Welcome!

This is a project that has had many purposes. The first one was to document a hitchhiking/boxcar trip that happened in about 1974; I had put things in a journal, but lent the journal to a friend in Iowa City, and he lost it. Since that time, memories of the trip had come to me, and haiku became a convenient way to record them.

Pulling together memories from that trip, I had choices to make: one was whether to include more recent memories, or other pertinent knowledge, even from modern times, in the collection; I did. Another was to be strict to the truth; I didn't, because poetry sometimes demanded allegiance to sound and meter. Finally, I missed a couple of states on the trip and hit a few others only at night, or briefly: I had to fill in the blanks. So I did. It was a little reckless at times.

Putting the poetry on this site had another purpose, as you can see from the URL. Haiku has kigo, or season clues, which are kind of an underlying mood; mine have geographical clues as well (and I'm experimenting with time clues). In the same spirit, these are represented by links. Thus the links recognize the role of subconscious background.

Almost every poem in the project is represented in some form or another on this site; scroll down and you'll find them. It's unruly at times, imperfect, but they were published here first. The books put a thousand in a single collection; in odd years they focus on the trip (true to the seventies); in even years, they are more modern and free-wheeling. The 2018 will be the most modern, free-wheeling of them all; I look forward to presenting it. More notes about the production of each one can be found here, where I talk about the process of writing it, problems with kindle, etc. -TL, 6-17