Wild Form, Savage Grammar

Book excerpt: These essays are reports from an increasingly important crossroads where art and ecology meet. Andrew Schelling belongs, in the words of Patrick Pritchett, "to a small group of poets who are actively engaged with the rhythms and pulses of the natural world." He is also the preeminent translator into English of the poetries of ancient India.Wild Form, Savage Grammarcollects ten years of essays, many of which investigate the "nature literacy" of American and Asian poetry traditions. Other topics include recollections of Allen Ginsberg and Joanne Kyger, wolf reintroduction in the Rocky Mountains, pilgrimage to Buddhist India, and the possible use of hallucinogens among Paleolithic artists. An underlying commitment to ecology studies, Buddhist teachings, and contemporary poetry weaves the collection together.>/p> "What the archaic traditions (and their echoes in Asia, Native America and elsewhere) might come to mean for a nature literate people of today and the future is very exciting. A way out of the West's goofy pastoralism? Out of the neo-Victorian nature writing which dominates the commercial nature magazines? Let's envision somewhere in the immediate future a tradition grander than Romantic landscape verse or regional painting, and far more heartening than nostalgia for a pre-industrial or pre-agricultural past. What might it look like? Could there be a future in which ecology and art fruitfully interact, inspired by biological discoveries and scarcely envisioned conservation sciences of eras to come? My hope is that projective forms of writing will move quickly past visual descriptions of natural phenomena, to enact or recuperate what Aldo Leopold observed to be the grand theaters of ecology and the epic journeys of evolution."--from theIntroduction