Although we often associate travel writing with essays about journeys or road-trip novels, poetry has had a long, rich history of association with travel. Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century poems explore wanderlust and faraway locales and new modes of transportation, which can be seen in the exoticism of John Masefield’s “Cargoes” and Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay” and the romanticization of rail travel in Thomas Hardy’s “On the Departure Platform” and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Travel.” More recent poems, such as Khaled Mattawa’s “The Road From Biloxi,” Jenny Xie’s “Rootless,” Naomi Shihab Nye’s “The Burn,” and Roger Reeves’s “Brazil,” explore themes of identity, migration, and diaspora. Write a poem based on a favorite travel memory that brings to mind a rich mixture of emotions and a connection with contemporary issues, perhaps touching on ideas of alienation and belonging, or the allure and repulsion of a certain mode of transit. Consider the binaries of travel and home, movement and stillness, the foreign and the familiar. Where have you been and, perhaps more important, where are you going?
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