Billy Mills 

Poster poems: Cars

Billy Mills: They can be vehicles for many subjects, so please rev up your imaginative engines and see where this month's topic takes you
  
  

Car on highway
Re: verse … a car on a highway. Photograph: Richard Hamilton Smith/CORBIS Photograph: Richard Hamilton Smith/CORBIS

Towards the end of 1955, Marianne Moore was invited to submit suggestions for naming the latest model from the Ford range of cars. For an obscure poet, Moore was something of a celebrity, known for her eccentricity and love of baseball as much as for her verse, and was quick to accept the invitation. Sadly, none of her suggestions made the cut, and so Americans found themselves driving the new Edsel and not the Utopian Turtletop.

Her list of possible names was the nearest that Moore got to writing a poem about cars. However, many other poets have been inspired by the internal combustion engine and the joys and travails of motor travel. In the case of George Oppen, the engine itself fired his practical imagination to write one of the very few poems in the language to feature head gaskets and crank shafts.

If Oppen was happy to get his hands oily, Moore's old friend Elizabeth Bishop was fascinated by the oily dirt of the family who ran a filling station she'd stopped at. Under her quiet, attentive gaze they became symbols of grubby humanity in all its unlovable grime. And then, of course, she drove away.

But while engines can be fun and filling stations educational, the main attraction of cars is the fact that you can drive and be driven in them. This became something of a signature for the Beats, who spent much of their time "on the road". In fact, Allen Ginsberg took to writing his poems by dictating them into a tape recorder (that Bob Dylan bought for him) while driving and being driven, and the result was one of his finest books, The Fall of America.

Around the same time that Ginsberg was finishing this book, Robert Bly packed his family into a car and headed west. It was 1970, the Vietnam war seemed to be drawing to a close and the future looked bright. The family sang Dylan songs as they headed for the ocean. The mood of Bly's poem is bright and hopeful, as befits an outing in the family car whatever the historical context.

For Australian poet Dorothy Parker, her car is something like Virginia Woolf's room of one's own; a place where she can go to observe the world and blend "business and pleasure" undisturbed. Parker's poem makes an interesting contrast with Reginald O'Hare Gibson's The Red Cadillac, which riffs on William Carlos Williams to produce a kind of tabloid TV image of maleness as defined by car ownership. The speaker in James L Dickey's Cherrylog Road owns a motorbike, not a car, but uses the abandoned vehicles in a scrapyard by the side of the road in the title as a set of rooms to share with his girlfriend when she can get away from her father's farm.

Like most machines, cars can be dangerous things. Carl Shapiro's Auto Wreck captures the suddenness of a car crash, along with the bystander's sense of complicity in what has happened, our need to speculate on causes and consequences of the accident's calamitous intrusion into the fabric of the everyday. In her poem The cars, Kathleen Fraser reminds us that traffic is just as dangerous for those who walk as it is for those who drive. The poem is a wonderfully detailed photographic observation of a walker crossing a freeway in heavy traffic, seen as an athletic contest between man and metal that leaves the reader almost breathless.

This month's Poster poem challenge is to write about cars. You might be inside one looking out, or outside looking in. Maybe you love the feeling of freedom to be had from driving on the open road or hate the confinement of city traffic. Perhaps you're a pedestrian engaged in a battle of wits with a street full of drivers, or a child in the back seat wondering if you're there yet. One way or another, now is your chance to share.

 

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