Episode 39 - Gary Snyder: his life & poetry

In this extended episode I talk about another American poet, essayist and environmental activist, Gary Snyder. You might like to take a break in the middle!

As I mentioned in Episode 34 both Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth explore the natural world in their work – literally, as hikers through the American landscape, and in their poetry and other writings. Snyder, who is now in his nineties, spent a lot of time with Rexroth in the 1950s and for a while Rexroth was something of a mentor to the younger poet. 

Transcript

I first encountered Gary Snyder’s poetry around 1967 or 68 when I was an art student on the lookout for new poetry and experimental texts. I still have a copy of Snyder’s book, A Range of Poems, in a beautiful first edition published in 1966 by Fulcrum Press in London. The brown paper flyleaf is held together with Sellotape, and the pages have that lustre that comes with much opening and closing. The poems seemed so fresh and spikey – they still do – the work of a craftsman who delighted in the physical world and in ideas drawn from many cultural sources.

Although many people tend to think of Gary Snyder only in terms of his role as one of the 1950s ‘Beat Generation,’ a friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, this period forms only a small part of Snyder’s writing career, and he has become known not only as a highly respected poet, but also as a very influential thinker in relation to the environment, Buddhist practice and ethics, and social activism. I will try to say something about these interwoven strands of thought and what we might learn from Snyder as we tread along life’s winding road.

Gary Snyder was born in 1930 in San Francisco, growing up on small farms in Washington State and Oregon. He was affected early on by what he saw as the destruction of the old forests in the Pacific Northwest and grew more and more interested in the native American cultures of the people he met around his home. He had a particular regard for the ways in which indigenous peoples interacted more harmoniously with their environment – sparking interests in ecology and anthropology which have continued throughout his long life. Snyder’s view of the natural world is not romantic or idealised – it is rooted in his experience of working on the family farm and later within the forestry industry and later still as one of the crew on a merchant ship. His poetry is imbued with a sense of the positive value of physical work and great respect for workers – the loggers, look-outs, trail crews, farmers and merchant seamen he met at home and on his travels. 

As an example, here’s an extract from a poem from the late 1950s titled, Oil – about his experiences working on board a merchant ship. It goes like this:

… men on the 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 turbine underfoot…

(Snyder 1966: 120-121)

And this poem titled, Hay for the Horses, about a man who arrives at a farm where Snyder is working early one morning with a truckload of hay:

… With winch and ropes and hooks

We stacked the bales up clean

To splintery redwood rafters

….

“I’m sixty-eight” he said,

“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen

I thought, that day I started,

I sure would hate to do this all my life

And dammit, that’s just what

I’ve gone and done.”

(ibid: 16)

This down-to-earth experience of, and regard for, physical labour gives Snyder a distinctive voice when writing about the natural world. He approaches nature as someone who works in, and with, a particular region – alert to the pleasures and pains of hard work and to the ethical and ecological tensions that arise as human beings explore, study and exploit the natural world. He is respectful of the strength and wisdom of his co-workers, while also being alert to the damage he, and they, do to the environment within which they work. Raising crops and livestock, making a homestead, cutting down trees for building and manufacture – these are all experienced from the inside, so-to-speak, even as Snyder observes the downside of this labour: the destruction of habitats, the gradual mechanisation of labour, the growing sense of alienation from nature and the disregard for ecological wisdom and good husbandry.

