“I Was a Stranger, the One Who Could Remember”: A Review of Sean Singer’s TODAY IN THE TAXI

New York City cab drivers have an almost mythic status in the American imagination. We think of them as loners who work the fringes of society, akin to cowboys in their savvy, self-reliant mode of living. Their occupation requires that they observe and listen to the needs of others while restraining their own impulses, so we ascribe to them the discerning, insightful minds of philosophers. In his latest collection, Today in the Taxi, Sean Singer elaborates on and complicates this mythic figure; he describes his own experiences as a cab driver, interweaving personal stories with thoughts on jazz music, Franz Kafka, the spiritual lives of prophets and saints, the films of Jim Jarmusch and his own wry sense of humor. In a voice that is both candid and lyrical by turns, Singer illuminates his experience as one of the urban workers whom Graham Russell Gao Hodges refers to as luftmenchen, meaning “people of wind, smoke and onion skin.”  

Today in the Taxi is comprised of a series of sixty-two prose poems that take the form of diary entries. Each piece unfolds as a daily meditation on cab driving. In a poem whose title could be a deep cut from an obscure rock or jazz album, “Antivenom,” Singer begins by recounting the discomfort he felt when a passenger left her baby alone with him in his cab. He riffs off of this feeling of unease, jumping nimbly to thoughts of American saxophonist Don Byas and then to Franz Kafka. These discursions, like the arpeggiated improvisations of a jazz musician, sketch out a space of wonder and emotion; they allow us to follow the contours of Singer’s thoughts as he puzzles over the brief yet revealing interactions he has within the sacred precincts of the cab. I am reminded of Basho’s diaries-cum-haibun collections, Travelogue of Weather Beaten Bones, or Narrow Road to the Interior. Each of Basho’s diary entries begins with a recounting of daily experiences then shifts into the poetic reigster of haiku. Singer performs a similar gesture by relating the everyday events of his life, then drawing us into the symbolic, the interior of his being. “I use my breaking and steering inputs to turn inward,” he writes in the opening poem, “One Tenth.”

Through these hybrid poems we bear witness to Singer’s frustrations and the slights he is forced to suffer, issued by various occupants of his cab. “Sometimes passengers treat the driver like he’s invisible,” he laments, yet, in spite of this he maintains a generous spirit, interpreting his role as providential, part of a divine plan. When ferrying a man to meet his drug dealer he notes, “The vehicle is not just a way to get to the crime, but somehow to bless whatever the journey needs.” This thread of blessing and faith weaves throughout the collection, partly through Singer’s repeated references to a female-gendered entity called “the Lord.” This being, much like Singer himself, must perform the abject tasks of cleaning up and attending to things that others do not see. She must push a shopping cart full of plastic bottles taken from a trash can, she must swab the deck of the Orizaba, the steamship that Hart Crane leapt from to his death. In one poem she is a raccoon in Central Park North rooting through a garbage can. Who is she, this strange creature, part-terrestrial, part-divine, that transfigures herself repeatedly? Perhaps she is an aspect of Singer, himself, or perhaps she is a debased god, one that Singer can address without feeling pressured to prostrate himself.

Some of the strongest parts of the collection read like spiritual instructions issued by a cab driver. In “Limbo,” he writes:

When the oncoming headlights are too bright, it is said you should look to the side at the lines on the road. You would stop yourself from being blinded, and stop yourself to imagine the road ahead, unstrung, and the rubber against it.

In “Rites,” he explains “Driving it must be noted, is about 10% physical and 90% mental. The wheel obeys the commands of the rose brain and its taut rituals.” These observations convey the speaker’s identification with his role as cab driver. In the film Taxi Driver, Peter Boyle’s character says of cab driving: “A man takes a job and that job becomes what he is.” Singer expresses a similar sentiment in “Harlem River Drive,” “The driver is nothing without the 3,300 pounds of metal slicing the air,” he concludes. The speaker of these poems is not merely reporting his experiences, he embodies his vocation, he is one with his vehicle, the wheel, the tires and the road. This sense of oneness with his occupation invests the driver’s speech with a quality of transcendental vision. He transforms the act of cab driving into a spiritual discipline that runs parallel to the other forms of faith alluded to in the book.

Being a collection focused on the daily routines of a cab driver, the atmosphere of the metropolis pervades Today in the Taxi. Bare, gritty, skyscraper-lined New York streets wind across every page, as Singer leads us through an exploration of the taxi as a site of danger and intimacy, a place where feelings of unwanted desire or anger can push through at unexpected times. It is a unique venue, the driver and passengers are strangers thrust together in a space as private as any confessional booth. In Jim Jarmush’s nocturnal comedy-drama, Night on Earth, a film Singer cites in a poem bearing the same title, this is precisely the purpose the cab serves. To judge by Singer’s poems, this brief intimacy provides a window onto a wide array of human emotions and experiences. These collected vignettes create a dynamic mosaic of life in the city, one that is poignant, harrowing, and at times darkly funny.

Rather than existing purely as standalone pieces, these poems gain power through their connection to one another, in this way they are reminiscent of other poetry collections such as Dear Editor by Amy Newman, and, more recently, the hybrid collection, Dear Memory by Victoria Chang, both of which use the repeated epistolary form of address to yoke together a series of related poems or essays. The titular line “Today in the taxi…” not only establishes the diaristic mode of the poems, but also acts as a refrain, giving the whole book a larger music; it creates a rhythm that draws the reader from one poem to the next.

Throughout the book we experience a cab driver’s loneliness and abjection. Singer’s driver must bear the weight of human anger, sexuality, compulsion and fear. He must be the recorder of these events. “I was a stranger, the one who could remember,” he says, waiting in his cab for an ambulance to rescue an unconscious thirteen-year-old boy. Yet, these feelings never threaten to overwhelm the collection, instead we feel Singer’s reserve, his quiet watchfulness “I put up with things calmly, without weight, without bones…” Beyond the negotiation of these fraught interactions we sense a spiritual yearning. In the concluding poem of the collection, “Take Hold of It,” we recognize the job of cab driver as a spiritual path:

Tomorrow in the taxi it will be another day. I’ll read the book twice, then lend it out for someone else to read quickly, then I’ll read it again.

When a prophet asked the Lord about what the book meant, She said, Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it…

Singer’s lord communicates her final thought to him, “Be silent, for this is the way I have determined it,” she says. The cab driver’s occupation, as rendered in this book, has been divinely ordained. The stories he recounts serve as metaphors for our lives, for the ways we must endure and accept each other with humility and patience, even as we exhaust one another with our frantic hunger to get from point A to point B. “Driving taught me to accept people for who they are, but other times I wish for an asteroid crashing into the city from the cold drain of space.” such is the cutting acceptance of reality that Today in the Taxi presents us with.

Taxi drivers, cast in the role of watchers and servants, are necessarily alone, their own lives hidden behind the role they play. It is hard to establish a genuine connection with people who come and go, who wash over the city streets like tides. Yet Singer’s cab driver never devolves into self-pity, instead, his thoughts go upwards, towards a personal spiritual force, or they pull downwards into the soul, the asphalt and the road itself. They gesture towards something human yet mythic, something that glitters with the city streetlights and wafts along on smog and steam into the realms of the mystic.