Of all the stereotypes about poets, perhaps the most enduring cliche is that poets can’t drive. But what evidence do we have to back that up? A non-driving poet attempts to find out the truth.
Bob Dylan said it. Jo Shapcott said it. Wendy Cope said it. Martin Amis said it, but Martin Amis doesn’t count, because Martin Amis is a novelist, and novelists lie for money.
The cliche that poets can’t drive satisfies because it confirms all our deepest suspicions about poets, which is that they’re a congenitally useless demographic who have chosen to live in a state of suspended childhood. From a public safety perspective, it makes sense not to let such people behind the wheel. But is there any statistical truth to these allegations? Are poets really a bunch of passenger princesses?
Historically, the proof is overwhelming. Donne never drove. Byron never burned rubber. Emily Dickinson wouldn’t have known a Toyota Hilux if it knocked her to the kerb. But what about the here and now?
In some ways, this is an impossible question to answer. While it’s easy to access statistics on drivers’ licences, there is no publicly available ministry-approved data set on the number of working poets in this country. It soon became clear that if I wanted to do any kind of statistical analysis, I would have to take matters into my own hands.
I took to Instagram to ask the question. Poets, can you drive?
Responses began streaming in, like moths dashing themselves against the windshield.
No. No. No. Yes, but not legally. Legally, but not well. Yes, but never at night.
The average response was a no, followed by some kind of self-deprecating emoji. Downcast face with sweat emoji. Flushed face emoji. See no evil monkey emoji.
A few people reached out with qualifiers. They got their scooter licence 10 years ago and never used it. They can drive but are regularly honked at. One or two maverick poets admitted to being able to drive despite never having sat their licence.
Jack Underwood, a UK poet, said “I forced myself to learn in my late 30s. It was horrible, but after several years and a hiatus in between, I passed on the third attempt without any minors [critical errors] – a perfect run. It was the first time that had happened for my instructor in 16 years of students. I was on about 3 hours sleep and heavily caffeinated. I may as well have been driving the Mars rover. My parallel park seemed to happen of its own accord. I drove terrified for a few months and have since given up because of the anxiety.”
Another UK poet confessed that her driving test was so bad that her driving instructor recommended she didn’t learn to drive.
I began recording responses in my Excel sheet. Soon, the poets started dobbing in friends and acquaintances. It was like Das Leben Der Anderen all over again. One person said they could drive, but they were the only poet in a 10-poet workshop group with the ability to do so. Another responded with “yep but nobody else does 🙄” adding “it’s all fun and games until someone needs to drive an amp to the reading and everyone’s looking at you.”
In the end, I got more than 80 responses. Interesting, but not enough for a solid data-set. I expanded my question into an Instagram survey and had to spend considerable time going back through my spreadsheet and weeding out those who had responded twice.
In the end, I got more than 400 responses to my poetry survey. The results were shockingly balanced: 49% of poets couldn’t drive compared to 51% who could. Out of curiosity, I asked novelists the same question. Out of a pool of 126 respondents, 54% of novelists couldn’t drive. A few multidisciplinary writers answered both the novelist and poet surveys, which just goes to show that if writers love anything, it’s answering questions about themselves.
Looking over the data, there were a few easy observations to be made. Older poets were more likely to drive, as were poets who had children. Being Pakehā diminished your statistical likelihood of being able to successfully operate a motor vehicle. So did growing up in an urban centre. Rose Lu advanced the bold theory that slam poets were more likely to drive than print poets, a theory which appears to hold water, but requires more research to confirm the statistical margin.
On the face of it, poets are doing better than I thought. Over half of them can allegedly drive, even though many described their driving ability as “poor”. But there’s no point comparing poets with poets. In order to find out how we were doing as a demographic, I had to compare these figures to the national average.
This turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. Most of the easily accessible figures on driving licence statistics were out of date. In 2011-2014, The Ministry of Transport recorded that 77% of New Zealanders over the age of 15 could drive. Another survey done in 2018 reported the figure at 84%. In 2019, The AA Lifestyle Insurance Survey reported that 97% of all New Zealanders hold a driver’s licence, a figure that cannot possibly be accurate, unless there’s a secret cabal of Fiat-driving children, zipping up and down our national highway.
While this gave me a good ballpark, I didn’t want to rely on these outdated statistics, because the number of young people with licences has been on the decline since 2016. I downloaded the 2022/2023 Ministry of Transport driver licence statistics and attempted to compare them to population figures in the corresponding census.
This is where my quantitative research began to go to hell. I decided to exclude motorcycles and focus only on those with a full, restricted or learner’s licence because it occurred to me that people with a motorcycle licence might also have a regular driver’s licence and I didn’t want to throw off my percentages by counting people twice. My first attempt at estimating the national percentage of drivers was curiously low until I realised I had accidentally omitted all drivers over the age of 60. I did the maths again. This time, it looked like 90% of the total driving-aged population held a licence, but this didn’t really seem right, especially as I hadn’t counted the motorbikes.