Much of the following biographical information comes from a 2005 Guardian article and interview with Snyder by James Campbell. According to Snyder, his parents, Harold and Lois, were "semi-educated, proud, western-American-style working-class. My father's brothers all went to sea or worked in logging camps. My mother was from a railroad town in Texas, very much a feminist rebel." The Snyders owned a small dairy farm but required outside work to keep ticking over. Snyder remembers that as a child, "there was no work for seven years". The family entertained themselves by reading aloud in the evenings: "Robert Burns, Edgar Allan Poe - very musical poetry which caught my ear,” says Snyder. He recalls how "I would go and cook and stay alone for a night or two, when I was just eight or nine years old, quite far from the house. At the age of 15, I became a mountaineer and began to climb all the peaks of the Pacific northwest. The kind that require ropes and ice axes. Snow peaks. Volcanoes. Big ones." He read widely as a child, but he says his “first interest in writing poetry came from the experience of mountaineering. I couldn't find any other way to talk about it." The combination of climbing actual mountain peaks and looking at oriental landscape paintings in the Seattle Art Museum, inspired an approach to poetry that, while it has developed over the decades, has not radically changed. In 1996, he published Mountains and Rivers Without End, a long poem begun 40 years earlier – inspired by a reference to a Chinese landscape hand-scroll with that name.

After studying anthropology and literature at Reed College, Oregon, Snyder enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1953, to study oriental languages. Enabling him to translate poetry from Chinese and Japanese. His interest in east Asian and tribal cultures arose from, as he puts it, "an ethical realisation that the Judeo-Christian tradition gives moral value only to the human being. I discovered that there were other traditions, including Hindu and Buddhist and Native American, in which all biological life is considered part of the same drama, that the world is not simply a theatre for the human being, in which everything else is just a stage prop. That became a very clear image to me." He often worked in the summer as a fire-lookout in the Washington Cascade Mountains. "All through July and August. You take just the food you need for that time, and a radio." This solitary experience provided the time and space to practise meditation, study Chinese, and write poems.’ (Campbell 2005) Somewhat romanticised accounts of similar fire lookout work found their way into Snyder’s friend, Jack Kerouac’s novel, Desolation Angels – first published in 1965 but probably written in the mid-fifties.

In another Guardian interview, with Michael March, Snyder has this to say about his upbringing: “I grew up on a small farm with chickens and cows in the woodlands north of Seattle, during the depression. We were extremely poor, but my parents were educated, proud, and thoughtful; their thinking agnostic and socialist. My grandfather had been a speaker for the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) which was strong in the Pacific north-west. My father did some union-organising on a big dam project, the Grand Coulee. This kind of family culture engaged us in discussions and critiques of current events. It was assumed that we would want to consider injustice and suffering in the world, and so we did. In my own work I extended that kind of thinking to include all of nature. It didn't occur to me to think I was powerless and it wouldn't make a difference.” (March 2007)

Since the late 1960s Snyder has lived on a 100-acre plot of land in the Sierra Nevada hills in Northern California. His homestead is called Kitkitdizze, a local Wintun Indian word for the surrounding low ground-cover bush, also known as mountain misery. Snyder describes his home-building as follows: "We had our hands full the first 10 years getting up walls and roofs, bathhouse, barn, the woodshed. I set up my library and wrote poems and essays by lantern light." Snyder's eldest son, Kai, was a child when work on the house began in 1969. He remembers the "heat and dust and a lot of people working, and me getting underfoot.” For a while, says Kai, "all our water had to be pumped by hand, which my dad did every day for about 40 minutes. It was good exercise, I guess. All the cooking was done on a wood stove, and our heating was produced by the same method. It was like a 19th-century lifestyle in lots of ways."’ (Campbell 2005)

Snyder’s work as poet, writer and activist, has always been at the interface of society, ecology, and language – these are his fields of inquiry. The title of his first book of poems, Riprap (published in 1959), suggests something of the distinctive interweaving of physicality and metaphysicality in much of Snyder’s work. 

I’ve come to realise that the rhythms of my poems follow the rhythm of the physical work I’m doing and the life I’m leading at any given time – which makes the music in my head which creates the line. (Snyder 1966: sleeve-notes)

Part of his work as a member of a trail-crew on the Sierra Nevada involved ‘picking up and placing granite rocks in tight cobble patterns on hard slab.’

