Title: Tripping in America
Author: John Bennett
[$10] “Tripping in America” takes “Charley” and “On the Road” and brings them up to date. There’s room for more than a couple road-writers. Bennett wanders America’s campgrounds with sixpacks and a manual typewriter, and not just for fun or with grant support or a publisher’s advance. For him and his girlfriend at the time it was a way of life, or a way he was trying to find his life. A vocation. Not an uncommon one for an artist. Just silenced is all: there should be more such realistic, normal-people books exploring today’s world. This kind of work should be read in high schools.
Bennett is a wonderful writer AND publisher AND poet. He invented the “shard” genre. A shard is a chunk of intense, flipping, prose poetry. Not bad, for a window-washer.
Yeah, he’s one of the last living Beats, one of the toughest of that generation. Only he never sold out. He kept on creating, striving and helping—which might be why he’s still doing windows in his 60’s. And you probably never heard of him. He’s been published quite a bit in the underground, at least a half dozen books and chapbooks. Someone recently did a great CD of him reading shards with a hip hop band, called “Rug Burn.” And he’s published a lot of other people’s work. His compilation of tributes to Henry Miller, “Black Messiah,” is a wonderful example of great publishing and of the small press scene that used to thrive in the U.S. as recent as the 80’s. (There’s still some decent work done and the zeen scene of the 90’s was really something.)
I have a few copies of “Tripping.”
Bennett has a website for his longtime Vagabond Press at: www.eburg.com/~vagabond/
