The Basement Trains (a 21st century poem)

the long version

The poem begins in ‘an ancient garden in the midnight city,’ where a nocturnal recollection of the past begins an epic voyage traversing centuries of ideas and continents of profound imagery. “The Basement Trains,” Payne’s greatest long prose poem, written when he was 28 years old, conjures up a wealth of poetic legacies: from Dante’s visit to the underworld, to TS Eliot’s ‘Mind of Europe.’ Here, one sees William Blake, Milton, the Catholic Bible, Greek and Roman myth, Russian folklore; and, beyond this, one hears the voice of Roman Payne in its purest poetic form.