Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Joel Duncan, author of Poetic Drive: American Poetry in the Age of Automobility
What inspired you to write this book?
Among many other things, the inspiration for my book was the fate of Detroit. I don’t even think I’d been there yet when I started writing Poetic Drive, but I’ve always been fascinated by motor city’s rise and demise, and all the culture that came out of it, from Motown to techno. The fate of Detroit says something important about American capitalism and the way that cultural production can emerge both from the assembly line and through the cracks of deindustrialization. In writing my book, I wanted to think about how poetry relates to the rise and fall of Fordism, and I was happy to discover that poets have themselves been engaging with factories and cars since the days of Henry Ford. Detroit is still a great place to go for car culture, whether the Ford Museum, Ford’s weird Greenfield Village (a kind of early MAGA project), or the street art installations full of disused car parts. While I was doing my PhD in Indiana, I even saw a 3D Kraftwerk concert in Detroit: “Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn.” (“We’re driving, driving, driving on the highway.”)
What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book?
The main thing I learned while writing this book was that poets have been reckoning with automobility since its inception. Most of the previous scholarship on culture, cars, and oil has suggested that it’s only in the last few decades that writers have confronted the environmental consequences of fossil fuels. While it’s true that our knowledge of global warming is relatively new, poets have nevertheless been vexed by the social and environmental consequences of driving for over a century now. From William Carlos Williams to Eileen Myles and Claudia Rankine, American poets have been struggling over who has the “right of way” (the title of a poem by Williams) on the open road. Their work reveals how driving is never straightforward but is rather always a question of power and identity. I hope that my readers will learn how American poetry has emerged through conflicts over automobility, whether around masculinity, whiteness or planetary survival.
What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book?
I was surprised to discover Frank O’Hara behind the steering wheel. Like everyone else, I’d been focused on all his poems full of strolls around Manhattan. But in reading Ada Calhoun’s wonderful book, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (2022) it became clear that O’Hara had a penchant for drunk driving while visiting his mother in Grafton, Massachusetts. And then I discovered O’Hara’s collaboration with Rudy Burckhardt for the film The Automotive Story (1954), as well as video of him parking a car in John Latouche’s Presenting Jane (1952), an image that is included in the book. Once I understood that O’Hara drove, I began to see him behind the wheel in many of his poems, and to reassess the status of traffic in his work. As he famously wrote in 1956 in “A Step Away from Them”: “Everything / suddenly honks.” As I argue in the book, that honking was coupled to crashing and death for O’Hara, not least in relation to James Dean, for whom O’Hara wrote several poems. Of course, O’Hara himself died after being hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island in 1966.
What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?
As I mention in the opening of my book’s acknowledgements, I’ve talked to many different people about my research. I particularly remember one conversation in Uppsala, Sweden, where I taught for a year in the Department of English. While in Uppsala I joined a Zen meditation group and one evening after our session I walked with the leader of the group to the bus stop while telling her about my book. She asked me if I knew of Gary Snyder’s poem “Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier than Students of Zen.” While I’ve read Snyder since I was a teenager, I’d somehow neglected this famous poem. It is a short, strange, and compelling poem that captures the energy, sexiness, and tragedy of driving as a form of destruction, while posing the question whether we can live in any other way. It only receives brief mention in the introduction to my book, but I’ve written a short piece about it for the Energy Humanities website. Whether or not you read my book, you should definitely read this poem!
What’s next?
I’m currently studying for my high school teaching degree, and I’ve enjoyed teaching some of the poets in this book to Swedish high school students. I’ve also finished a translation of the Swedish poet Ann Jäderlund’s first book Pennant City and am looking for a publisher. As a sort of follow-up to Poetic Drive, I’m writing an article on W. E. B. Du Bois’s short apocalyptic road story, “The Comet” (1920). In the story a passing comet kills everyone in New York City except for a Black bank worker and a rich white woman, who then go driving through Manhattan together in search of their relatives. It is an enigmatic story of interracial accord during the height of the lynching era, which comes tumbling back in at the end of the story. For Poetic Drive, I failed to find interesting driving poems by Black poets from before the Second World War, and so in turning to Du Bois I’m also returning to the question of Black hopes and anxieties around automobility. What did driving mean for Du Bois, and how did driving relate to his dour assessment of the progress toward racial equality in the United States?
