Transitive Properties: Allen Ginsberg's Transit Poetics

This essay considers Allen Ginsberg’s poetry from the late 1950’s through the end of the 1960’s, advancing the concept of “transit poetics” as the poet’s central mode of artistic production in the years following his success with Howl and Kaddish. Situating Ginsberg within histories of Cold War travel technologies and within existing narratives about the relation between travel and poetry, this essay argues that as both an aesthetic and political world-building project, Ginsberg’s “transit poetics” helps us to better theorize how the embodied experience of movement can help us rethink Cold War narratives about the personal and social body, (anti-)nationalism, and transit as a critical practice.