I have about twenty such poems, dating back to around 1970. They chronicle motorcycle rides from coast to coast and border to border, runs of thousands of miles, weeks and months long. These poems all run fifteen or so pages, and fifteen minutes or so, in length. It turns out there are no short epic journeys, no short epic poems.

Epic tales and poetry have been around about as long as people. I am confident it is a condition of language and that it probably somehow predates speech. The "Iliad and the Odyssey," and Virgil's "Aenid," are usually the classic examples given of the genre. Other cultures have given us "The Legend of Gilgamesh," "Parcival" and so forth. And there are also many works like "The Canterbury Tales" and "Beowulf," and more recently some of the work of Mark Twain, Longfellow, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.

Epics are, by definition, long narrative pieces. And they typically recount a legend or a history, or extol the virtues and deeds of a national or cultural (or sub-cultural; and scootertrash counts as a subculture, so my poetry counts here) folk hero. In many societies, Classic Greek or Old Norse for example, these long poems were delivered on specific occasions.

There is often a ritualistic element to it all. I refer to this in one of my own poems: It might have to do with migration/or just the need for goin',/and it comes around annual./But the leavin' motions/ are always the same;/it's like some kind of ritual./ I put my bedroll together/roll and tie my leather./Pack a campstove and a coffeepot/gear for bein' both cold and hot./Spend some time gettin' it clean,/figure out which way it leans.

These ancient epics started out as the real stuff, as genuine folk poetry, probably with a lot of truth behind them. I doubt Homer had any idea his work would be studied thousands of years later. These tales recount the times and places in the same way as contemporary road literature. More modern examples of such work include some of the songs of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.

There are earlier sub-culture epics like "Casey at the Bat," and 'The Legend of John Henry." And then there is a whole bunch of African-American folk poetry, often called "toasts," that was seldom written down. There is one such toast called "Shine" about the guy who was the coal stoker on the Titanic for example. There is evidence that many of the ancient and early, as well as the more recent subcultural, epic stories were set up in rhyme and meter so that they could be memorized more easily by the pre-literate and illiterate regular people.

No matter the author or the audience, the topic, the point, is the journey, the going someplace. Besides formulaic rhyme and meter schemes, many early epics also had mandatory lists of heroic accomplishments, requisite lengthy accounts of who was met along the way, and detailed names of the places gone to, and things that were seen. It was important to recount the weather and the route and countryside. Some of the ancient stories and poems read like extensive inventories.

Longfellow's epic poems, "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline" are also good examples, as are most of the poems of Robert Service. Again, because of their length maybe, these poems have a strict metric structure and rhyme scheme. Similarly, "The Strawberry Roan," "The Streets of Laredo," and many other such cowboy poems and western ballads tell the tale of a heroic deed, with pretty rigid rhyme and metric restrictions. Contemporary Cowboy Poetry is very similar.

Again, the meter and rhyme were often set up to accommodate memory, in lieu of writing it down. I once heard a recreation of what "Beowulf" probably sounded like in the original Old English; the orator played something that looked like a guitar, and he sort of chanted the tale with a specific rhyme and beat. It was a whole lot better than the way we got it in class.

I had written a dozen or so such poems before I caught on to what I was doing and did enough research to know all this. I got a hunch that epic poetry really is one of those things that is part of being human. Just passing through seems to have been a pretty consistent theme in history, probably in pre-history, too. Ulysses and Huck Finn were really doing pretty much the same thing: Moving on, passin' through, traveling, exploring, if for no other reason than to look at something different. Much of it has to do with the human need for goin'.

There is a part of a poem of mine: My Grandfather used to say to me,/Boy tell me where it was you went to./Tell me about the things you've seen./He'd want to know all about the sights/and the names and the places/and about my highway machine.

That's what I think it's about. It's about imparting to others where it was you went to, explaining about what you saw, telling about the exotic names and places, the wondrous things and strange people you encountered on your trip. It's about down the road, around the bend, beyond that hill yonder.

Anyway, in 1998, I finally got a book published. Longrider - a tale of just passin' through is about my million miles on motor- cycles over the years and along the way. In the doing of all this, I learned that writing a book is really relatively easy. Getting one published, conversely, is a heroic endeavor. And then selling the damn thing is an undertaking of Herculean proportions.

Some really good things happened as a result of the tape and the book. I got to do some readings at bars and parties and campfires and a wedding reception. I might even have made a couple dollars, but it wasn't like I was able to quit my stupid day job or anything. I heard a story about how a biker out in Arizona had wrecked his scooter and killed himself. And they played my tape at the funeral.

Then the book got me invited to the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville. It also got nominated for a Pushcart Literary Award. I did a couple readings at bookstores, shilling and hawking my modest literary efforts. I am pretty sure that when you go to Hell you are condemned in perpetuity to sitting at a card table in a bookstore trying to sell your book.

