New York poets Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder are on the bus carrying an ever-changing cast of poets to towns in America and Canada.

Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took inspired journeys and the Beatles toured England by bus in “Magical Mystery Tour,” but this road trip is literally lyrical, conjuring images of Eliot and Shakespeare alongside Exxon and Shell.

Messrs. Beckman and Zapruder are editors at the Seattle-based Wave Books, which is sponsoring the 50-city tour. Their Green Tortoise bus left September 4 and will return to Seattle for a final reading at the Space Needle on October 27. Each day or evening they read at venues varying from fine arts concert halls, pubs, bookstores, schools, and theaters to the Naval Academy in Maryland and a dormant volcano in Northern Arizona. In each city and town, traveling poets are featured with local poets.

Last month, the bus arrived in New York City, where there was a marathon reading at Dia:Chelsea featuring John Ashbery, Eileen Myles, David Lehman, and many others.

Noelle Kocot, who has recited such poems as her “Ode to my cat Euclid,” about her mackerel tabby, described the spirit of the tour as “inclusive.” Mr. Lehman said the impulse behind the tour was to move poetry beyond the realm of a “private pleasure … to try to build a larger readership for it.”

“It’s like being at a really fun cocktail party moving down the street,” Matthew Rohrer, who joined the tour for a portion of the East Coast trip and will fly to Las Vegas for some of the West Coast journey, said. Mr. Rohrer, who teaches poetry at the New School, said the bus has couches, tables, and even an old typewriter, on which his young son, Seamus, spelled his name. The trip “brings little fragmented poetry communities together,” he said.

Mr. Rohrer said when the bus stopped in traffic at red lights in Manhattan, pedestrians tried to board it, even though it reads “Poetry Bus” on the outside.

“This is Joshua’s brainchild,” Ms. Kocot said.

Mr. Rohrer said that Mr. Beckman once made a countrywide tour, reading at bookstores as well as more unusual locations such as a prison and a grain silo in Wyoming. In 2002, the two went on a 27-city tour for their book “Nice Hat. Thanks” (Wave Books), reading in places such as a dive bar in Nashville and someone’s living room. Mr. Rohrer recalled crashing a friend’s pickup truck in Connecticut, but he and Mr. Beckman still managed to arrive in time for a reading at Harvard University.

Mr. Beckman was inspired to attempt a cross-country poetry bus journey after hearing while in Slovenia of poets who boarded a train and gave readings at various towns along the way.

Reached at a diner in Albuquerque, Mr. Beckman said being on tour “is a generative process” where one gets a lot of ideas. He compared the bus to a workshop where handicrafts are made: Poets on board, he said, were “working on collaborative projects every day.”

Mr. Zapruder, whose poetry collection is called “The Pajamist” (Copper Canyon), said that while on the trip he and other poets have been asking people they met along the way if they wanted to hear a poem. He recalled reading a poem to a hitchhiker and his dog.

The poets have praised their bus driver, Bill Wesley, who plays guitar and harmonica, and knows the location of the country’s best natural hot springs.

How rare is it for a poetry bus to traverse the country? “I think,” Mr. Beckman said, “it secretly happens all the time.”