‘What are you doing?’ I asked old Roy Marchbanks. ‘Riprapping,’ he said. His selection of natural rocks was perfect, the result looked like dressed stone fitting to hair line cracks. Walking, climbing, placing with the hands. I tried writing poems of tough simple short words with the complexity far beneath the surface texture. (ibid)

Snyder’s poetry-making is analogous to the laying of stones side by side along a trail. Each stone or word carefully fitted into the pattern of the unfolding path or poem. In the title poem from Riprap, Snyder’s intelligence draws on the geology and ecology of the place and is articulated in a text of short-studded lines that are almost indexically linked to the work of the trail-crew. There is a fusion of mind and body, a sense of cosmological magnitude inlaid with a dexterous handling of the gritted earth:

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,

…

Crystal and sediment linked hot

                              all change, in thoughts,

as well as things.

(Snyder 1966: 29)

In his poem, What You Should Know To Be A Poet, Snyder advises aspirant poets to learn:

all you can about animals as persons.

the names of trees and flowers and weeds.

names of stars, and the movements of the planets

                                             and the moon.

your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.

(Snyder 1970: 50)

In Earth House Hold (1969: 123) he writes:  

Everything was alive – the trees, grasses, and winds were dancing with me, talking with me; I could understand the songs of the birds…. The phenomenal world experienced at certain pitches is totally living, exciting, mysterious, filling one with a trembling awe, leaving one grateful and humble…

Snyder’s concern for the world of animals and plants as beings who are a vital part of the natural world - co-inhabitants with humans of planet Earth – has been a feature of his worldview throughout his long career. The ways in which humans interact with the natural world, for good and ill, constitute another thread in his writing – from the Range of Poems collection published in 1966 to his most recent books. Nature, landscape and the beings who inhabit the land are intimately connected to the humans who work in the land – be they indigenous peoples pursuing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, small farmers, agribusinesses, forestry industries or large-scale extraction companies. Snyder is always seeking to highlight sustainable ways to work with nature and to bring critical scrutiny to bear on unsustainable and destructive patterns of work. This is a long way from a romantic view of nature as a transcendent spectacle to be written about with clean hands and not with the dirty hands of a labourer or homesteader.

WHY NOT TAKE A BREAK HERE.

Welcome back.

Snyder writes eloquently about his experiences of being in the landscape, rather than being a detached observer or theoretical commentator on the natural world. For him, nature is a particular patch of land, a region in which he works, climbs and walks. And it this this aspect, walking the land, that I would now like to turn to.

Snyder writes of walking as both measure and discipline, and as a primary mode of being. As we walk through a place our sensory intelligence develops, we get to know the lie of the land, our body moves with the topography of mountain, valley, shadowed forest and illuminated plain. As Snyder puts it:

We learn a place and how to visualize spatial relationships, as children, on foot and with imagination. Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities. A ‘mile’ was originally a Roman measure of one thousand paces… To know that it takes six months to walk across Turtle Island/North America walking steadily but comfortably all day is to get some grasp of the distance. (Snyder 2004: 8)

Walking is one of what the Chinese refer to as, ‘the ‘four dignities’ – Standing, Lying, Sitting and Walking. ‘They are ‘dignities’ in that they are ways of being fully ourselves, at home in our bodies, in their fundamental modes.’ (ibid) Snyder also discusses the myths woven around mountains and how these relate to ancient Daoist cosmologies:

Mountains also have mythic associations of verticality, spirit, height, transcendence, hardness, resistance and masculinity. For the Chinese they are exemplars of the ‘yang’: dry, hard, male and bright. Waters are feminine: wet, soft, dark – the ‘yin’ - with associations of fluid-but-strong, seeking (and carving) the lowest, soulful, life-giving, shape-shifting. (ibid: 10)

Mountains and waters are bound together as two vectors of geography and myth. Walking in the mountains, fording streams, being enveloped in moisture-laden clouds on rocky paths, is to activate and realise the mythic structures that are immanent in the landscape. Knowledge is transmitted from age to age through the symbolic codes embedded in the cultural ecology of each locality. 

