(Interview
with Andrew Schelling, poet, scholar, teacher and author of Old Tale Road published by Empty Bowl
Press. Conducted via email, July 16-21, 2009.)
Andrew Schelling was born
January 14, 1953 and raised in New England. He earned his B.A. in Religious
Studies from U.C. Santa Cruz in 1973 and joined the faculty of what is now
Naropa University in Boulder in 1990. There, in Colorado’s Indian Peaks
Watershed, he has been engaged in land use and ecology concerns, as well as a
being a fine teacher of poetry and Sanskrit. He’s also on the faculty of Deer
Park Institute in Himachal Pradesh, India. His translations of Sanskrit poetry
are well known and his latest book of poetry is Old
Tale Road.
PN - Andrew,
thanks for this opportunity to pick your brain. Eliot Weinberger’s blurb on the
back of Old Tale Road places you in a
poetry tradition that includes the Transcendentalists, Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder. The
Transcendentalists, perhaps, because of the interest in metaphysics. Rexroth
and Snyder because of being a poet from the West, the wilderness expertise,
interest in history and Asian philosophy and writing. Can you elaborate on how
important these three influences are to your own work and what other major
sources there are for you?
AS - Rexroth and Snyder, yes. Like Thoreau, they
taught me to read Asian texts, and to seat the books in the North American
landscape. When I began to study Sanskrit—and then to translate India’s
poetry—those two poets among others kept me on track. All poets pick and choose
the writers that become our personal pantheon or chief influences. I guess
that’s what’s meant by tradition. Thoreau was singular for me as a child. I
grew up in the pre-revolutionary townships West of Boston, and would swim in
Walden Pond, roam the forests Thoreau knew, and climb his rugged little granite
peaks. In fact last year I went to Maine with a couple of friends and climbed
Mt. Katahdin (or Ktaadn) in tribute to him. Really it is only Thoreau, not the
Transcendentalists, that I keep in my medicine bundle to smoke.
There’s also my commitment to wilderness studies,
mountaineering, land use issues in the American West, and ecology. I’m always
looking for fellow writers who know something about the land they live on,
about who lived there before, what the material base is—you know, the
geography, plants & animals, weather patterns. Almost all early traditions
of song or poetry are steeped in this stuff, before modern urban life reduced
such studies to the status of a hobby. Of those older traditions, India has
taught me immeasurably, classical Japanese writings, and Native America too.
PN - Old Tale Road is your first book in six
years. Can you tell us about how a book goes from idea to published work? Was
there an idea before the writing started as to how the book would look, or do
you go back after a period of time and see how chapters may go together? Is
there some central theme, or is it a case when a publisher says Do you have enough material for a new book?
AS - Most of my books come about when I have enough
material—either poetry or essays or translations—to make a viable collection.
My interests, or ways of writing, are consistent enough that I don’t worry too
much about whether things fit in. I do put a lot of time into looking at how
poems fit together. Making a book happens at a different order of concentration
than making a poem. But, Old Tale Road
really holds ten years of work, with many poems originally in the manuscript
that I later removed. It had earlier titles too, including Haibun Black Earth, Tundra Poetics, High Lonesome, and then its
present title—which by the way is the name of the road I live on. JB Bryan who
designed the book found the striking photograph of Newspaper Rock in Utah for
the cover, which meets the tone of the book perfectly.
On the other hand I have edited two
books—anthologies—that came about because editors approached me. One is The Wisdom Anthology of North American
Buddhist Poetry. Wisdom Publications first asked Mike O’Connor if he’d do
such a book, and Mike said no, he didn’t really think he wanted to, but that
there was this character down in Colorado who might be foolish enough to try
such a thing. And then recently I finished an anthology of India’s bhakti or so-called devotional poetry
for a press in India that had approached me. Bhakti poems are quite wild, very
anti-clerical, sexy, full of trickster material. American readers might know
the names of Kabir and Mirabai, two of about forty-five poets included. This
book was a very methodical study for me, as I had to learn a pretty wide range
of things I knew little about.
PN - Haibun is
a form used extensively in Old Tale Road.
In fact, there is a haibun on the migration of haibun. When did you first come
across this form and how did you begin to incorporate that into your writing
practice?
A couple
of tips of yours on writing haibun include:
- Make
prose compressed, disjunct, and play at the edge of narrative, don't go
into the center of it.
- Make
the poems weird, ie. so they don't sound too much like haiku.
The inclusion
of a guy named Kyle provides a bit of disjunction in the aforementioned haibun,
as does another, better known (infamous) individual, Donald Rumsfeld. Why do
you believe it necessary for well-written haibun to have that disjunct quality
and does the poem come out of your head like that organically, or do you need
to go back and introduce that in the re-vision process? And is your writing,
like Philip Whalen called it, a picture
or graph of the mind moving?
AS - For many years my writing has come out of my
journals. Most of what I keep track of goes in: scraps of verse, prose bits,
dreams, notes on books or lectures, recipes, natural history, word origins
& definitions, portraits of friends, and so forth. At some point a phrase
or a rhythm comes to me, and I will go into my journal and find things to put
in a Haibun. I think that as a poet you need to be a thief—and the best person
to steal from is yourself. So keep lots of notes…. My journals are a mix of
prose and verse-stanzas anyhow, so making things a little more formal isn’t
hard. I have also studied Basho & Sei Shonagon, and other Japanese writers
who contributed to the form. You can get as deep, as complicated as you want,
in your practice of haibun.
