Rubber Side Down is the first anthology of biker poetry. The verses cover the attitude and lifestyle of these bikers and renegades. They aren’t aiming to be Shakespeare’s successors but they are expressing the quiddity of their outsider existence.
I’m not quite positive as to when the biker poetry movement truly began. It is tied to the Beat poets via Allen Ginsberg. It’s also akin to cowboy poetry and I have no idea how long that’s been around. But it seems that even fewer people would be acquainted with this genre of poetry if not for the Highway Poets and Motor Cycle Club (HPMCC).
That organization got it’s start in the fall of 1975. Some bikers and some hippies were sitting around a fire and began spewing out (or reciting, whichever way you want to express it) poems at each other, the hippies resorting to classic works and the bikers recited original works on the fly. (According to legend, Hunter S. Thompson was within this bevy). Afterwards, a couple of the bikers discussed the responsibility they had to encapsulate the biker lore in verse. One of those bikers was a guy named Sky who would go on to be a founder of the HPMCC.
In the early 80’s, Sky met another biker poet called Peddlar Bridges. The two of them ran into each other now and again and finally in 1990 officially established the HPMCC. One of the results of this Highway Poets group is this anthology – you can read more of the history of the club in the book.
I like to write poetry on occasion. Usually I hear some music in my head so I’m really writing lyrics to a song no one else can hear. Thus, my words are only half realized or fulfilled. That’s the impression I get from the poems in Rubber Side Down. We can’t hear the music so we miss the full power the song, so to speak. Of course, I don’t have a bike, and I think that would make a big difference. The music is there, no doubt, in the growl of the engine, the piercing wind, etc.
The first half is a little hard to read, it jumps and starts and sputters and starts but by the time you get to the second half the motor’s mostly thrumming. That’s where the premier poets seem to show up. Colorado T Sky seemed to be the sagest voice in the whole book. Eddie Pliska touched on the origin of bikers – not as a group but as individuals; you know, why they may choose the biker life. There’s some powerful emotional content in his poetry. Mary Susan is very visceral – good images in her poems.
My favorite is clearly Chopper Kate. She’s got the best grip on language. Her poems live. She has the cadence, her poems move down the highway, revving, pausing, turning, never parking. Here’s a bit from “Burn Out”:
Friction is born/as the asphalt bites/and rubber’s torn./Deep and dark/you leave a black mark/that stays forever/here embedded/like ground tatoos.
These guys and gals love their bikes, to be sure. There’s lots of innuendo here: moaning and screaming and kissing and squeezing thighs. Interestingly, we non-bikers tend to stereotype bikers, right? Right. These poems give us a glimpse of how bikers stereotype us “cagers” – no freedom, bad drivers and convinced that the biker life is what we want.
There are a number of photographs included in the anthology as well. The photo’s are as rough as the words, portraying a rough, dirty life full of leather, bald heads, big bellies, tatoos and lots and lots of motorcycles. I would really have enjoyed seeing some poets put a thousand words to each of these pictures, though, distilling the history of the events.
Rubber Side Down is really is a fine introduction to the eclectic world of biker poets. It seems to be a genre still trying to find out what it really is and what it can accomplish but it should be a really good ride.
Here’s a few more links to that world:
