In Walt Whitman’s prophetic 1855 Leaves of Grass Preface, he said “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” My Great American Novel Project follows Walt’s footsteps. I have written hundreds of poems these last 5 years all over the continent whenever the mood struck during my 100,000+ miles of adventures. In truth, the continent itself is already a poem: the shapes of the mountains, the voices of the rivers flowing down, the contours of the coastlines, the patterns of humans and trees and birds filling the vastness. My project is merely to translate a language older than words.
Click a pin to see the link; click the link and the piece will open in a new tab. All red dots are poems; there are around 200. Stars are my best ~25% of poems. Diamonds are normal poems. Three squares are daopoems (collaborative poems by more than one author), and nuclear symbols are the best daopoems. In the future I will add pins for all articles, essays, stories, and more. I’ll also be eventually using this same map application to trace all the paths I’ve gone in the last 7 years of the Great American Novel Project. You can toggle layers using the slide-out by clicking the top left of the map window and checking the boxes of the layers you’d like to see.
Currently, this map is updated up to SEPTEMBER 2023. When I do my next update, there will be dozens of new pins (especially in the northwest, British Columbia, Hyder Alaska, and a particularly good poem in New York City.) Make sure you zoom in on this map: many areas that look like they only have one pin actually have many if you zoom in close enough (certain spots in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Massachusetts may be hiding 7 or more pins behind a single pin.)
I have striven for high accuracy using memory and phone data to determine where I wrote each poem, and although not every poem is placed perfectly, about 85% are highly specifically placed if you zoom all the way in. It’s interesting, seeing where I’ve written my poems; I never wrote them thinking I would do something like this map, so it’s not an even sampling of where I’ve been. I simply wrote when inspired. For example, you would never know by this map that I am technically a voting resident of South Dakota.
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 