Supplementing, restructuring, resisting: Maps of Underground space in poetry, embodied performativity, and the “misrepresentationalism” of Harry Beck's Tube diagram

Abstract This article considers mental and poetic “maps” of London in their respective relationships to Harry Beck's famous 1930s “circuit‐diagram” map of the underground railway system. This iconic image distorts and radically stylizes London geography; thus, it functions as a tool for planning individual travel itineraries but leads to a misrepresentative top‐down mental map of the city. I focus on poetry by Michael Donaghy, D. J. Enright, and Carole Satyamurti that confronts the “ocularcentrism” of visual mapping and the stylization of Beck's image and, I argue, proposes the embodied experience of transit passengers as an alternative basis for conceptually organizing city space. These poets “write in” what pictorial cartography excludes, reorganizing London geography within the passenger's cognitive map and challenging the authority of Beck's image to establish what constitutes “official” territory via inclusion in or exclusion from the standard visual representation of the transit system.