I double-checked my figures. I was stumped. Are the people with learner’s licences also getting their restricted licences in the same year, creating unexpected statistical double-ups? Did I add an extra zero to my spreadsheet somewhere?
In the end, I gave it up as a bad job. I’m a poet, not a statistician. A poet who can’t drive.
Maybe, I thought, this is further evidence that I’m not qualified to operate heavy machinery or do basic math. Unless of course AA Insurance is hiring.
There were notable flaws in my survey. Although most of the respondents were local, a few UK and US poets answered, distorting the national average. Then there was the problem of self-reporting. Were all the people who responded truly poets, or just people who considered themselves to have poetic dispositions? Philosophically I decided that anyone should be able to self-identify as a poet, regardless of their publication record. After all, Emily Dickinson was barely published in her lifetime. I briefly wondered if there was any truth to Martin Amis saying “Never trust a poet who can drive. If he can drive, distrust the poems.” Could strong driving skills bear an inverse correlation to the quality of someone’s writing? But I was qualilatively able to debunk this, by scrolling through my list of fully licensed poets.
Even if my statistics are slightly wonky and outdated (“tell all the truth but tell it slant”) I think there’s enough compelling evidence to suggest that poets are less vehicularly capable than your average New Zealand citizen. And so the question remains: why?
The most obvious explanation is that New Zealand has seen an explosion of younger poets in the last decade. Perhaps there’s an easy correlation between young artistic, environment-conscious people in urban centres, and not feeling the need to get a licence. One poet shared their theory that poets are more likely to be neurodiverse, and therefore less likely to drive, although I was unable to statistically verify either of these assertions. As Don Patterson once said, “I’ve often kind of suspected that poetry itself is really more of a kind of a diagnosis than a calling. And I think maybe an aspect of that diagnosis is that you also can’t drive.”
Maybe it’s just that every generation produces a class of spiritually preoccupied but otherwise enfeebled people, like the anchorites who bricked themselves up in church walls and left the donkey grooming and stone masonry to the general populous. Maybe poets feel the beauty of the world too keenly, and might easily become fatally distracted by the white Berocca of the moon, hissing over midnight cornfields. “Drunk on the wind in my mouth / Wringing the handlebar for speed / Wild to be wreckage forever.”
Maybe – and this is where I started to really pick up steam – poets are suffering a culturally specific, The-Body-Keeps-the-Score generational trauma. After all, wasn’t Frank O’Hara killed by a taxi? Randall Jarrell was also killed by a car, although there’s compelling evidence to suggest he threw himself in front of it.
I buckled my seatbelt and adjusted the rear-view mirror. I spent all afternoon sifting through articles with titles like: “Rolls Rough”: William Carlos Williams on the Thrills and Ills of Automobility” which contained exactly zero information about Williams’s ability to legally operate a motor vehicle, but was full of phrases like “the automobile serves in this era as the vehicle par excellence of male pathos, carrying the burdens of both personal immediacy and individual finitude.”
It turns out, it’s pretty hard to find information about whether 20th-century poets could drive. It doesn’t help that Google’s search algorithm is fully enshittified. I tried to confirm a rumour that Will Self can’t drive, and got thousands of results for “Will self-driving cars soon be a reality?” I discovered contemporary racing car drivers named Dylan Thomas and James Baldwin. I spent a long time trying to figure out if Bill Manhire could drive, until I finally stumbled across a blog post Paula Green had written about his personalised number plate. In retrospect, I should simply have asked Toby.
I searched the Poetry Foundation’s database. There were 8,500 poems with the word “moon” in the title compared to 930 poems with the word “car” in the title. This didn’t tell me anything, considering cars were invented more recently than the moon. I quickly discovered you don’t have to know how to drive to write a poem containing the word “driving.” Blake drove his plough over the bones of the dead. Keats drove remembrance from his eyes. Milton, “on his impious foes right onward drove / gloomy as night; under his burning wheels.”
Some writers were easier than others to crack. Gertrude Stein drove ambulances in France during the second world war, and had a Ford named Auntie after Gertrude’s aunt Pauline, “who always behaved admirably in emergencies and behaved fairly well most times if she was flattered,” although Stein never mastered the skill of driving in reverse. EE Cummings drove ambulances in the first world war, despite his father being fatally bisected in a terrible motorcar accident. Philip Larkin drove, although Amis claimed his creativity declined the moment he got behind the wheel. Elizabeth Bishop didn’t have a licence, but owned several Jaguars, saying she preferred “speedy looking cars that I can drive very slowly.” Sylvia Plath not only drove but once attempted suicide by swerving off the road, which is not great evidence for the “poets should be allowed to operate heavy machinery” camp. George Oppen was “a magnificent driver all his life.” Bukowski drove a Volkswagen Beetle. Ashbery drove a “sedate sedan of domestic manufacture.” Maya Angelou drove a Rolls Royce.
