Taxi Driving, Poetry Book Prizes, and First Person in the Digital Age

Poet Sean Singer discusses how and why he turned his experience driving a taxi into a book of poems, plus thoughts on his publishing journey

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing poet Sean Singer about the development of his most recent book, Today in the Taxi.

Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022). He runs a manuscript consultation service at www.seansingerpoetry.com

We discussed:

- How poems in Today in the Taxi attempt to reclaim humanness in a data-driven era

- The challenge of writing in first person in poems today

- Social media’s influence on writing

- The myth of “making it” in poetry

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read the interview in text. To hear Sean read poems from Today in the Taxi, check out the video.

Taxi Driving, Poetry Book Prizes, and First Person in the Digital Age

[Interview edited for clarity.]

Radha: Sean, we're going to be talking about your most recent book Today in the Taxi—where it started and how it developed. It has a unique framework or premise, so maybe we can start there. Would you like to give a brief description?

Sean: I drove a taxi for Uber and Lyft and other ride-share companies from 2014 until March of 2020, when COVID started. So, it's a book of prose poems about all of my experiences. And the poems—they're in these little rectangular blocks—begin with the phrase “today in the taxi.” There are three characters. One is Franz Kafka. One is the jazz bass player, Charles Mingus. And one is The Lord, who has a female voice.

The book combines the immediacy of my experiences and the strangeness of the people and the city, which is almost like another character. The people are sort of representative of the city. And there are the juxtapositions and contradictions of that kind of work—what it's like at the current moment.

Radha: How was the process different for this book than for others?

Sean: In my other books, I never really wrote about myself much. I was more interested in the process of creativity and pushing language to make it much more elastic, and to see the poems arise from the language itself.

With this book, I wanted to do something different. I wanted it to be much more direct and vulnerable. It's the first book I've written in the first person. The speaker is much closer to the surface. I wanted to convey the immediacy of experience but also some interiority of the writer or the speaker.

There's much more risk and the vulnerability [in using first person]. It was like a challenge to myself to see if I could be more revealing in that way. Whereas before, there would be some construct, like a character or a historical figure or a piece of art or a piece of music, that I would kind of use to refract all of that. [The “I”] was much more below the surface.

Radha: This question of the poem’s speaker, the “I,” seems like a big one for contemporary writers. We're writing in the shadow of the confessional poets on one hand and, on the other, the narrative poetry of this time also often touches on very personal stories. So, I'm curious, how did you think about that?

Sean: That's an interesting question. I think there’s a corollary to social media where people treat Facebook or Twitter or whatever almost like this oracle that you scream all of your problems into when, in fact, it's almost like a public utility. It creates the impression of intimacy when, in fact, it's the opposite of that.

I think it can be very narrowing to just think of trauma in a poem. What I tried to do was not treat difficulties or traumas with a kind of warmth, the warmth of my personality, but the opposite. I would be standing back from it at an arm's length with a lot of psychic distance to just describe these things as they are, without trying to infuse my own opinions or judgments.

I think this top-down system we have in poetry is very unhealthy because it narrows the scope of what people feel permission they have to write about. So, it's not an easy thing to solve or think about. But I do think that poets need to be responsible for things that are not necessarily limited to their own story. I think everyone can do better to push beyond that.

Radha: One thing that I admire in Today in the Taxi is the space of each poem. A taxi ride is an enclosed, finite thing, just as a poem is a finite thing in which you're on a journey, moving through something. It’s an intimate space, in a sense, and yet completely ordinary. What I love about the space that you're creating in each of these poems is the “I” becomes more than a personal “I” as the speaker interacts with the people in the taxi, the characters, the city.

I think this very interesting thing for us to consider as we're developing books. If we are writing in first person, well, what does that first person serve? Does it serve a set of universal themes that are beyond a personal “I”?

I'd love to talk a little bit about the approachability of the poems. They read very naturally. Readers might think that they were easy to write but that’s probably not the case. Could you briefly describe your process?

Sean: It’s difficult to make something complicated simple. In most of the poems, there's the immediate experience. And then there are my reactions to it or thinking it through. And then I have these other voices that I mentioned, that are like the ethical GPS that could provide an opposing counter force or countervailing force to the cerebral reaction. Mingus could represent the volatility or the hostile reaction. And then The Lord is sort of like the moral or the ethical core of how to deal with the entire world.

