What do you think?
Rate this book
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.
268 pages, Paperback
First published September 3, 2015
129 people want to read
About the author
Marc Beaudin
9 books11 followersMarc Beaudin, an Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation artist-in-residence, is a poet, theatre artist and bookseller in Livingston, Montana, dubbed “America’s finest open-air asylum” for multiple reasons. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in High Desert Journal, Cutthroat, Whitefish Review, Ibis Head Review, and numerous other journals, and has been widely anthologized in publications fighting for environmental and social justice. He is a co-editor of the anthology Unearthing Paradise: Montana Writers in Defense of Greater Yellowstone, which includes work by Jim Harrison, Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass and others. His latest book, Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals, was called “a jazzy, freewheeling, rollicking road trip into the beating heart of the Eternal Now” by Montana Quarterly. A frequent performer of poetry and spoken word, Beaudin has worked and recorded with a variety of jazz and rock musicians at venues across the country, notably The Northwoods Improvisors, Billy Conway (of Morphine) and Bill Payne (of Little Feat). He believes the Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D is more powerful than all the guns, smokestacks and coal trains in the world.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 23, 2016
I really like everything about this book. The way it's conceived, what Beaudin has to say in it, the mix of travel, memoir, and poetry, the art (and the story behind it), just everything. Here is the review I wrote for the Missoula Independent:
___________________
There is a scene in Vagabond Song where writer Marc Beaudin has to spend some time with a wealthy, inept, American journalist wannabe in Tapachula, Mexico. The journalist is there, allegedly, to report on the Zapatistas, whom I would describe, in the grossest of oversimplifications, as a group of Mexican revolutionaries. But this journalist doesn't seem interested in going anywhere near the Zapatistas or talking to people who may know anything about them. He doesn't speak Spanish and thinks using an interpreter would just be a waste of time. About all he wants to do is visit Izapa, a small, nearby site of Mayan ruins. Beaudin accompanies him, if only to get him to pay the bus fare. When the visit concludes, Beaudin writes, "Somehow he survives and, fortunately for all of us, he soon returns to the States with his souvenirs and rolls of film and nothing at all to write about. In fact, his entire existence has been reduced to a brief scene as a clown in an unpublishable book by an unknown poet. Serves him right."
I got a chuckle from that second-to-the-last sentence. That I'm holding Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals in my hand is proof that the book is indeed publishable. Then again, it is from Elk River Books, the imprint of the Livingston bookstore that bears the same name, and of which Marc Beaudin happens to be co-owner. So, while Beaudin's statement maybe was a bit prescient, I don't care who ultimately published his book. I'm just pleased to have the opportunity to read it.
Beaudin is originally from Michigan and before settling into a remote writing cabin along the Yellowstone River in Livingston, he spent a couple decades post-college traveling all over the United States, as well as long periods in Mexico and Central America. Some of this traveling was via near-broken automobiles. Most of it was via the dying art of hitchhiking. Vagabond Song found its genesis in those travels, literally, through the journals Beaudin kept along the way.
The book takes an inspiring approach as a combination travelogue, memoir and collection of poetry. Beaudin's poems, many of which have seen previous life in various poetry journals, are interspersed throughout the narrative. Sometimes they serve as interludes between sections and sometimes they follow a scene in which he initially describes the event that inspired the poem in the first place. I appreciate the intimacy—and immediacy—that approach lends to the reading.
Hitting the road with no money and counting on the kindness of kindred spirits is a risk Beaudin seemed happy to take. Those odd characters he meets along the way keep the stories interesting beyond the thrill of the quest to find the next meal and the next place to crash. He describes those magical people, who seem to appear at just the perfect possible time, as "vagabond angels." Most he meets only once before they are on their way. Others, like a farmer-turned-truck driver named Clyde, he ends up seeing multiple times. They all have their own stories, which Beaudin relates—some sad, some with just a hint of lunacy.
Beaudin employs dry wit throughout the book. He isn't above poking fun at himself or at like-minded folks he encounters. Describing a dilapidated attic space he inhabited for a time in a house full of musicians, he quips, "It is a sad state of affairs when drummers are given better accommodations than poets, but such was life in those dark days." However, Beaudin is just as willing to aim his pen at things he disdains. That list clearly includes interstate highways, meddling "peace" officers and soulless cities.
