To the Hitchhiking Dead

To the Hitchhiking Dead is a book-length sequence culled from notebooks made between 1986-1988 when hitchhiking in Europe and England or otherwise doing nothing. An unknown poet - even to himself - who didn't know he was seeking and fleeing lost love, and assumed he was the only Asian freak on the roads in nail varnish and pearls. Those notebook sketches were towards an epical rhapsody that never got written. By the time I came to be published in the '90s my poetry was framed in a post-Language discursivity: hard, vituperative, directed to actual audience-readers (epistles, performances). No-one would know that poet was made of such Romantic ravings.

When I belatedly, reluctantly returned to the insignificant poetry world after a protracted silence, I wanted to know what the vangardistes were doing these days. And I found a new online PDF zine produced in Seoul (Erototplasty), and the very first poem in its first issue had a long poem called 'The A1' by RTA Parker. It was like reading my abandoned poem, with the same cadences and Romantic visions. I later met him and told him there was no point to completing my poem. He demurred, and somewhere in 2019 I found I wanted to revisit the dozen notebooks to piece it together. Richard Parker wrote a version of my poem, and then I wrote my poem.

Returning to recover the project after 35 years sees a rapprochement between the two poet-selves. I am writing into the fragments of the past and the notebooks are writing into my occluded present. I've kept the scribal trace of each by retaining orthographic styles: I spelled conventionally before 1990 or so, and afterward determined on the course of unconventionalized spelling that has become signature to my work; so contemporary sections have deformed spelling but the original notebook writing is undeformed.