how horrendous the event was for him, to return to his native country,” Spence wrote. “That seemed to make it resonate far beyond that day’s grim occurrence.”
Spence’s poetry has been published in a wide range of magazines and reviews, including The American Scholar, The New Republic and The North American Review. “The Bus Driver’s Threnody” was a finalist for The New Criterion Poetry Prize, and won him a Literary Fellowship for the Arts from Washington State in 2014, the year he retired from driving a bus. Since its publication, he has written a fifth book, “Umbilical,” which won The New Criterion Poetry Prize, and will be published by St. Augustine’s Press.
“The Bus Driver’s Threnody” is an excellent read for anyone who enjoys skillfully written poetry, and for readers who might enjoy a few different ways to think about the people who drive Seattle’s buses.