I wish more publishers, particularly the big ones, would pay closer attention to books like Vagabond Song. It's not memoir, it's not an essay collection and it isn't a book of poetry, and publishers seem to prefer to separate all of those so that they occupy their own neat little sections of the bookstore. Yet Vagabond Song is all of those books at once, the result making it special and something that is more than just a sum of its parts. I'd like to see other collections like it from folks as interesting as Beaudin.
___________________
___________________
There is a scene in Vagabond Song where writer Marc Beaudin has to spend some time with a wealthy, inept, American journalist wannabe in Tapachula, Mexico. The journalist is there, allegedly, to report on the Zapatistas, whom I would describe, in the grossest of oversimplifications, as a group of Mexican revolutionaries. But this journalist doesn't seem interested in going anywhere near the Zapatistas or talking to people who may know anything about them. He doesn't speak Spanish and thinks using an interpreter would just be a waste of time. About all he wants to do is visit Izapa, a small, nearby site of Mayan ruins. Beaudin accompanies him, if only to get him to pay the bus fare. When the visit concludes, Beaudin writes, "Somehow he survives and, fortunately for all of us, he soon returns to the States with his souvenirs and rolls of film and nothing at all to write about. In fact, his entire existence has been reduced to a brief scene as a clown in an unpublishable book by an unknown poet. Serves him right."
I got a chuckle from that second-to-the-last sentence. That I'm holding Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals in my hand is proof that the book is indeed publishable. Then again, it is from Elk River Books, the imprint of the Livingston bookstore that bears the same name, and of which Marc Beaudin happens to be co-owner. So, while Beaudin's statement maybe was a bit prescient, I don't care who ultimately published his book. I'm just pleased to have the opportunity to read it.
Beaudin is originally from Michigan and before settling into a remote writing cabin along the Yellowstone River in Livingston, he spent a couple decades post-college traveling all over the United States, as well as long periods in Mexico and Central America. Some of this traveling was via near-broken automobiles. Most of it was via the dying art of hitchhiking. Vagabond Song found its genesis in those travels, literally, through the journals Beaudin kept along the way.
The book takes an inspiring approach as a combination travelogue, memoir and collection of poetry. Beaudin's poems, many of which have seen previous life in various poetry journals, are interspersed throughout the narrative. Sometimes they serve as interludes between sections and sometimes they follow a scene in which he initially describes the event that inspired the poem in the first place. I appreciate the intimacy—and immediacy—that approach lends to the reading.
Hitting the road with no money and counting on the kindness of kindred spirits is a risk Beaudin seemed happy to take. Those odd characters he meets along the way keep the stories interesting beyond the thrill of the quest to find the next meal and the next place to crash. He describes those magical people, who seem to appear at just the perfect possible time, as "vagabond angels." Most he meets only once before they are on their way. Others, like a farmer-turned-truck driver named Clyde, he ends up seeing multiple times. They all have their own stories, which Beaudin relates—some sad, some with just a hint of lunacy.
Beaudin employs dry wit throughout the book. He isn't above poking fun at himself or at like-minded folks he encounters. Describing a dilapidated attic space he inhabited for a time in a house full of musicians, he quips, "It is a sad state of affairs when drummers are given better accommodations than poets, but such was life in those dark days." However, Beaudin is just as willing to aim his pen at things he disdains. That list clearly includes interstate highways, meddling "peace" officers and soulless cities.
I wish more publishers, particularly the big ones, would pay closer attention to books like Vagabond Song. It's not memoir, it's not an essay collection and it isn't a book of poetry, and publishers seem to prefer to separate all of those so that they occupy their own neat little sections of the bookstore. Yet Vagabond Song is all of those books at once, the result making it special and something that is more than just a sum of its parts. I'd like to see other collections like it from folks as interesting as Beaudin.
___________________
December 29, 2024
I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this book. And I don’t really know the reason. But once I started it, I really loved it. The writing incorporated me into the authors adventures and I felt like I was there too. And I loved his poetry. It touched on the magic that I wish really existed in this troubled world.
June 19, 2025
some neat stuff in here but on the whole felt almost like a mad-lib of beatnik authors. or maybe like some tracing of On the Road through the paper of contemporary fiction. mid.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews