Vagabond Song

"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.