Overview

""If I don't get back on the road I'm going to lose my dog-damn mind howling mad and barking crazy like some burning saint. ..."" So begins the journey, one of many in a two-decade stretch of living out of a backpack upon the open road - often without a destination, but never without a purpose. Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals blends travel memoir with poetry to recount the author's days of hitchhiking and road trip adventures. With excursions to Central America, Britain, and throughout the American West and Midwest, the book follows in the tradition of Bashō's haibun classics such as Narrow Road to the Deep North and Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton. Amid stories that are often humorous and sometimes harrowing, lies a strong foundation of commitment to wild spaces, freedom (in all its precariousness) and the transformative power of poetry. Setting out from a small cabin in northern Michigan, Beaudin hits the road to find a poetry of freedom and wilderness, both physical and psychic. He confronts the ravages of history, religion and capitalism, as well as his own fears and hypocrisies while always seeking the lessons found in the wild spaces of the earth and the mind. Each chapter is a different road, from M-46 to West Elk Loop, from the A1 to the Chicken Bus Highway. The roads are presented as movements in a musical composition, separated by interludes hinting at the adventures of the perhaps apocryphal Miscellaneous Jones, the Ur-Traveler, and his companions Zorba Chaos and Moses Om. Brief periods of being off the road are recounted as caesurae, moments of silence within a piece of music. As a whole it becomes, as William Hjortsburg, author of Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan, calls it, ""a poet's song to the rewards of wandering and the joy of the highway."" The book includes a foreword by poet/essayist William Heyen and cover art and interior sketches by well-known Montana artist Edd Enders. This special 10th anniversary edition has been fully revised by the author with several new poems, as well as adding two ""bonus tracks"" - ""The Hundred Highways Tour,"" culled from journal entries and blogs written during the original book tour during which Beaudin traveled 100 highways to read at bookstores, bars, libraries, festivals, art spaces and a cliff above the Pacific Ocean somewhere along the Coastal Highway, and ""Casa Parota,"" a haibun written during a stay in an unnamed seaside village in Jalisco, Mexico in 2024.

Full Product Details

9780986304064

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Marc Beaudin is a poet, theatre artist and bookseller in Livingston, Montana. In addition to his books, he's released two albums of spoken word and jazz featuring music by members of the band Morphine and the Northwoods Improvisers. He still believes the Brahms' Violin Concerto in D is more powerful than all the guns, smokestacks and authoritarians in the world. Edd Enders was born in Livingston and studied art at Montana State University. He has worked on archeological survey teams throughout the West, and as a hunting guide, packer, wrangler and cowboy from Alaska to Arizona. His work has collectors from New York to Key West to Chicago to Shanghai, and has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. William Heyen is a National Book Award finalist, a former Senior Fulbright Lecturer and a recipient of awards from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has published nearly 50 books of poetry, memoir and essay, and has appeared in hundreds of journals. His collection of scherzi, Timewarp and Numbnuts, is forthcoming from Elk River Books.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available