MPH and Other Road Poems

Book excerpt: Poetry. Edited by Andrew Peart. In 2015, while, in his words, "dismantling my house in New Jersey and preparing it for sale," Ed Roberson discovered in some envelopes in his attic a manuscript he thought lost, drawn from the experiences of the summer of 1970, when the poet, along with two friends, rode cross-country from Pittsburgh to San Francisco and back on two BMW motorcycles. The recovery of this manuscript,--over forty years later--alerted Roberson to the fact that he had been relating to its material ever since, yielding for him work that "calls across the span of a lifetime." MPH is Roberson's epic, serial road poem, decades in the making, stamped with and guided by the talisman of its title. "one thing visible every day / any time 24/7 / for 3 months 8000 miles / was mph // on the speedometer. / a small petty thing. / a pin. / down of a larger / limiting. // a sighting an ideograph / even more than a picture beyond word."