Then somewhere along the line, I sent a copy of the book and tape up to an old friend who teaches at the SUNY campus in Potsdam. And my buddy showed them to the guy who chairs the English Department there. He liked them both a lot. And then the two of them got to talking about other books about the road.

They began with Kerouac, and his classic, maybe pinnacle, work, On the Road. They listed Tom Wolf's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways. I don't recall if Steinbeck's Travels with Charley was on the original list or not, but it is now. And they also had Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig on their list.

Peter S. Beagle's book, I See By My Outfit was incorporated, as was some of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I think. Maybe his Hell's Angels was included, but it really shouldn't be. Recent additions have been Larry McMurty's Roads, and Robert Kaplan's book, An Empire Wilderness, although the latter really isn't about "the road."

And then, somehow, in a mysterious process known only to academics, these guys in Potsdam turned the whole thing into a class called Literature of The American Road.

And then their campus was the host of The American Voices Festival in the Spring of 2001. And, as a part of the festivity, they had a symposium about Road Lit. as it was by now being called by the students. I was invited.

And I had a real fine time. I went to the Road Lit. class a couple times, talked to the students about riding and writing. And they had me on a couple of panels with some other authors and such. And I was invited to entertain at a dormitory and some other kind of academic gathering; I told them a recent poem that isn't on the tape.

I have some real fond memories of that experience as visiting important author. The first day on campus, I found myself outside, shunned and banished, in the cold and snow with the other smokers. One young man kept looking at me. Finally he smiled and pointed at me and said, "Wow, man. You're the assignment." I felt I had arrived at what would surely be the pinnacle of my academic career. And there was a boy up there who played some real pretty guitar backing up my poetry recitals. But the best part was being able to share my lifelong love for the highway and the motion and the freedom and the distance with the students and others who were there. I talked to the students in the class about it all. And I discovered that most of them, after having read most of what was on the booklist, they Got It. The guys teaching the class are good at what they do. In lieu of a final exam, the students were strongly encouraged to take a road trip of their own over Spring Break and then write about it. I have, incidentally, stolen the entire class and will be teaching it for the first time next semester. I have seldom looked forward to work with this enthusiasm.

In one of those roadpoems, I try to explain, "The highway calls and the distance beckons./I chase ancient memories,/pursue primeval passions./It's gypsy nomad wanderlust,/all in a scooter- trash fashion."

And, like Kerouac and Least Heat Moon and John Steinbeck and them other boys, I felt passionate enough to try to write about it. I try to explain in my book that I think it's the result of some kind of unfortunate genetic convergence of nomad-gypsy-cowboy- pirate genes. The best times I can recall have been out on the road, so that's what I write about, both in poetry and in prose. I have spent much of a career in academe trying to get young people to write about what they know about. Anything else will be hollow and artificial.

Again, from an old roadpoem: And I got up to where/I needed to listen to/that big bike rumble;/to hear the thunder/on down the line./Had to get back out to/where all there is/is other laces and different times.

Most of what comprises this literary genre is about the love of the road as much as it is about the destination, the itinerary, or the logistics. That must be the case, because most of the travelers, since before Ulysses, often returned to their point of departure. It really is about the road. One of the nicest compliments I ever got was in a review of my tape in a truck driver magazine called rpm. The guy said the poems might have been about motorcycles, but that there was a whole lot of trucker in them as well. I was enormously flattered. The road is the road. The vehicles and directions and experiences vary.

Literature of the American Road is about America over the years and along the way. It chronicles the times and places passed through. Unlike some other literary genre's, Road Lit. probably isn't timeless or even maybe very important in the larger sense of great literature. I doubt Kerouac will ever replace Chaucer or Homer. But both those old boys were writing road lit, too.

Most road literature is a period piece, and, as a genre' it sure does tell about the changes that America has undergone along the way and over the years. For example, in both Longrider and the sequel, I found myself frequently writing some kind of historic disclaimer: Remember now, this was the 1960s or the early '70s, and folks used to treat one another better and take care of each other back then.

There was a time when, if you broke down, you either fixed it or pushed it to someplace where someone might help you fix it. Now the cell phone has become the Tool of Choice in such difficult situations. There was a time the guy at the gas station (remember those?) might tell you to go on ahead and climb up in the wrecker or pitch a tent out back and sleep for the night. But all this is chronicled in these books.

Another thing that is pretty obvious here is that road lit. isn't always just about the road. Sometimes the road maps, the destinations, even the trips themselves, are internal. The travelers, like Ulysses and his ilk, invariably return to from whence they came. It completes the circle. The highway provides the muse and the vehicle (no pun intended; no, really) for the stories. The stories are, at least in part, about the road and the times and places the road runs through.

