By my time, these images were ingrained in every young man‘s head, but were failing to materialize as anything more real than youthful confusion. New images of the rebel as poet or biker were just that, images, now sensationalized by Hollywood in films like Stanley Kramer‘s The Wild One. The Angels left the Beat poets behind, and took up violence as the one thing society could not integrate into its romantic sense of self. In Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, Richard Slotkin suggests that violence was always the difference, the real outlaw ―stands in actual opposition to the moral values embodied in the Cooperian mythology and therefore to the ideological values of the ‗progressive‘ mythology that Roosevelt constructed on the Cooperian base.‖ (127) There was bad and then there was bad. The images persist today, but differently. Middle-aged businessmen on Harley holidays, and poets talking about a revolution they missed some 40 years ago. As a poet, I have inherited more than an image; I‘ve lived out a particular time. Now, when I ride across the desert looking for some unknown quality of life, I see myself in the mirror of the highway‘s mirage. But it‘s not the outlaw who comes home in the end and takes up his post at the university. It‘s the poet in his best disguise.
~GM
2009
But the images of poet/biker were corrupt long before I found them. Motorcycling‘s outlaw culture benefited by association with old Westerns. The hero of those films was himself often an outlaw, an image transformed after WWI and granted a new kind of existential depth in detective fiction, as in the hands of Dashiell Hammett. The new existential embellishments of the old Western heroes were further transmuted through film depictions of WWI heroes, which in turn affected the stature of men as they saw themselves going into combat in WWII, particularly fighter pilots in the Pacific in the 1940s, a group priding itself on selfreliance and a death-defying kind of
nonchalance. It should come as no surprise that the first chapter of the Hell‘s Angels, from San Bernardino, California, was made up of those same pilots, gunners and bombardiers from the Pacific campaigns.
Poet Biker George Moore Photo supplied by author,
In my manuscript, The Lone Rider's Guide to the American West, I‘m looking for a perspective on my life in the context of this constant, uncontrollable flux of images. What, like Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? everyone asks. No, a different version of the old image resurfacing. I‘ve always been fascinated with open terrain, and have written about the existential nature of space for years. I used to crisscross the West on my way to and from college in Oregon. Riding across on a motorcycle for the first time in 2001, I discovered I‘d never known it, not really. I‘d thought the prairies and deserts sank deep in my being, but found out that was only an illusion from inside a car. You have to be ―out there‖ on the road to know what space is about. The poetry followed me into that space, and took up the awareness of its living dynamics. Once, close to the Arctic Circle, I realized we live on this planet. My poetry went looking for a way to capture that, and the bike was the experience of it unveiled.