The Mental Traveler by David Omer Bearden

The Mental Traveler is a lost-then-found manuscript of 20th-century American poetry that was completed in 1990, but remained unpublished. Now released for the first time, The Mental Traveler reveals a notable range of David Omer Bearden’s work, starting with his formative years in 1958 while attending the University of Tulsa.

Bearden’s ingenuity takes you on an autobiographical journey that challenges and elevates literature with innovative words and surrealist expression that is spiritually trans-dimensional. The mind-space and language presented throughout David’s work are diligently curated like a scientist formulating conceptual metaphors with purpose and soul.

Special Note: The Mental Traveler includes an intimate joint diary between David Bearden and singer/songwriter Judee Sill while they were on tour in England, 1973.

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"Bearden obviously opened the door to steal a chunk of poetic gold from the Gods. Intricate and well written."

— Nicolai Billy

“Somewhere between Blake, Hank Williams and Homer, David Omer Bearden traveled a poetic line and gave himself over to it. ‘To waltz is to leave without paying’, he says in one poem. ‘Which undermine all noble arrangements’, he says in another. Bearden is one of those poets who begins an old man and gets younger as he progresses. Out of time all of the time, the window he shares with us allows us both a view into his poems and a view of him. Born in Blythe, California, raised in the 40s and 50s, senses sharpened in the 60s and 70s. Who has time for a career when you’re studying the line this hard? ‘I set fire to bitter walking papers./I was ever the I am not in those good days.’ The Mental Traveler brings the reader into the sharp, sardonic and gorgeous observations of this fine bard that we may ‘. . . interpolate him into here/flash-drowning world/one moment/before the blink.’ Poetry has always had a home for the outsider, and David Bearden waits there now, his poems in your hands.”

— Edmund Berrigan

“Bearden’s earlier poems are full of neo-surreal descriptions, with elaborate images, and intimate know-how of American lingo. His most recent identity as a ‘traveler’ focuses more directly and with strong success on lyrical, romantic themes of love, friendship, and family. As a fellow poet, I admire his ability to access and phrase as achieved in the title poem. ‘And the wayfaring traveller; For ever open is his door. . . Till he becomes a wayward Babe, And she a weeping Woman Old, Then many a Lover wanders here; The Sun and Stars are nearer roll’d’”

— Gerd Stern

“There is an autobiographical component to this work as a whole, and often specifically. . . We are taken on a wide and deep journey through his life, exposed often to his negative responses to his environment. Yet, his descriptions of the desert flora around Blythe, California and various places in Oklahoma show by eloquent detail, his constant sensitivity to his environment. . . One cannot read these poems without realizing you are in the presence of an important poet. His ability to illuminate a landscape with notes of emotive description is superb. One soon realizes that this is ingrained in the body and mind of this poet and his unique renderings of his observations are far purer than stylized. His mind and his craft seem to be one.”

— Roxie Powell

“Poets sometimes explode with radiance and then die young. This is the romantic model that so appeals to the sophomoric, but which is not a literary necessity. In David Omer Bearden’s case, he burned bright and early, intimidated his colleagues, and then continued to survive, getting painfully battered the way life does to everybody. The upside of living a long life as a poet may be that suffering ceases to be an aesthetic foundation for preciousness, and becomes the coin of the realm. In a great poet’s life, the drubbings of experience cut far deeper than with ordinary mortals. It becomes a miracle of creation when the infrequent psychic alchemy occurs which transmutes ugly experience into beautiful Art.”

— Dion Wright

“David Bearden breathed, a rhapsodist, as one among the ancient Greeks, a wandering minstrel reciting a fully lived contemporary epic. . . Bearden’s true genius quivers in a play of abstractly connected images sewn together with such tenderness, that reading, we feel the needle in our very cloth. . .”

— Maureen Owen

“David Omer Bearden’s work speaks to the traveller in all of us and touches on a kind of allusion found in the poets I love: Rimbaud & Lorca; with the sensuality of Neruda. He creates these authentic images of places that feel like out of memory or in a Terrence Malick film; somewhere between the sacred and the mundane. . . Bearden is one of those important poets whose voice is unique and in the long tradition of the great written word going back to the Ancient Greeks.”

— Nicholas Tolkien