Rubber Side Down is the first book to anthologize the output of an emerging underground genre of "biker poetry." The verses contained cover the range of attitude and lifestyle of these poet bikers and renegades who aren't aiming to become Shakespeare's successors, but simply to express the quiddity of their outsider existence.

I'm not quite positive when the biker poetry movement truly began -- it's tied to the Beats through Allen Ginsberg, and 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 Motor Cycle Club (HPMCC). 

The seeds of the HPMCC were planted in the fall of 1975. Some bikers and hippies (and, according to legend, Hunter S. Thompson) were sitting around a fire and began reciting poems to each other, the hippies resorting to classic works and the bikers spewing original works on the fly. 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 become a founder of the HPMCC. 

In the early 1980s, Sky met another biker poet named Peddlar Bridges. The pair ran into each other now and then and finally established the HPMCC in 1990. 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 and I'm really writing lyrics to a song no one else can hear; 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.

Article Author: Gray Hunter

Gray Hunter enjoys an eremitical life in the desert. Beer and words are two pleasures in his life. He holds down two jobs while he works at his novels and stories.

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