As I once tried to explain, in pretty structured meter and rhyme: Needed to get out to where all/there is time and milepost signs,/and places I ain't been to yet/and places in between./Needed to get out there and/burn up some of my money/on some high-test gasoline./Needed to get back out/there in the saddle and/listen to my highway machine.

Another interesting aspect here is that many of these titles (OK, not mine, but a lot of them) became best sellers, and a few have managed to become cult classics, some are even regular literary classics. Of more contemporary importance, some (OK, again not mine) have been made into movies.

One of the things almost all road lit. has in common is that it isn't fiction. The way things go down, out on the road, there is hardly reason to have to even exaggerate, much less make any- thing up. There may be some literary license taken, but the stories are pretty much authentic stuff.

Another commonality is that most of this stuff was written by white guys. Yeah, you can find the occasional road lit. book by a woman, but not often. There is a lot of 19th century work by women, but most of it reads like endless lists of the things and people they had to abandon, and bury on their way across the country by wagon train. And, as one has come to expect, many of the few current such offerings are fraught with feminist anger. And I did find a book by a black guy who took a canoe the length of the Mississippi. Hell of a journey. Pretty good book, too. But, most of it, at least historically is white guy dominated.

After having reread and reviewed most of the books on the road lit. list, I came to a number of such conclusions. One of them is that part about how people used to help one another a lot more than we do anymore. I blame technology for this and for most of the other social (asocial?) problems plaguing contemporary America. We have become a suspicious, paranoid culture of isolated individuals, rather than the helpful, cooperative society of years gone by. Or maybe that helpful, friendly thing was a myth.

And that brings us to another of my conclusions. Much of what is written about the road centers on the colorful characters met along the way. And many of these characters originally came to us as helpers of some kind. These folks achieve heroic proportions and become champions of the broke-down traveler. And, sadly, their number is diminishing as we become more isolated from one another due to technology.

In Longrider I spent a lot of time writing about savior waitresses. I mention them all by name. Finally, in the sequel, I got around to a philosophic discussion of the intimacy involved in having a woman feed you. In a couple of instances, it was the courageous waitress who saved me from getting my ass kicked by the local indigenous boys spoilin' for a fight. Other times they just fed me well, or they let me set and drink coffee until the rain had passed. Once in awhile they smiled at me real pretty. Someplace in Longrider II I tell a tale about a waitress who took me home with her. Kept me awhile, too. Talk about heroic.

Others who came along as helpers obviously include mechanics. I have some fine stories of scootershops and stray mechanics along the way who saved the day with a wrench. Other times it's just folks who come along and help you out of a jam. That sequel of mine has a story about a guy whose house I broke down in front of one time. He rescued me from imminent disaster. And he offered me iced tea and a place to wash up afterward.

Sometimes folks come to your aid in the form of directions. It's always embarrassing to have to admit you are lost, but it sure is gratifying to find help and a way out. Sometimes you get much more. I happened upon a boy, another biker, years ago on the ferryboat from Maine to Nova Scotia. When I asked him where was the cheapest place to stay on Prince Edward Island, he responded, "My house."

I had very much the same thing happen last summer. I went to a motorcycle rally in Nebraska to sell some books and tapes. And my battery went dead while there. Typically it was of a Sunday. And one of the guys who I had just met the day before made it his personal mission to find me a battery. The operative word in all that was Nebraska.

While it turns out Nebraska is home to some true fine people, some beautiful country, and some great beef, it is not a hotbed of commercial activity. But this man found me a battery in the wilderness. He became my local hero. I asked him what he would have done if he had been unable to locate one. I already knew the answer. He told me he would have taken the one out of his motor- cycle and put it in mine. And I am invited back to his house anytime.

Such tales are in nearly all road lit. The other consistent and recurring thing is, obviously, the other end of that; you always run into some mean bastards out there someplace. On the road they sometimes come in the form of uniformed authorities. This is not to say that some cops aren't nice people and fine human beings. I have been saved a time or two by highway heroes in the form of police of one kind of another.

But it turns out a lot of cops think it is THEIR road. Hell, some of them think it is their world. And, often, if you ain't from right around there, they figure you don't belong to be there. You are perceived as an alien, a damn foreigner. To compound things, you probably talk funny, and they figure out you are just passing through and that you are probably up to something.

But you run into sons of bitches and worse both in and out of uniform. Some of them are running stores or gas stations, some of them restaurants, some motels, some scootershops. And once in awhile you encounter one who is just there, with the express purpose of making a mess out of your ride. Like miserable bastards in life not on the road, they come in all sexes and sizes and colors and ages. Again, similar to the greater ratio of life, the heroes outnumber the pricks. If it weren't so, we would all stay home, and I would have nothing to write about.

© copyright 2002 Mark K. Edmonds