‘Please enjoy a cup of tea.’:Tyler Doherty reviews
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It’s fitting Andrew Schelling’s most recent book, Tea Shack Interior: New & Selected Poems, is dedicated to ‘Althea Rose Schelling/her friends & generation/ ‘Please enjoy a cup of tea.’ Hard to think of a poet working these days whose passions and concerns embrace both the local exigencies of home, heart and hearth and the long view of geologic and mythic time with such compassion and care. I stopt in to watch the Yankees at Rocky Flats, a wind-scraped roadhouse on State Ninety-three. At the bar a few couples sat talking quiet, or gazed at the ballgame. Cold out? ask’d the bartender. I ordered beer and a whiskey. A t-shirt back of the bottles said
It’s a form perfectly suited to the supremely odd and culturally destructive juxtapositions of life in twenty-first century America like this one from ‘The Roadhouse at Colma’: The Conoco station
And lest the post-everything hipster thinks the poems lack the kind of jazzy music and verbal density we’ve come to admire in poets like Clark Coolidge, let her/him tangle with the crabbed and torqued sentences of ‘Tundra Poetics’ written on one of Schelling’s annual hikes up to the Continental Divide with his students during Naropa’s Summer Writing Programme in ’99: After lunch they went into rock, entrance haphazards of rock. Six stripping down slipped into Dorothy Lake. Nerve ends alert. Oz sandwich vistas to Wichita, to breach the as if. The lake mostly iced under cliffs of cathedral. At one open edge it had flow rots and breakings, stuttered sheets, and small whitened dinosaur ends.
As with Christopher Dewdney’s work, it’s writing that shows Schelling to be one of those few ‘nature writers’ willing to go where the words take him. A true ecology of mind, foot and letter always on the move. Or can we picture a future monasticism — half the year given to mountain retreat, raven and rattlesnake comrades, twisting along pine forest cliffsides — half the year inside cities, like Catholic Workers on 34th St. lading soup?
Schelling’s engaged Buddhist spirituality is a vision that breaks down distinctions between monastic and lay practitioners where the locus of transformation — both personal and social — is set squarely, almost stubbornly, in the midst of everyday life. There are no religious pronouncements down from on high here — ‘No divine edicts, no one to issue them.’; these poems have heard all that claptrap and seen past its dead ends. If there’s any ‘Zen’ at all it’s not in the form of made-to-order tenets — more like a fact of writing, a part of the life. No biggee, like growing your hair or itching a scratch. It’s a pithy vision that lays the groundwork for a thoroughly secularized interreligious cooperation, working for a sane world while appreciative of, and fostering, differences. Indeed, that curious appreciation of the off-key and out-of-the-way is a hallmark of Schelling’s work — something between a crackpot Sanskrit scholar’s glee at the discovery of an arcane turn of phrase and a kid’s wide-eyed amazement at a Golden Eagle seen for the first time. Bateson revealed the antidote
Like the Japanese tea ceremony from which the collection takes its title, this is a poetics of the plain and ordinary, but with a singular difference — it’s attended to, as if everything depended on it — which it does. |
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Jacket 22 — May 2003
Contents page This material is copyright © Tyler Doherty
and Jacket magazine 2003 |