The American Road

“I was a young writer and I wanted to take off . . .” Jack Kerouac, On The Road If you don’t know where you are going, surmised Lewis Carroll, ravishingly logical as usual, any road will get you there.[1] Yet long and winding roads aren’t always moseyed by rigid souls who imagine they know…

In 1965, my sophomore year at Manchester College in Indiana, I bought my first car, a 1957 Chevy crème over rust four-door sedan in perfect condition. I paid $750 in cash, most of my savings, to a tall man with black hair whose used car lot was a green field on a sloping hill that…

I don’t think I had any conscious concept of Whitman’s vision of the “Open Road.” I had to read Whitman in school, but hardly any of it took. Later in life I’ve come to love Whitman but I never delved that deeply into him. I agreed with everything he said, but there were a thousand…

Much has been written about Route 66. That iconic shield with the double 6 marks the most famous of American highways. It had its origins in the twenties, and eventually extended from Chicago to LA, but the original road has been almost completely swallowed up by the Interstate System. It exists now only in patches,…

Until the road I took became the road I knew, the journey I envisioned wound through the world just as any Western traveler might map his way across the seas to see all the popular sights. Upon escaping a circumscribed, middle-class California existence, I would set off to destinations mostly familiar to me in all…

The Dallas show was over; the crowd had dispersed and the campgrounds were deserted except for the Prankster’s four buses and a couple of rented Hertz trucks for the Querry, the band that had played on the free stage at Woodstock and followed us here. I overheard one of the Pranksters say, “There’s a faint…

If I now put myself in Dave Huehner’s 1948 Studebaker heading for San Francisco, from Champaign, Illinois, in 1961 I remember studying its single blue front fender which pointed us West while Whitman whispered:“ The only home of the soul, is the open Road.” The world is open to you when you’ve a hundred bucks…

Although I faithfully followed the bardic path for more than 40 years, I waited a long time to hit the road as a poet.  There were so many other things to do along the way, and I did them all. I had directed the Detroit Artists Workshop, the Allied Artists Association, Jazz Research Institute and…

Anne Waldman is a poet, performance artist, and author of dozens of literary works as well as the editor of important volumes on the beats and other subjects. Waldman’s latest book is The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, 2011) She is a cofounder, with Allen Ginsberg, of the Jack Kerouac…