The Language of Birds

The workings of chance have attracted all manner of minds over the centuries: poets, diviners, physicists, tricksters, gamblers, magicians, sages. Lucky for us, Dale Pendell was all of those and more. ‘The Language of Birds’ offers a spare and witty patchwork of voices, verse, and philosophical koans, all delivered with the panache of a poet’s coup de dés. Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s–Erik Davis

Dale Pendell (1947-2018) was a poet, author and artist from Northern California. He is best known for his acclaimed trilogy of works Pharmako/Poeia (1995), Pharmako/Dynamis (2002), and Pharmako/Gnosis (2006), an in-depth study of the shamanic and pharmacological dimensions of psychoactive plants. His poetry is widely anthologized, most recently in ‘The Wisdom Book of American Buddhist Poetry’. Most recently Dale’s work has appeared in CLAVIS: OCCULT ARTS, LETTERS AND EXPERIENCE VOL. 4, and INVERNESS ALMANAC 4.

Andrew Schelling grew up in New England–Thoreau & Transcendentalist country–then moved West to California, where he worked among poets of the San Francisco Bay Area, editing a samizdat literary journal and studying Sanskrit and Zen Buddhism. In 1990 he resettled in Colorado, along the Front Range of the Southern Rockies. He is a poet, translator, essay writer, and editor. Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India received the Academy of American Poets award for translation in 1992. A recent book, Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture, investigates wilderness encounters, bohemian writers, and mythology of the west. His most recent book is Some Unquenchable Desire: Sanskrit Poems of the Buddhist Hermit Bhartrihari. Natural history, linguistics, and thorny old languages run through his twenty-odd books. He teaches at Naropa University.