In his foreword, Edward Hirsch compares Hyam Plutznik’s book-length poem to the work of Whitman, Crane, and Lorca. Composed in 1934, and published for the first time in 1978, The Seventh Avenue Express is divided into canto-like sections, which resemble the opus of yet a third poet — Dante — who is most famous for the “Inferno” section of his own epic, The Divine Comedy.
And Plutzik’s long poem is indeed infernal. It takes readers on a hellishly evocative trip through the subterranean New York City of the Depression. The tone and emphasis are Expressionist: the imagery is reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s dystopian film masterpiece Metropolis, which came to theaters in Manhattan only seven years before Plutznik’s composition.
Lang’s film begins with robotic male workers marching numbly in and out of their underground workspaces. Similarly, in Plutzik’s cavernous NYC subway, flesh-and-blood men are rendered into living machines:
And here in the earth, this strange cosmopolis
They sit with body bent, dejected; eyes
Filming the light but neither thought nor passion;
And fingers inert and jaw seeking the chest.
The poet flies in and out of the consciousnesses of the strangers he observes on the trains. Although many are made into automatons, a few, including a woman reading Kant, resist the oppressive, machine-like, thoughtless existence foisted upon them. The woman goes home and draws a picture of a child she saw earlier:
She leaves the universe outside, and shuts
The door. Over a desk she bends her head.
Her fingers move with nervous pace; she draws
The picture of a child under the El.
And weaves herself a web of dream, and then
Within the web she is herself enmeshed.
Does creative expression free us from or imprison us in the world we have made? Eventually, inevitably, the poet realizes that he himself is not immune to the hellscape he is observing. His poetic distance dissolves; he, too, falls into a tortuous logical tangle, even as he seeks to interrogate it:
Can we transliterate into our speech,
Our tongue of darkness, the language of the sun?
Our eyes probe upward, outward, inward — probe,
Asking the how of how, the why of why,
The what of what — until the burdened mind
Reels like a dizzy rat upon a turntable,
The silly subject for experiment.
A frightening, brilliant, and shattering historical document, The Seventh Avenue Express reaches forward into the present. It asks contemporary readers about the meaning of the work we do, the suffering we bring others, and the havoc we are wreaking on the natural world. At once a product of its time and a work that looks scarily into our own moment, Plutzik’s poem challenges us to face the wrongs we have committed, as a society and as a species:
Never the naked earth, but the stone below them.
Below them the treacherous stone they have mastered, their master.
Stephanie Barbé Hammer’s is a 7‑time Pushcart Prize nominee in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her new novel Journey to Merveilleux City appears with Picture Show Press.
