Andrew Schelling | The Handful of Seeds | Three & a Half Essays
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Poet and translator Andrew Schelling's The Handful of Seeds is the first volume in the new Pleasure Boat Studio Chapbook Series. His Three and a Half Essays on literature, philosophy, and the process of creation, include "A Grammar"; "Avalokiteshvara, Rocky Flats, and the New York Times"; "Old and New Litigation Songs"; and "Allen Ginsberg Death Notes." Schelling teaches poetry, Sanskrit, and wilderness studies at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. His recent books include The Cane Groves of Narmada River: Erotic Poems of Old India, Songs of the Sons & Daughters of Buddha (with Anne Waldman), and The Road to Ocosingo. |
from THE HANDFUL OF SEEDS
"That cry–confusion, anguish, complexity, fragile doomed beauty, toxic mistake–that is where Buddhism and poetry twine together. Both are attempts to hear the world's noise, the anguished cries of sentient beings everywhere, however discordant–to discern their order, their pattern, with an eye to easing the misery."
"Allen [Ginsberg] must have baffled a lot of listeners when he first began to chant mantras at poetry readings to the accompaniment of Tibetan finger cymbals or Indian shruti box (harmonium). Professors considered him silly. News magazines made fun of him. But more than anyone else he helped us see those magic early texts as poetry, and led us away from the peculiar Occidental weirdness which wants its religion safe in church, but sends poetry adrift and lonely to street or classroom. "
"In a handful of wild seeds taken from any one natural community, there is hidden the distillation of millions of years of coevolution of plants and animals."
—Gary Paul Nabhan, Ethnobotanist,quoted in THE HANDFUL OF SEEDS
Andrew Schelling
THE HANDFUL OF SEEDS
Pleasure Boat Studio 1999
ISBN 0-9651413-5-7
Nonfiction | 36 pages
Paper | U.S. $7.OO