This reading will focus on a new volume of poetry, Forests, Temples, Glacial Rivers , and a just-released book of translations, Old Time Love Song Magic. The translations are the surviving poems of Vidyā, who wrote in Sanskrit (ca. 7th-9th century), along with commentaries that dig into the mysteries of the old language. Vidyā appears in several alternate versions in Schelling’s recent poetry collection. In that book, contemporary poems based on ecology, land, and bioregion, meet the savvy know-how of archaic India in reading the cycles of nature. Poetry of the West Coast, and of the intermountain West, has often turned towards Asian models, with great interest in close readings of the natural world. These attentions have famously gone to classical Chinese or Japanese traditions. Schelling extends this perspective to the work of classical India, where the poems are structured around the changing seasons, as are raga music and ayurvedic medicine.                                                                                                                                                          ~Andrew Schelling

You can make a reservation using this link: Andrew Schelling Poetry

Copies of Schelling's just-published Forests, Temples, Glacial Rivers, and Old Time Love Song Magic will be available for sale.  Seating is limited to 25 people. Reception will follow Andrew’s talk.

Andrew Schelling

 Bio: Andrew Schelling is a poet, translator, essay writer, and editor of anthologies. He joined the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University in 1990, and in 1994 began teaching Sanskrit language for the department of Buddhist Studies, then for Yoga Studies. He works on land-use and ecological issues in Colorado and the American West, is an amateur naturalist and mountaineer, and for many years taught at Deer Park Institute in India’s Himalayan foothills. His most recent collection of poetry is Forests, Temples, Glacial Rivers. A new collection of translations, Old Time Love Song Magic, is just out, presenting the known poetry of Vidya, India’s earliest-known woman to write poetry in Sanskrit. Elliot Weinberger has written of Schelling as directly in the line of Rexroth, Jeffers, and Snyder. Schelling’s Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture is an ideogram of linguistics, storytelling, wilderness lore, bohemian poets, and cattle rustling. The book has become an underground classic of sorts, on the West or “Left” Coast.