Did you know there is a Biker Poet movement? Bikers are not only Hell’s Angels with leather and nefarious intent, but poets, on the road, burning rubber, and spouting odes to the endless highway. Joe Gouveia, poet, motorcycle  enthusiast  and new head of the “Highway Poets Motor Cycle Club” had the good sense to edit an anthology of Biker bards. HPMCC founded by Colorado T. Sky, boasts many fine poets in their ranks  Allen Ginsberg commented on the concept of “Biker Poets” according to a history included in the anthology:

“The Highway Poets could be, for their generation, what the Beat Poets were for ours.”

And for this lively subculture of poets this could indeed be the case.

The title “Rubber Side Down,” according to Martin Jack Rosenblum means to ride safely, and “ we shall meet again at the next café  for coffee or swap meet for spare parts—if we have kept it down safely.” To the Biker cars are cages, vehicles of conformity.

  Rosenblum defines Biker poetry, or at least the Biker poetry presented in this book:

“ The poetry in this book is written by folks who are outside the cultural safety zone. Some ignore technique, some deplore it, some explore it beyond where workshop academics would confine it and some take a breather from the understood confines of a literary canon sensibility to gather a better voice because of a crazy, two-wheeled power drift into experiential reverie.”

  I was pleased to see a number of poets that I know and have published appear on these pages including: Linda Lerner, K. Peddlar Bridges, and Marc Goldfinger. Goldfinger has an intriguing prose poem  “ The State Trooper& The Biker Get Tested” It involves his offbeat encounter with an offbeat State Trooper while riding his late wife’s bike.

  Many of the poets in this collection write of the vehicle of transcendence, the motorcycle. This Holy Roller provides them with freedom from the grind of everyday. In her poem “It’s Okay,” Susie Howard portrays the road as a trip that flies in the face of convention:

“ But the road is free of that

It is the steady air against the skin

whipping hair and clothes

and flawed thinking from my mind

with the steady hum of opposing carburetors

passing by dinosaur  Buicks

traveling to destinations of work,

lifestyle, maintenance, drone hood

while I follow no map but that of whim

and its steady song of

It’s okay.

It’s okay.

It’s okay.”

And Diane Wakoski in the “ The Desert Motorcyclist” explains why it is better to ride a motorcycle than a man:

“ Now I run away

to my dry desert,

the place where there is enough space

for my imagination

and nothing to drown it.

Desert motorcyclist:

that is me.

And it is the man,

never the machine

who betrays me.”

 If you never have been exposed to this genre, then get a strong grip, plant your rear on a leather hide, hear those cylinders roar, and take a ride.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update