In my youth, after finishing my B.A. in English at UConn but before moving to California and then joining the Army, I spent several years as a struggling author (starving artist). I hitchhiked throughout my college years, and then hitched across the USA coast to coast and then south from Oregon to the Mexican border. This subset of my poetry pages on this site celebrates those years, during which I continued to prolifically write fiction and poetry. Let's pretend it's that time again, rather long ago now. As a Sixties youth, the highway odyssey was in my blood for real, not just metaphor. (Think Jack Kerouac updated). As a student of Classics, Modern/Comparative Lit, Languages, History, and more, I was in tune with poetry across a divers spectrum back to Catullus, Homer, Solomon, Ovid, and Virgil among ancients, through the European Medieval Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch, and Villon just to name a few; and then of course the more recent including a vast spectrum from (OMG, too many to try and name)…Thomas Carew: "Ask me no more whither do stray/The golden atoms of the day"…and Byron, Keats, Shelley, Poe, Whitman…more modern, the Symbolists (a favorite of mine), the Beats (still modern in the Sixties), and (must stop; out of breath!).