A01=Joel Duncan
American poetry
American road narratives
Ann Brigham
Author_Joel Duncan
Category=DS
Category=DSBH
Category=DSBJ
Category=DSC
Category=JBSF
Category=JBSL1
Charles Olson
Christina Sharpe
Claudia Rankine
Cotton Seiler
Dorothy Wang
driving while Black
Eileen Myles
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_new_release
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eq_society-politics
Fordism
Frank O'Hara
In the Wake
Jericho Brown
John Urry
Laurence Goldstein
masculinity studies
Mimi Sheller
mobility justice
modernist poetry
oil extraction
petroculture
petromodernity
postmodernist poetry
prose poetry
racial discrimination
sexual violence
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Tongo Eisen-Martin
trans ecopoetics
trans identity
Vickie Vertiz
video art
Wanda Coleman
white supremacy
whiteness and masculinity
William Carlos Williams
Product details
- ISBN 9780813954035
- Weight: 328g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 31 Dec 2025
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
'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.
Joel Duncan is a writer and educator living in Gothenburg, Sweden. He completed his PhD in English at the University of Notre Dame.
