City Transit Gloria: Mass Movements and Metropolitan Poetics

Abstract

The poetics of mass mobilization (in both spatial and ideological senses of “movement”) that we find in international modernism’s animated anatomy of the urban demonstrates that, despite the melancholy of the alleys and the crowds, navigating the modern city need not be an entirely isolating experience. Juxtaposing works ranging from Claire Goll and Alfredo Mario Ferreiro to Vladimir Mayakovsky and Fortunato Depero, this essay argues that such poetics, which rejects the conception of a poem as a monument as well as a stabilized focus on heroic achievement, both documents (and often celebrates) the communal experience of the subway, the tram, and the bus, and challenges well-worn configurations of modernism as the art of the disaffected individual.