THE BOOK: The Real People of Wind and Rain: Talks, Essays, & an Interview
PUBLISHED IN: 2014.
THE AUTHOR: Andrew Schelling.
THE EDITOR: Paul Naylor.
THE PUBLISHER: Singing Horse Press. The press was founded by poet Gil Ott, to publish a range of experimental or avant-garde poetry. Ott died sadly young. On his deathbed he questioned Paul Naylor rigorously about what Paul would do should he take on the press. Satisfied with Paul’s answers, Gill handed it over with a blessing. Some of the press’s authors over the years include Rae Armantrout, the Zen priest poet Norman Fischer, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Ed Roberson.
SUMMARY: The Real People contains talks and essays that cover a number of years. Themes that run through the book are ecological concerns with land in the American West, what use poetry and mythology are to protection of wild life, archaic poetry as it erupts into contemporary life, a long cool view of baseball, and of course those secret beings I call “the real people of wind and rain.”
THE BACK STORY: I write many essays, often drawn from talks I’ve given in various places such as The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, or at festive gatherings of eco-activists and poets, or in India to a collection of students who speak various languages besides English. At some point these pieces began to arrange themselves into a structure that did not seem haphazard. A friend who teaches in a tough public high school gave the baseball & Zen essay to his students; he told me their favorite authors that year were Shakespeare and myself.
WHY THIS TITLE?: I got the phrase from a poem of Joanne Kyger’s. It feels like it is halfway to locating a new mythology for North America, animating the forces of weather, peopling this continent with its archaic powers. Call them by their names and they might be pleased.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? The Japanese have a literary category, zuihitsu, often translated as “follow the brush.” It refers to a grouping of prose essays, musings, memoir, philosophy, that finds its own order. The most famous might be Sei Shonagon’s “pillow book.” I find such books refreshing, each piece contributes something new to an order drawn out of random groupings. You could say, with Allen Ginsberg, “Mind is shapely, art is shapely.” But the only reason someone would read this book is because its themes already color their emotional lives: poetry, ecology, myth, archaic languages.
REVIEW COMMENTS: The book got no reviews that I remember. But I do like what Eliot Weinberger once wrote for another book: “Andrew Schelling is the latest in an American poetic lineage that began with Transcendentalism and moved west with Rexroth and Snyder: the unlikely and fortuitous conjunctions of wilderness expertise, the observational precision of a natural historian, homegrown radical politics, and an immersion in Asian philosophy and writing.”
AUTHOR PROFILE: Most of the time I prefer to climb in the Rocky Mountains or camp at winter solstice on the icy desert of southern Utah. What keeps me at the writing desk is an old enjoyment, by old I mean quite archaic, that certain stories and poems not only have durability, but they need people to fight for the ecosystem of ideas in which they occur . I write poetry and essays, and have one lengthier book, a folkloric account of wilderness, bohemian poets, indigenous lore, and languages, titled Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo and Pacific Coast Culture. I teach at Naropa University, a smallish place with roots in both European and Asian traditions, and with a uniquely optimistic set of students. I also translate poetry from Sanskrit and related Indian languages. These are surely my most popular books. Many of the poems are quite delightful love poetry, with a very light touch. That is due to the original writers who lived a thousand or more years ago. Three of the books are with Shambhala Publications, which is happily stationed in Boulder, Colorado, near where I live. You can see them at: https://www.shambhala.com/authors/o-t/andrew-schelling.html
AUTHOR COMMENTS: The wizard of book design, JB Bryan of Northern New Mexico, laid the book out, and arranged the cover. I think it the loveliest book I have, and at every moment you can see how it collaborates with friends. Not a single-author book, but an ecology of people who practice the most lovely and most endangered of arts: poetry, conversation, translation, wilderness skills, pictographs, black & white photography, emotional clarity.
SAMPLE CHAPTER: Sorry folks, no Amazon page. But if you want to sample a bit, the essay “Post Coyote at Orono” is on the website for Jacket2: http://jacketmagazine.com/36/schelling-seventies.shtml
LOCAL OUTLETS: Support your local independent bookstore!
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Small Press Distribution, or order it from a local shop.
PRICE: $18.95.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
aschelli@naropa.edu
or
Naropa University: Religious Studies
Naropa University
2130 Arapahoe Ave.
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 