by Jim Lenfestey
Thoreau Returns to Minnesota: Gary Snyder to Read in Minneapolis April 18.
California poet and essayist Gary Snyder is commonly associated with the Beat Generation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, he read at the famous Six Gallery gathering in 1955 in San Francisco, along with Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, and Allen Ginsberg, who read from an early draft of Howl. The event was hosted by Kenneth Rexroth and helped spark the San Francisco Renaissance. Yes, Snyder was a friend of novelist Jack Kerouac, who visited him in Marin County and modeled his entrancing Dharma Bums character, Japhy Ryder, on Snyder.
But Snyder was not just hanging out in Marin County. He was a serious graduate student of Asian languages and culture at Berkeley, busily translating the poetry of Han-shan, “Cold Mountain.” Snyder had also studied anthropology and linguistics at Reed College and Indiana University. He had already begun his lifelong practice of Zen and was soon to embark for most of a decade into the disciplined life of Zen communities in Japan.
So there is nothing “Beat” about Snyder, in the conventional sense of that literary term and its connotation of an urban underground, bohemian lifestyle. He knew the writers of that school and was friends with many of them, but he was an entirely different American species: a scholar-poet in the tradition of Chinese scholar-poets. He was not living “underground” but firmly and openly “on the ground,” a pioneering poet-ecologist. For example, his 1958 poem “Oil” was the first use in English, to my knowledge, of the metaphor of addiction to describe civilization’s risky reliance on oil:
Soft rainsqualls on the swells
south of the Bonins, late at night. Light
from the empty mess-hall
throws back bulky shadows
of winch and fairlead
over the slanting fantail
where I stand.
but for men on watch in the engine room,
the man at the wheel, the lookout in the bow,
the crew sleeps. in cots on deck
or narrow iron bunks down drumming
passageways below.
the ship burns with a furnace heart
steam veins and copper nerves
quivers and slightly twists and always goes -
easy roll of the hull and deep
vibration of the turbines underfoot.
bearing what all these
crazed, hooked nations need:
steel plates and
long injections of pure oil.
I first met Gary in 1969, when I was a young instructor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls, in charge of the visiting poet program. I showed the list of traveling poets to my students and one of them pulled from his pocket a copy of Myths and Texts, Snyder’s first book (1960). We chose Snyder.
Snyder arrived carrying a large rucksack holding everything needed for two months on the college poetry circuit. The reading he gave that evening was a revelation. Not only did he twinkle with impish humor like a playful Zen master, but his scholarly side shone bright. On the lecture hall blackboard, he spontaneously sketched images of Kokopelli, the humped-back flute player (now familiar, then known mostly to archaeologists and anthropologists) and other mysterious images from rock carvings in the American Southwest, and explained their roles and the stories they tell.
For the audience, the evening was an engaging breath of mountain air, encompassing poetry, learning, wit, and delight, entirely free of the stuffy academic discourse or monotone delivery of many traveling poets of the day.
Snyder lived then outside academia, working on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, in national forests, on ocean freighters, and in Zen Buddhist communities and communes, before settling in the forested foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. Along the way he was studying, practicing, and teaching. And always writing poems.
Snyder’s ars poetica was solidly laid down in the title poem to his 1969 collection, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems:
Riprap
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Intensively reading the old Chinese poets, Snyder heard in their language the repeated heaviness of Chinese nouns, and created from that weight a poetry of words “ingrained / with torment of fire and weight” unheard before (or since) in English—nouns laid down like individual rocks in riprap, the assembly of rough stones that undergirds mountain trails. He had worked building such trails and knew how the friction of each stone held the whole together, so that humans and pack animals could pass safely overhead. He knew, too, that the process of laying down rock after rock applied in all realms, from ants moving sand grains beneath our feet to the deep universe moving like “an endless / four-dimensional / Game of Go” (the 2,000-year-old Chinese game in which players strategically move around stones). Snyder’s poetics have wavered little since (though he took a delightful side trail into metric play in Left Out in the Rain, 2005).
Interestingly, when Robert Bly published his magazine The Fifties, his pathbreaking rebellion against the poetry (and political) status quo, he included in the first issue in 1958 two poems by Gary Snyder as examples of the fresh American poem he was listening for. In “First Shaman Song,” Snyder announced his commitment to a mythology based on practical American, including Native American, experience. The poem ends:
I sit without thoughts by the log-road,
Hatching a new myth,
Watching the waterdogs,
the last truck gone.
In “Milton by Firelight,” he expressly dismissed the Western literary canon and its hellish ethics in favor of the music heard in mines. Here is the first verse:
“O hell, what do mine eyes
with grief behold?”
Working with an old
Singlejack miner, who can sense
The vein and cleavage
In the very guts of rock, can
Blast granite, build
Switchbacks that last for years
Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves.
What use, Milton, a silly story
Of our lost general parents,
eaters of fruit?
Today readers can hear his rock-solid syllables in ten collections of poems, seven essay collections, and in two compilations, No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992) and The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations (1999).
Snyder has been called “the Thoreau of the Beat generation” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti among others. That’s an apt comparison, without the feckless Beat connotations. Thoreau, also a poet, activist, and pioneering naturalist, traveled to Minnesota in the wild Northwest Territories to record plants and animals and interactions with American Indian populations. And like his mentor Emerson, Thoreau was entranced with the poetry of Asia, though mostly of India and Persia. But Thoreau died young, at 44, not long after his Minnesota visit, the word “Indians” reportedly on his dying breath.
Snyder is alive and well at 80, every bit as much the poet-scholar as when he began his writing career. His clarion call against nuclear power, the poem sequence Danger On Peaks (2005), reverberates presciently today in the unfolding disaster involving the nuclear plants on the northeast coast of Japan. His latest book of essays, Back on the Fire (2006), includes a call for learning to live with forest (and prairie!) fires as necessary regenerative processes.
In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is one who, motivated by compassion, seeks awakening not just for himself but for all sentient beings. If you are a sentient being and want to see what an American bodhisattva sounds like, come hear Gary Snyder in a rare visit away from his home deep in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Gary Snyder will read at Plymouth Congregational Church, 1900 Nicollet Avenue (at Franklin) in Minneapolis, on Monday, April 18, 7 p.m., as part of Plymouth’s Literary Witness series, cosponsored by the Loft. The event is free, with plenty of free parking.
