How American poets have explored driving, in all its facets

“Whither goest thou, America,” asked Jack Kerouac in On the Road, “in thy shiny car in the night?” For American poets, the act of driving has always harbored a critical dichotomy. It can express the thrill and the freedom of the open road, but it can also foster fears of ecological catastrophe, crashes, and police violence. In Poetic Drive, Joel Duncan examines the writings and experimental film collaborations of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, Eileen Myles, and Claudia Rankine to show that while poets have consistently inhabited the driver’s seat as a vehicle for self-possession, they have also reckoned with the social exclusions and environmental destruction central to American automobility. These poets have at times left their cars behind as stalled junk, or simply stopped driving them, mourning the forms of violence they encountered behind the wheel.

While previous studies have considered road novels and films, Poetic Drive is the first book to explore how American poets have harnessed the contradictory nature of automobility in crafting new work. By tracking poets’ vexed engagements with automobility over more than a century, Duncan offers a unique contribution to ecopoetics and petrocultures scholarship that expands our understanding of the place of driving in American literature and culture.