According to Michael Davidson, for Snyder, and for his contemporaries, the poets Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger and William Everson:

place is both the source and the ground of numinous presence […] To walk in the landscape is to establish connections between animate and inanimate realms …  [poems] are not intended to be descriptions of … events but re-enactments, testifying through the poetics of open form to the vitality of an open universe. (Davidson 1991:13)

Snyder considers landscape to be an ‘ecological model’ (see Davidson 1991: 12) rather than an allegorical or symbolic subject. Cataloguing landforms and the plants and animals that inhabit a particular ‘bio-region’ is an important part of the poet’s role to give song to the natural world – to locate ourselves within the ecological web. Snyder is also an activist, very aware of his other responsibilities, particularly the need to ‘prepare the landscape for future habitation.’ (ibid) His poetics combines a belief in giving voice to the land and its inhabitants, a feeling of reverence and kinship with the ways of the natural world and those who work with it, and a sense of responsibility to hand on to future generations a sustainable presence in the landscape. 

Mind and mountains, poetry and waters, myths and land are inseparable and mutually reinforcing. The landscape, with all its constituent energies and beings, is alive with inherited knowledge, passed along lines of culture from microbe to microbe, plant to plant, animal to animal, bird to bird, human to human. As we walk in the landscape, attentive to our footfall and to the landscape that flows through and around us, biological and cultural evolutionary realms are fused in narratives of stone, water, fibre, filament, flesh, bone, air and light. Each strand of the ecological web sings its songs, tells its tales, inscribes its drawings, and all are orchestrated in a great improvised symphony of voices.

In his book, Turtle Island, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975, there is a poem titled, Prayer for the Great Family. Here are a few extracts from it:

… Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day –

           and to her soil: rich, rare, and sweet

… Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing light-changing leaf

           and fine root-hairs; standing still through wind

           and rain;

… Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and the silent

           Owl at dawn. Breath of our song

           clear spirit breeze

… Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,

           freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;

           self-complete, brave, and aware

… Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through

           trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where

           bears and snakes sleep….

(Snyder 1974: 24)

Snyder is alert to the minutiae of patterns of growth, to the functioning of soil and the elements of earth, sun and water, and to the innumerable organisms that inhabit and enliven our bountiful planet. His gratitude is given to the full array of natural features that provide us with a world in which we can live and flourish – if only we understand its ways and care for it. Snyder notes that this poem was written ‘after a Mohawk prayer’ – and his work often acknowledges a debt and connection to the indigenous peoples of North America, some of whom he got to know first-hand in his early years on the northwest coast.

Snyder often talks about his relationship to the natural world from the viewpoint of the poet, hunter and shaman. At the end of the nineteen-sixties I came across Snyder’s description of still-hunting, a technique used by many indigenous peoples around the world:

To hunt means to use your body and senses to the fullest: to strain your consciousness to feel what the deer are thinking today, this moment; to sit still and let yourself go into the birds and wind while waiting by a game trail. (Snyder 1969: 120)

Snyder describes how, when he first started sitting meditation in 1949, and then undertaking long periods of formal meditation practice in a Japanese Zen monastery in 1956, he realised that this practice of sitting quietly doing nothing other than being present, was something that our ancient ancestors had probably done on a regular basis. Hunter-gatherer peoples and indigenous peoples around the world probably spent quite lengthy periods sitting by the fire, or in a landscape, just quietly observing what was going on. To Snyder this seemed ‘a completely natural act.’ Indeed, he writes, ‘it’s odd that we don’t do it more, that we don’t, simply like a cat, be there for a while experiencing ourselves as whatever we are…’ (Snyder 2000: 95)

