The Subway (C Train) as a Symbol of Modern Alienation and Encounter in God I Feel Modern Tonight
Introduction
In Catherine Cohen’s debut poetry collection God I Feel Modern Tonight, the New York City subway—especially the C train—functions as more than a setting. It becomes a concrete symbol of the speaker’s routine urban life, her alienation, and the unexpected encounters that punctuate her days. The C train appears explicitly in only one poem, but its resonance reaches into other subway moments across the collection, linking themes of modern anxiety and discontent, performance and authenticity, and digital culture and social media. This analysis examines what the C train literally represents, where it recurs (directly and indirectly), how its meaning shifts, and how it connects to the speaker and other characters. It concludes with four study questions rooted in the text.
Literal Description and Direct Occurrence
The C train is a subway line that runs through Manhattan and Brooklyn, known for its frequent service and stops at major transfer points. In the poem “poem I wrote after I woke up at 6 a.m. as a joke,” the speaker gets stuck on a C train with her beaded bag. She describes speaking to a guy who claims he has the best sound system in lower Manhattan. This mundane yet frustrating situation—being trapped on a delayed train—is the poem’s catalyst. The speaker’s mind then leaps from the subway to a series of disconnected modern preoccupations: being late to therapy, restaurant seating policies, checking her phone, and imagining her daughter’s first podcast.
The C train appears only by name in this single poem. However, the subway as a setting recurs elsewhere. In “poem I wrote after seeing that guy from project runway at the whole foods AGAIN,” the speaker recalls being on the L train and trying to remember a man she met during sex. In “Life is in the spaces between sex with you,” she observes her own reflection through aisles at a bodega on Nostrand Avenue (connected to the subway system). These moments create a mosaic of underground or transit‑adjacent experiences, all sharing the claustrophobia and randomness that the C train poem crystallizes.
How the Symbol’s Meaning Changes
Initially, the C train represents a literal inconvenience: the speaker and her bag are stuck. That stuckness forces a random conversation, which she treats with ironic distance—the man’s claim about his sound system is absurd. The train thus becomes a stage for the performance of everyday life; the speaker performs being stuck, and the man performs his bravado. Beyond the literal, the C train symbolizes the speaker’s entrapment in contemporary rituals: therapy, dating, social media. The poem’s daydreams about future restaurant policies and her daughter’s first podcast suggest that even while physically stuck, her mind drifts toward other forms of waiting and obligation. The train’s immobility mirrors her own resistance to growth—she later questions her therapist about why she should want to grow, concluding “what is she trying to prove?” The C train, then, becomes a vehicle for existential stuckness.
By the poem’s end, the C train’s meaning deepens through contrast. The Italian waiter’s comment about the sound of rain offers a different kind of being—immersive, natural, free from digital noise. The speaker immediately undercuts this by asking if he wanted to sleep with her, reframing the romantic as the transactional. The C train, in retrospect, is where she confronts both the possibility of genuine connection and her own tendency to reduce it to a hookup question. The train thus oscillates between a site of banal frustration and a space where deeper desires leak out.
Character Connections
The C train does not directly involve the collection’s other named characters (the lover/partner, ex‑boyfriend, therapist, friend, stranger). However, the stranger on the train becomes a minor character in the speaker’s narrative. The man with the sound system is one of many strangers she encounters; he is unnamed and his boast is reported with deadpan humor. This reflects the speaker’s relationship with the broader city: she is both engaged and detached. The therapist appears only in the subsequent lines, as the speaker imagines being late to a session. The C train’s delay creates a temporal link to therapy, where the speaker resists improvement—tying the train to her reluctance to change.
The speaker herself is the central consciousness. Her beaded bag, also mentioned in “poem I wrote after I crummed,” travels with her from the C train to CityMD, linking urban transit to health anxiety. The bag is a material marker of her persona: quirky, feminine, and slightly absurd. On the C train, it is her sole companion until the man speaks. The bag thus participates in the symbol, emphasizing how even personal objects become part of the subway’s chaotic intimacy.
Theme Connections
The C train anchors several of the collection’s major themes. Modern anxiety and discontent is palpable in the speaker’s resentment at waiting—for the train to move, for the party to arrive, for therapy to start. Her impatience echoes throughout the book. Performance and authenticity emerge in the conversation with the train stranger; both parties perform versions of themselves (he, the knowledgeable audiophile; she, the patient subway rider). Yet the poem’s dreamy turn toward rain and desire suggests a longing for authenticity that the subway cannot provide.
Digital culture and social media appear when the speaker anticipates checking her phone and hearing a podcast version of her daughter’s voice. The C train becomes a liminal space where analog stuckness meets digital escape. Body image and self-critique are also implied: the speaker’s beaded bag may be part of her self-presentation, and her physical stuckness echoes body consciousness. Finally, love and disconnection haunt the poem’s conclusion, where the memory of the waiter’s romantic sentiment is immediately questioned. The C train is thus a microcosm of the speaker’s world: repetitive, irritating, and oddly poetic.
Study Questions
1. What does the speaker’s beaded bag suggest about her character, and how does it connect to the C train setting?
The beaded bag appears in two poems: stuck on the C train and later taken to CityMD. It functions as a personal object that travels with the speaker through mundane and anxious moments. On the C train, the bag is a companion before the stranger speaks, underscoring her solitude. The bag’s ornate, feminine style contrasts with the roughness of the subway, highlighting the speaker’s attempt to bring a touch of beauty or individuality into an indifferent public space.
2. How does the C train poem contrast with the memory of the Italian waiter that appears later in the same poem?
The C train scene is defined by technology (the man’s sound system, the speaker’s phone) and frustrated waiting. The memory of the Italian waiter introduces a sensory, natural image—the sound of rain—that seems more authentic and meditative. However, the speaker undercuts this by wondering if the waiter wanted to sleep with her, suggesting that even in memory she cannot escape her own cynical lens. The contrast reveals how moments of potential depth are immediately flattened by modern habits of reduction.
3. In what ways does the structure of the C train poem (leaping from the train to therapy to the waiter) mirror the speaker’s experience of urban life?
The poem follows a stream‑of‑consciousness pattern: a single subway delay triggers thoughts about future inconvenience (therapy, restaurants), digital culture (phone, daughter’s podcast), and then a disconnected memory. This associative flow mirrors the fragmented, overstimulated quality of New York City life, where one mundane event can spark a cascade of anxieties, desires, and absurdities. The speaker’s mind never settles, much like the city itself.
4. Why does the speaker resist her therapist’s claim that growth reduces suffering, and how does the C train reinforce that resistance?
Immediately after the C train vignette, the speaker asks her therapist why she should want to grow, and the therapist’s answer (“you will suffer less”) is met with skepticism: “what is she trying to prove?” The C train’s stuckness is both literal and metaphorical; it traps the speaker in a moment she resists moving beyond. By refusing to accept growth, the speaker embraces a kind of permanent adolescence—a state the C train, with its delay and lack of progress, perfectly symbolizes.