RIP Dale Pendell

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http://dalependell.com/

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The Poet of Plants

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/oct/19/magazine/tm-pendell42

The Poet of Plants
Dale Pendell Has Written Two Books on Botanical Pharmacopeia That Resonate With a Lusty Wit. He May Be America's Answer to Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Right Down to the Opium.
October 19, 2003|Emily Green | Emily Green is a Times staff writer.

The first conversation with Dale Pendell is like an overseas telephone call with a lag on the line. I speak. He listens. He thinks. Then he responds in such perfectly formed sentences that I can almost hear the commas.

The stilted speech is surprising. As a writer, Pendell is so fluent that he can make a list of drug side-effects sound interesting, a feat he routinely performed in his two books. Delve deeper into his work and you find poetry, beautiful poetry.

Pendell, 56, has been writing since the 1960s, but his work is little known. I discovered it last spring while serving as a judge for the 2003 Pen Awards overseeing the "Creative Nonfiction" category. As a case containing 57 books arrived at the office for consideration, two things worried me. The amount of reading and the "creative" part. Nonfiction is hard enough to get right when it's written the old-fashioned way, straight up--who, where, why, when.

As it turned out, the books were at least 50% hard-luck stories, most of them trenchant. There was a war correspondent who got shot, an equestrienne whose leg was crushed by her horse, a profoundly moving brace of Korean stories of search for identity after diaspora. Daniel Ellsberg was there, recounting the events that led to the leaking of the Pentagon papers. There were a couple of biographies, wisecracking sociology from a newspaper columnist and ruminations on the essence of the West.

For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday October 21, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 26 words Type of Material: Correction
Name spelling -- An article in the Sunday magazine on author Dale Pendell misspelled the name of the late philosopher Norman O. Brown as Norman O'Brown.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday November 09, 2003 Home Edition Los Angeles Times Magazine Part I Page 14 Lat Magazine Desk 0 inches; 25 words Type of Material: Correction
The article on author Dale Pendell ("The Poet of Plants," Oct. 19) misspelled the name of the late philosopher Norman O. Brown as Norman O'Brown.