Interview - On Writing American Cycle

Beat Soundtrack #20 - Larry Beckett

“After writing most of the long poems of American Cycle and contemplating writing a beginning and ending, I thought of when I was rolling down the freeway back into Los Angeles after years away, and how those old off-ramp names — Sepulveda, Sunset, Figueroa — had stayed in my memory, like the names of rivers a century before. These highways are our rivers. And then from On the Road I took the image of the American driver and imagined him going north on Highway 1, and then west on Route 66, along the way encountering the next nexus, where history, legend, and song mysteriously cross, and I had US Rivers, to start and finish the epic.”