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Poets on the Road

Maureen Owen & Barbara Henning

Calling to mind Bashō’s late life journeys through the backcountry of Japan, two women poets in a wellworn Honda Fit hit the road for a legendary pilgrimage in a far-flung landscape of American poetry.

Although a road trip across North American calls to mind Jack Kerouac’s youthful meanderings of self-discovery, this reading tour was more in the manner of Basho¯’s late life journeys through the backcountry of Japan. . . . The road trip was in a sense a pilgrimage of reengagement with their calling as poets, and a chance to reacquaint with like-minded friends, old and new, in a far-flung landscape of American poetry.

Venues would include upscale bookstores, coffee houses, museums, legendary used bookstores, botanical gardens, university classrooms, art centers, and artist coops—in short, a unique sampling of poetry environments tracing an arc across the Southern States, the Southwest, and up the West Coast before hooking back to the Rockies.

Framed as a personal challenge, the poets hit the road much in the manner of itinerant preachers and musicians, lodging at discount motels, funky hostels, Airbnbs, and with friends along the way. Adding a social media touch, Maureen and Barbara created a blog of their tour so that friends, family, hosts, and fellow poets might also share in their adventure.

—from the Introduction by Pat Nolan

These representative passages illustrate the attention to detail and the sense of open-ended possibility that both Owen and Henning make manifest in their work. This beautifully designed book, replete with a generous helping of photos and reproductions, serves as an excellent guide to the possibilities of poetry in community for the unfolding century.
—Kit Robinson review in Rain Taxi

Each stop, each reunion, is framed by a shared social, poetical network of people who become a big part of the story. The familial spirit is gently captured by a lovely frontispiece built around two graceful, lighthearted portraits, one of Maureen by Yvonne Jacquette, the other of Barbara by Rie Shimamura. To contemplate this book as an artifact of what Donald Allen (editor of The New American Poetry, 1960) called “the community of love” strikes me, now, as anachronism. It’s there to be appreciated, though.

Social positionings in Henning’s and Owen’s work are wonderfully alive to happenstance – the existence of their poems, their circumstances, with or without ascribed purposes, part of the grand celebration we witness in celebrating the now. I come better to grasp how both poets constitute chapters in anyone’s history of the New York School with its adoration of the situation. In this particular way this book honors people’s lives.
—Burt Kimmelman review in Pedestal Spring, Issue 93 2024

Barbara Henning’s and Maureen Owen’s Poets on the Road offers up a valuable view into the contemporary poets/artists community through the lens of poets traveling through and across the United States, reading and sharing their work and lives. In the book’s introduction, Pat Nolan—poet, editor, translator, and publisher—describes the project as a “Poetry Odyssey in a Honda” and surely it is that. With dated blog posts by both Henning and Owen and photographs of friends (new and old), poetry readings, bathrooms, bridges, and more, readers experience the sheer joyous energy of creative gatherings—in reading venues, in kitchens and restaurants, doing yoga, visiting museums and everywhere these poets venture. The vitality of poetry is alive on these pages. As readers we experience how entwined with community, (former) students, family, and friends poetry can be, how inclusive poetry can be. In addition to blog posts and photos, a handful of the poems Henning and Owen read are included. This book is for everyone interested in poetry and the arts.
—Martine Bellen, Review of “Poets on the Road,” Amazon, August 30, 2023

Poets on the Road by Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning is a rambling account, both literally and figuratively, of how two poets, who are in semi-retirement, embark on a road trip across (mainly) the American South and Southwest, stopping along the way to visit and give readings, sketching in pen and photo the friends met and made along the way. While the people who welcome the poets to each small community will probably not be known to readers, they quickly become visible to readers as part of a community of artists and writers. Anthropologists complement the term biodiversity, the mix of plants and animals in a local ecology that is needed for environmental health, with the term socio-diversity, the way a larger society, if it is going to thrive, is an interlacing of different pockets, enclaves and cliques of people with shared, specialized viewpoints. As Mark Kurlansky points out (in The Last Fish Tale), as he talks of the loss of New England fishing towns, “Each culture, each way of life, that vanishes diminishes the richness of civilization … The multiplicity of cultures, like the multiplicity of species, is the guarantee of the continuation of life.” Owen and Henning take us through widely separated towns each with an arts community of congenial souls who love language, love talking about it, and love writing poetry and doing other arts practices, suggesting the sociodiversitty that animates their locales. As to poetry, in a book of interesting contrasts, one of the most resonant is that between the chronicle of the two’s journey and the set of each’s poems that conclude the volume. It’s as if the steady companionship, zest and exuberance expressed in their travel writing, accompanied by dexcriptions of farms, prairies, mountains and seashores usually rendered in a lyrical pointillism, with the entrance of poems gives way to new ballast. For the poems bend a serious ear to the stacked-up troubles that appear in US daily life. Owen’s poems often detail what seem to be events taking place in a small town but unlike her focused narrative of the trip, the poems often describe a free-flowing spate of lightly integrated imagery. Where Henning soars in describing the open road, many of her poems describe a ride on the claustrophobic subway where there is a human interest story on every face. Arriving at the sheaf of poems at the end, ones taken on the journey to share, reminds me of the serious core of each writer’s offerings.
—Jim Feast, review on Goodreads