But the disjunction is simply the way many of us
write today. “A graph of the mind moving.” We all know how the mind follows a
lot of leads, connections, and pleasures simultaneously. There’s a lot of
boring modern Haibun that gets written, stunted by the writer’s belief that it
should be a simple unified narrative. Our lives luckily don’t work that way. My
problem’s the opposite! My stuff always begins with a half dozen things going
on, and any revision I do is to find my way back to the first impulse, to that
original rhythm or image.
PN - The link
in “Haibun the Migration of Haibun” is the Japanese poetic form (haibun), and
your region of the country where WWII Internment camps held U.S. Americans of
Japanese ancestry. The thread between these facets is Asian metaphysics with
the found poem from the Dalai Lama. So, the history and bioregional aspects of
your work and life all come up into this one example. Two of the most important
thrusts of post-modern North American poetry in my view, are the interest in
history (Paterson, The Maximus Poems,
&c.) and that sense of place exemplified by those two works. But do you
believe a bioregionalist sensibility takes these concepts further?
AS - I hadn’t quite thought of those two poems as
early bioregional writings. Williams and Olson were both largely interested in
the social, political, economic conditions of the Euro-American settlers who
built their cities. Olson did try to go beneath to the underpinnings. He knew
the fishing industry, and he got on to the Vinland sagas that document Norse
explorers reaching Massachusetts. Weirdly though, he could never accept real
cultural discoveries on this continent before the Old World got in. His Mayan Letters is painful to read; he
can’t believe that indigenous people had astronomy and shipping, or could build
observatories and pyramids. He thought it had to be seafaring Phoenicians.
I guess a bioregional awareness is studied,
skeptical, and also quite pragmatic. It suggests a regional and anarchist
approach to politics, local organizing, and ultimately a vision of
reestablishing communities based on natural boundaries, not political ones that
ignore local conditions. There’s a loose version of it getting very fashionable
now, with the global economy in a downspin. Many people are being forced to
think more progressively, support local growers, understand the way the big
machine has decimated their neighborhoods & back yards, drive less,
reconsider their school systems. For the moment it looks like old-fashioned
community values are enjoying a resurgence. This might mean that we’ll look at
big poems with global ambitions more skeptically in the future.
PN - You told
me that Mike O'Connor, the publisher of Old
Tale Road, says the Perfect Wisdom Suite is heart of the book, but you say:
“It must have at least two then—as the Noh play on Jaime de Angulo is the
single piece I would want to outlive me.” Can you elaborate?
AS - Jaime de Angulo is a West Coast culture hero,
and one of the writers close to my heart. This loops back to your first
question, about influences. De Angulo was a linguist, ethnographer, kind of a
literary man, but behind that he was a scout into older ways of living. He
spent time with a number of “doctors” among the California tribes, and knew a
great deal about the Indians of northern California, especially their
languages, songs, and old time stories. “The Camp at El Mocho” is a Noh play
that takes him for its shite or
central figure. Certain Japanese Noh plays use historical people that way.
There are several Noh composed around the poetess Ono no Komachi, for instance.
Noh are quite stylized—with exacting use of sets, characters, musicians, and
chorus. They have an overlay of Buddhist metaphysics, but underneath lies a
concern with old medicine and magical healing practices.
There was a particular healing that I hoped to bring
about a few years back. I’d been studying Jaime de Angulo’s writings since the
late 1970s, and the El Mocho piece formed itself around him. For a long time I
have hoped to write on de Angulo. Maybe the Noh play is that book. Maybe
there’s another in the wings.
PN - There is
much from your essay Post-Coyote Poetry
that I could ask about, but the two things most critical, for my interests are,
first, the notion that this kind of poetry has projectivist tendencies and,
second, that this is a poetry of western North America. Rexroth has said on
many occasions that West Coast poets are more influenced by Asian culture than
European culture. How does that differentiate the poetry of the west from that
of other regions of the continent?
AS - I live in Colorado, right where the short grass
prairie meets the eastern slope of the Southern Rocky Mountains. It is a rough,
comparatively unformed place, culturally speaking, and does not yet show a
settled, recognizable approach to the arts or even to life ways. Most of the
high-tech industry, the ghastly condominium developments—which have business
centers but no schools or grocery stores— are pretty much in the same old
cut-and-run mode as mining towns were. Places to do extraction work but not to
live. They will end up ghost towns probably, and I doubt they will leave any
worthwhile poetry. My spiritual homeland, where I learnt to think as a poet,
where I entered a community that went to the wilderness, to anarchist politics,
and to Asian poetries for sustenance, is Northern California. There you look
out across the Pacific at Asia, and many of the life ways are shared around the
North Pacific Rim.
When I coined the term “post coyote poets” I wanted
to evoke an anarchic, rangy, non-academic but studious set of poets who share
certain tendencies. Knowledge of Asian languages and literatures, wilderness
expertise, respect for Native American knowledge about the land, a
gift-exchange system of publishing. Post coyote was meant to be funny. It also
refers to Coyote’s Journal, the
publication that looks to me to have best captured the internationalism, the
interest in translation, the concern with world cultures and local cultures,
which characterize these poets. In particular, I see the current University
based poets as having lost interest in the wider range of world poetry,
including oral forms. So I wanted to point to poets who write in relation to
what ecologists call “deep time.”
4:46P
– 7.21.09
Auburn,
WA