The Beat poets were obviously keen drivers, if not accomplished ones. Ginsberg wound up in a mental institution after the car he was travelling in crashed with a trunk full of stolen silverware and men’s suits, an experience which eventually led to the writing of Howl. Pam Ayres wrote a poem about her sat nav. Simon Armitage wrote a poem about his Lada. Tony Hoagland wrote a poem about his Honda. I discovered Audre Lorde could drive, after reading an excerpt from her biography. She describes having to pull over after hearing the news that a 10-year-old black boy was shot by a police officer. “A kind of fury rose up in me; the sky turned red. I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. So I pulled over. I took out my journal just to air some of my fury, to get it out of my fingertips,” she said. The poem she wrote was Power.
More is made about non-driving novelists. CS Lewis didn’t drive. Ray Bradbury didn’t drive. Nabokov didn’t drive, but he did, for some reason, write most of Lolita in the backseat of his parked black 1946 Oldsmobile. Tolkien turned his garage into a writing studio. Ursula Le Guin says “It’s awful to think what I might have done armed with an automobile.” Virginia Woolf bought an expensive car, immediately crashed it into a hedge, and never drove again. Patricia Highsmith’s driving ability is unclear, although she did once write: “One reason to admire the automobile: It demolishes more people than wars do.” Which should have been reason enough to confiscate her licence.
Wallace Stevens was a lifelong pedestrian, who preferred ambling around his Asylum Avenue and considered a seventeen-and-a-half-mile walk “a good days jaunt.” Langston Hughes couldn’t drive. James Wright couldn’t drive. Robert Lowell couldn’t drive, and neither could John Berryman (“he never managed to do the simple things like cook a meal, drive a car or read a bank statement”.)
I quickly became distracted by looking up everyone in the western literary canon. Could Louise Glück drive? Anne Carson? TS Eliot? “TS Eliot” + “automobile?” “TS Eliot” + “motorcar.” I couldn’t figure out if Sharon Olds could drive, although I was happily reminded of her magnificent lines “my job is to eat the whole car / of my anger, part by part / some parts ground down to steel-dust.”
Occasionally I was able to find suggestive evidence. TS Eliot once wrote to the Automobile Association saying he had never owned a car. Srikanth Reddy says of Louise Glück: “She would need someone to drive her to Star Market for groceries on weekends. (I volunteered once, waiting nervously in the parking lot until she returned with a cantaloupe and asparagus.)”
I discovered Anne Carson loves driving and put her in the yes category, only to immediately revise my position, after her partner commented “Anne rides in the backseat with books and notebooks.” I got excited when I found a search result that seemed to suggest that Robert Frost might have been a driver. But it turned out to be an amateur ode to the electric car written in the style of Robert Frost.
“The road is lively, quick, and steep / But I have batteries to keep / And miles to drive before I sleep / And miles to drive before I sleep.”
All of this information is interesting and proves exactly nothing. Why are poets so reluctant to get behind the wheel?
In this instance, I can only speak for myself.
My reasons against driving: I find the road rules insane and difficult to understand. I have trouble intuitively telling my left from my right. When I give directions, I have to continually turn the map, so the car is always facing up. I find the rage of other drivers frightening. I have trouble operating anything with wheels, whether I’m pushing a supermarket trolley or playing Mario Kart. It’s expensive. It’s bad for the environment. I hate sitting exams. I’ve watched too many horror movies where a woman’s car breaks down on an empty stretch of highway at night. And perhaps the most compelling reason of all: even if you are a competent and responsible driver there’s always a non-zero chance you will accidentally kill someone.
Some days I regret my decision. There are lots of jobs you can’t apply for without a licence. I’d love to be able to drive to various rural op-shops and bring back unwieldy items of furniture. I love gazing out the window of a moving vehicle. The cows “sad and beautiful, like girls very long ago.”
Mostly, it’s not much of an inconvenience. I have no kids or dogs. My partner can drive. My city has a good public transport network, and you overhear a great many extraordinary and funny things on the bus. Like Wallace Stevens, my preferred method of transport is walking around aimlessly, taking photos of people’s ornamental garden frogs and ugly Christmas decorations. Perhaps if I had learned to drive at 16 I would never have racked up so many steps on my pedometer.
Perhaps the most compelling reason to learn to drive is simply the merch. Maybe one day I will be the proud recipient of one of Stacey Teague’s iconic badges which she distributes to New Zealand writers with wheels. The badges are pale pink, and emblazoned with words by Rebecca K Reilly: “private vehicle, public feelings”.
Learning to drive out of a sense of personal responsibility doesn’t interest me. But I have to admit the idea of a complimentary badge tips the scales. Maybe that says more about poets than raw statistics ever could.
On the other side of the divide is Ella Frears’ baseball cap that reads “real poets can’t drive”, which one of her cousins embroidered, in a homage to Ella’s magnificent poem on the subject.
I no longer believe real poets can’t drive. But if there’s any truth to be derived from my investigation, it’s that poets (guilty) can make a poem out of anything. In the words of Bill Manhire:
“Excuse me if I laugh.
The roads are dark and large books block our path.
The air we breathe is made of evening air.
The world is longer than the road that brings us here.”
