156 contemporary poetry
Minhinnick’s travelogue also looks for connections, for senses of
connectivity and global links between communities. The form of
the poem, with its drafted-in voices as well as stammers, visual per-
formances on the page, repetitive clauses and pared-down lyrics,
enacts an ‘open fi eld’ poetics. First coined by the American poet
Charles Olson in his manifesto ‘Projective Verse’, composition by
fi eld combines lyrics, speeches of different kinds, conversation,
images and a collage of information.^53 This impression of a poetry
written without predetermination enables the poet to enact multi-
ple conversations throughout the journeys. In the second ‘journey’
we listen to a doctor in Iraq’s damning indictment of the USA’s
involvement in the war: ‘And no I don’t feel sorry for your boys.
/ Let them anoint their blisters / with Exxon’s frankincense.’ He
adds ‘We all sign up for something’ (p. 14 ). Minhinnick’s vast poem
returns us to the point of initial departure, but changed, with the
imminent mutation threatened in ‘the gamma / ghosting towards /
the cell’s gateway’ (p. 17 ). This interrelationship between the local
and the global is made evident in another poem from the volume,
‘The Fairground Scholar’, where one of the fair’s main attractions
is ‘our Kingdom of Evil’s Saddam Hussein’ (p. 102 ). From the axis
of evil to a small resort in South Wales, Minhinnick’s work exhibits
an awareness of global interconnections.
Jamaican poet Laura Goodison’s ‘Run Greyhound’ from
Travelling Mercies ( 2001 ) presents the more familiar expectations of
a travelogue.^54 For Goodison the mythic status of the Greyhound
bus enables a ludic narrative as well as vaudeville performances
from her fellow travellers. Presented in unrhymed couplets, the
movement of the poem enables the sense of an ongoing mobility.
Goodison immediately interrogates elements of American cultural
mythmaking. The legacy of the Beatniks becomes a humorous
anecdote of an overheard conversation at the Ann Arbor station. A
young woman admits that she set ‘out after Jack Kerouac to write
a road novel’ but her car broke down (p. 20 ). Moreover, she panics
once she learns that the man she is speaking to, who has travelled
the ‘vineyards of California and the peach groves of Georgia’
(p. 20 ), has just been released from prison. Social anxiety ensues,
as this most iconic of American institutions, representing mobility
and freedom, becomes a ‘convict bus’ (p. 21 ) for men released from