Who wasn’t obsessed by the Beat Generation in high school? Okay, it was just unbearable punks like me. In Jack Kerouac, I saw a reflection of my ineloquent angst. I used to be able to recite entire paragraphs of On the Road, but I’ve since blocked all of it from my memory. I was particularly interested in Allen Ginsberg because, like me, he was unpretentiously pretentious—or at least we both tried to be. He might allude to a Greek myth in a poem written on acid. A surfer boy reeking of weed, I used polysyllables that made my classmates’ eyes […]
Tag: On the Road
‘On the Road’ by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch: ZYZZYVA No. 106, Spring
by editor
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch is the author of the poetry collections “Rockclimbing in Silk” (Seren), “Not in These Shoes” (Picador), and “Banjo” (Picador). In 2014 she held a residency at the Dylan Thomas Boathouse to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth, and she is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship. She lives in Wales.
Two of her poems appear in ZYZZYVA’s Spring/Summer Issue (No. 106), including “On the Road.” An examination of Madame Tusaud and her long-lasting craft of wax figures, “On the Road” isn’t so much intrigued by the Tusaud’s waxworks as it is by how they ever came about. “To make the dead appear living, the living dead//without quite meaning to, is a skill I cannot/ yet take in …,” says the poem’s speaker. What follows is the poem in its entirety.
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Giving Kerouac’s ‘Mexican Girl’ Her Rightful Voice: Q&A with Tim Z. Hernandez
by Matt Markovich
Who was the woman known to history only as “Terry, The Mexican Girl” from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road? Given that she was the linchpin for what became one of the most renowned tales in American letters, and that virtually all of Kerouac’s characters were based on real people who subsequently became famous themselves by association with the book and, often, as artists in their own right, it seemed improbable that no one had taken the time to track her down. That is, until author, poet and performer Tim Z. Hernandez found himself standing on the front doorstep of the […]