3. Environmental Sensemaking and the Body as Cartographic Organizing Principle in the Poetry of the London Underground

This analysis draws on recent work in situated cognition and the phenomenology of embodied Experience, considering first how passengers navigate and cognitively map underground transit system to confront the disorientation and confusion induced by subterranean spaces, and then examining literary representations of such mapping processes in action. I demonstrate how for poets of the London underground such as Donald Davie, Carol Ann Duffy and Seamus Heaney, the movements and nonvisual sensations of the body, organized according to the coordinates of what cognitive scientists call the spatial body framework, provide means of mentally mapping the environment that compensate for deprivations and distortions of sight below-ground and constitute sensorimotor alternatives to visual cartography. In “Londoners” (1990), Davie shifts sensory emphasis toward sound, departing from a disembodied, ocularcentric privileging of the visual; in “Woman Seated in the Underground, 1941” (1985), Duffy proposes embodied movement rather than sensation as the basic for stable identity and interpersonal connection; and in “District and Cricle” (2006), Heaney holds out the possibility of physical and social orientation within the otherwise alienating and confusing urban milieu via a “coembodiment” between self and other. Such poetic representations of environmental sensemaking, I argue, help to articulate what we might mean by a nonvisual cartography of underground places.