You're this person driving and what does that actually mean? What does that entail? What do you do when somebody is crying three feet away from you, but you're not involved with it? You're not involved with their lives. No woman wants a strange man, the taxi driver, to respond. The human part of you feels like “I really need to do something.” Things like that all day long. It's very contradictory, and I think it tells us something about the situation we're in [as a society] where so much of our attention is given to fantasy and not reality because social media is increasingly controlling our experience.

But for those of us who are old enough to remember life before the internet, that's actually not the experience. Uber is not really a taxi service, it's a data collection service. What they're selling actually is the passenger—you—because they know your name, your address, your credit card number, where you're going, who you're with, where you are at what time of day, and on and on and on. They package and sell us, and we actually pay for them to do that.

I did more than 8,000 trips. Those are in a cloud somewhere—all these data points. So, part of the thinking of the book was to return the humaneness, the human part, of these stories—to kind of reclaim them. There's a whole world in each of these trips, a whole microcosm. Part of it is a statement about not necessarily allowing tech companies to take everything

from us.

Radha: I hadn't thought about the book in that larger context, but it makes so much sense. And it underscores what's so beautiful about the book—the literal experience of being in the taxi, interacting with different people, thinking, What do these moments mean? I think it's a great reflection tool for readers in that way. Certainly it felt like that for me.

A lot of folks who are reading and watching to Poet to Poet are interested in the development of books and the path to publication. You won a very significant prize, the Yale Younger prize. I think folks tend to think that winning a prize like that is like having a magic key. That may or may not be the case. Would you mind sharing a little bit about your publishing journey?

Sean: I was 26 at the time. It was just one of those fluke things that happened. I had finished my MFA, but I didn't really know anyone. I will say that it really didn't make publishing books any easier. It made publishing in journals a little bit easier, I think. But, if anything, it creates a situation of expectation, internal and external expectations, to “do something great.” But you can't repeat yourself. And it's very, very hard to reconnect to that wilderness that was there when you were 18, to keep that untamed part of you alive under the pressures of life.

The other thing I would say, which is so important to keep in mind, is that there is no meritocracy in poetry. It just doesn't exist. The publishing industry, book publishing, is subject to all of the race, gender, class, caste systems that affect everything else. They are not presented transparently, but they're there nonetheless. For every mountain, you climb and poetry, you're really rewarded with another mountain to climb. It's not like you get there, and there's a plateau

The impression that we get from looking at social media is that everybody does this [publishes books] on their own, which is just completely wrong. Nobody does anything on their own. You need a personal board of directors around you at all times to sort of open doors for you, for encouragement. This is the advantage of a writing group or a workshop, like there's a group of simpatico people who know what it's like who are sort of trying to do the same thing as you. And they're a captive group of readers.

I do think that people spend a lot of time on creative writing, but not nearly enough time, or really any time on creative reading, which is not expecting a poem to be a product that you could buy and then consume, like Cookie Monster, and then it's done. It's the poem isn't going to do that for you. You have to come to it with your own questions, your own life, experience your own inquiry. And then the meaning is then a joint project between the poet and the reader who could be separated from you from space and time. I mean, we don't know.

My second book, which was more left of center, much more experimental, was actually rejected 77 times in 13 years. So that's a long time in between books. I started and finished a dissertation. I had two children. I had jobs of varying success and part timeliness. There was no “there” there. You know what I mean?

I think all you can really do is support other people read as much as possible. You know, and the the central problem with poetry. It's not like cooking, or knitting or cabinet making or anything like that, in fact, the problem remains the same. Whether you're Louise Gluck, or Merwin, or me, or you're in an MFA program, everybody is concerned with the same problem, which is: Fill this blank page with something. That's it, that's the whole game, there's nothing else. The reward is that. That's it.

It's very difficult but could be life enhancing to take poetry seriously. An MFA, a PhD, a prize might impress your partner, your kids, but it's really just a sticker that says, “I did this thing.”

Tony Morrison said, “Once you get up this ladder, it's your job to then pull people up.”

Radha: Thank you, Sean. These are wise words.

Find Sean Singer at seansinger.com and on Facebook. Subscribe to his newsletter, The Sharpener at seansinger.substack.com.