Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals

"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.

About the Author :
Marc Beaudin is the author of Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals, The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds and Other Poems and the play Frankenstein, Inc. His work has been seen in Avocet, Watershed, The MacGuffin, Temenos, Haiku Journal, Fragile Arts Quarterly, Badlands Literary Journal, Pirene's Fountain and numerous other journals. He is included in the Bangtail Press anthology of Montana writers, An Elk River Books Reader. In 2004, he edited the anti-war anthology Jihad bil Qalam: To Strive by Means of the Pen. He is the poetry editor of CounterPunch and the founding artistic director of the Caldera Theatre Company. Originally from Michigan, he now lives in Livingston, Montana. He believes the Brahms' Violin Concerto in D is more powerful than all the guns, smokestacks and coal trains in the world. More on his writings and theatre work can be found at CrowVoice.com. Montana native Edd Enders worked with archeological survey teams, as a hunting guide, packer, wrangler and cowboy before studying art at University. Enders paints full- time, portraying human impact on the region, not romanticized landscapes, and is widely collected and shown. William Heyen is the author of Crazy Horse & the Custers and numerous other books. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American literature in Germany, he has won prizes and awards from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters. His Crazy Horse in Stillness won the Small Press Book Award in 1997, Shoah Train: Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004 and A Poetics of Hiroshima was a Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle selection in 2010. He lives in Brockport, NY.

Review :
"A poet's song to the rewards of wandering and the joy of the highway. It's a bracing tonic and one this sorry, sad-assed, gadget-obsessed nation needs to hear again and again." -William Hjortsberg "Is there such a thing as free-range literature? I think there is and I think this is it. These lovely, spirited, freewheeling trip logs are charged with the poetry of motion." -Walter Kirn "Here is a poet's road trip, as drunk on travel as Bash, tracing the blue highways with a dazzling prose. Beaudin's lyrical style is the joyful song that keeps us belted in for the fast passage, a firm anchor of raven, woodlands and the fractured moon on the lake at night. We should all take strength from his impressive traverse." -Doug Peacock "Beaudin is a cat in his own category of howl & highway hymn. It's our luck that he's made a book that will persist in our minds as a classic companion of blue moonways & on-the-road travels with Charlie." -William Heyen "This is the kind of book parents will hide from their graduating children, but which will be found nonetheless." -Rick Bass "Beaudin intertwines expansive and lyric passages as he weaves his personal narrative, and he has plenty to say about history and politics, about religion, mythology and the spiritual curiosity that drives him." -Tami Haaland "What a roadsong! No matter where I opened the book, I was drawn into the bright moment of the journey. Only a poet could fashion such a book." - Tamarack Song"