Rhyme and Reason

From the halls of academia to the shores of coffeehouse tables, poets find difficulty in being taken seriously.
It helps a little when they have a book out.  The Biker Poets now have a book out, and it is available online and at the Biker Poets & Writers Association website, www.bpwa.net

It seems that the twenty-something year old genre of biker poetry can now be taken a little more seriously, with a new biker poets anthology now out; RUBBER SIDE DOWN, The Biker Poet Anthology.  Not that any biker poet worth his salt that I know would care what someone else thinks about them. But this new anthology, published by Archer Books, LA, CA, is a case of a very rich literary history finally coming to fruition.  RSD features work by 44 poets (16 are women) and also features the incredible photography of Michael Lichter of Easyriders magazine fame.

On August 4th, 2008, Archer Books officially released RUBBER SIDE DOWN.  There is a saying among bikers as they ready to ride, “Keep the rubber side down, shiny side up!” In other words, don’t tip over, fool.  The biker poets in RSD don’t tip over, but rather take you on one hell of a ride from cover to cover.  To quote the great, famous Alicia Ostriker on this book, “The shiny side is truly up, the rubber side is truly down, and the language is truly alive, in this speedy, funky, glamorous, gloriously freedom-loving, death-defying, windblown and joyous anthology of poems.”

Poetry is the fine art of literature. It is what tells us of our history and our humanity, connects our spirits and moves our souls. Therefore, poetry is the wheel, the rubber of the mechanism spinning, thus propeling the machine forward (motorcycles don’t have reverse). RUBBER SIDE DOWN leaves the rest of the phrase, “shiny side up,” for prose.  But that’s another publication for another blog, maybe next year. One book at a time, here.

RSD is dedicated to Allen Ginsberg & Hunter S. Thompson, with quotes by Thompson and Lucinda Williams, and poetry by Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, Diane Wakoski, H-D Historian Emeritus Martin Jack Rosenblum and also features poetry and essays (an Intro, Foreward, History of and Afterword) by members of The Highway Poets Motorcycle Club, founded by legendary biker/poet Colorado T. Sky, who was Cape Cod Community College’s “Alumni of the Year” a few years back. He resides in Ohio after a five-year stint at Franklin Pierce College of New Hampshire as their visiting lecturer.

Back in the early ‘70s, in Colorado, a bunch of bikers and hippies (with some overlap) sat by a bonfire, partaking in various “spirits.” Sky swears he saw Hunter S. Thompson sitting across the fire from him, not saying much, much less to each other. Both were a few sheets to the early ‘70s weather. Sky announced his vision of a troupe of Biker Poets forming a club. Gonzo was all for it and encouraged him to follow through.

Some years later, Sky had a radio show and was having the great Allen Ginsberg as his guest. Sky says they had so much fun doing the show that they moved on to a coffeehouse down the road afterwards. When he told Ginsberg of his Biker Poets vision, he not only encouraged the idea, but told Sky that he could see Biker Poets in the 21st Century doing on bikes what the Beats did with cars in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Sky was taken aback, and looked down to his coffee cup for a sip, but when he looked back up Ginsberg was gone. He wasn’t in the coffeehouse, not outside, not in the bathroom.  It was as if he’d vanished into thin air after giving his blessing.

Sometime around 1980 Sky met up with K. Peddlar Bridges, and the Highway Poets Motorcycle Club was officially formed. Peddlar and poet J. Barret “Bear” Wolf operate the biker online Ezine, RoadPoet.com and RoadPoet-NY.com, and both are key members of the biker poetry “movement.” Peddlar served as Submissions Editor, club member Susan Buck Associate Editorm and I served as the Editor.  “Bear” will be booking biker poetry reading dates.  To keep up on biker poetry readings near you, visit www.roadpoet-ny.com and click on “Biker Poetry Month Events.”

That’s right, Biker Poetry evehn has its own month - August!  April rains too much for bikers.  So we got August, and a few biker mags and bike rally organizaers to endorse the idea.

RUBBER SIDE DOWN book release parties are scheduled to occur in Provincetown and Hyannis in August and into September, as well as in Boston, parts of Southeast Mass, Providence, NYC, Southeast Maine and across New Hampshire.  Bookings are in the works for Colorado, Florida, Nevada, California and Milwaukee, home of Harley-Davidson.

Someone recently asked me that although having a book is a big deal for any poet, does publication of RSD find the Biker Poets “selling out?”  Peddlar has assured members of the Highway Poets Motorcycle Club not to worry, that we haven’t sold out so long as we don’t shave our faces or cut our hair (female membership excluded).

What exactly is biker poetry? It’s simply poetry written by bikers. There is no official form or function to define it. It is more a movement of spirit, a Whitmanian tradition of celebrating America, a Kerouacian tradition of the open road. The Club motto is believed to be the world’s longest palindrome (a word or line that spells the same thing forward as backwards), “In girum imus nocte et consumimur ignI.” (spelled with caps fore and aft, because it reads in both directions, of course!). The literal translation is “we travel around at night consumed by fire,” figuratively, “we light the night.” It pretty much covers what the club is all about: we’re out there, coming and going back and forth, getting “The Word” out, combining the ancient with the modern, tradition with innovation, the mechanical and the scholarly, the crafts of performance and the writing.

What is great to see is that the poets in the forefront of establishing the biker poets, keeping them going and getting them published, are all great writers.

And as if that isn’t serious enough, the biker poets have a book out, an anthology, published by a California publisher, Archer Books. Rubber Side Down is now available in online bookstores and at the Biker Poets & Writers website, www.bpwa.net  Order yours today!

Again, the book is dedicated to Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson for fueling us on, in more ways than one.

Now that’s serious.