Snyder argues that poetry (and meditation practices such as zazen) are closely aligned to the ancient practices of hunting and shamanic ritual, each discipline sharing a common experience: that is, a heightened perception of the phenomenal world, made possible by the dissolving of illusory boundaries between self and surroundings. Hunting, like poetry, is an art of listening, sensing, waiting for what appears – as free as possible from preconceptions and egocentric habits. This approach to hunting and poetry is noted in a sequence of poems under the title, Hunting, which includes these lines: ‘Deer don’t want to die for me. / I’ll drink sea-water / Sleep on beach pebbles in the rain / Until the deer come down to die / in pity for my pain.’ (Snyder 1966: 67) The making of poetry, like the practice of still-hunting is about being attentive to the sights, sounds and smells – feeling the vitality of the world and, in poetry, distilling this sensing and aliveness, into words and images. Snyder immerses himself in this vibrant world of presence and motion. As quoted earlier, for him, ‘everything was alive – the trees, grasses, and winds were dancing with me; I could understand the songs of the birds. (1969: 123)

I now want to turn to Snyder’s political affiliations, or at least to his activism and its roots in Buddhist ethics and in the worldview of many indigenous peoples. In 1961 Snyder had written an essay titled, Buddhism and the Coming Revolution. Snyder was critical of the whole capitalist project. Using the language of his time, he writes: ‘The ‘free world’ has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet except against oneself, the persons one is supposed to love, or the revolutionary aspirations of pitiful, poverty-stricken marginal societies like Cuba or Vietnam.’ (ibid: 91) At this time, Cuba was under an American blockade and the Vietnam war was being fought. 

For Snyder Buddhist ethics, grounded in the realisation that craving, clinging, delusion and aggression are root causes of suffering, offer a way out of the insatiable and unsustainable habits of capitalism. While he acknowledges the progress made in western democracies towards social emancipation and political participation, he maintains that we need the power of Buddhist, Daoist and other ‘Eastern’ understandings of the mind, and the discipline of mindful meditation, to fully realise our creative and compassionate capabilities. He writes: ‘The practice of meditation, for which one needs only ‘the ground beneath one’s feet,’ wipes out mountains of junk being pumped into the mind by the mass media and supermarket universities.’ (ibid) Remember this was written in the late 1960s, a long time before the growth of digital media and the internet. Although the utopian language is of its time, the message is probably even more relevant today than it was then. 

Snyder goes on: ‘The belief in a serene and generous fulfilment of natural loving … destroys ideologies which blind, maim and repress.’ (ibid) The Buddhist values of metta (friendliness), karuna (compassion) and ahimsa (non-violence) are as important today as they were back in the 1960s – and for Snyder these can be very effectively cultivated and maintained through the practice of meditation – particularly Zen and other forms of mindful awareness. If we are to reduce suffering in our world, we have to understand and transform our harmful tendencies of prejudice, craving and aggression, into the life-affirming qualities of understanding, friendliness and peaceful kindness. This is a challenging life-long learning process – a day-by-day, year-by-year development of ancient methods, aligned with personal responsibility, creative awareness and action, and hard work.

In his book, Turtle Island, there’s a poem titled, Bedrock – dedicated to his then wife, Masa Uehara. They have made camp high in the mountains and Snyder connects the layering of geological strata with the passage of one’s life and the cultivation of tenderness and love. This is the whole poem:

Snowmelt pond                warm granite

we make camp,

no thought of finding more. And nap

and leave our minds to the wind.

on the bedrock, gently tilting,

sky and stone,

teach me to be tender.

the touch that nearly misses –

brush of glances –

tiny steps –

that finally cover worlds

               of hard terrain.

cloud wisps and mists

gathered into slate blue

bolts of summer rain.

tea together in the purple starry eve;

new moon soon to set,

why does it take so

long to learn to

love,

          we laugh

                           and grieve.

(Snyder 1974: 64)

For Snyder past (and future) are wrapped up in the present. Even the deep geological past is just a breath away, living as it does in our awareness of this moment. I would like to finish with these closing lines from a recent book of poems titled, This Present Moment:

This present moment

that lives on

to become

long ago

(Snyder 2015: 67)

Snyder is still with us. At 95, he is an elder who many younger poets and environmental activists turn to for advice and inspiration. To my mind, Snyder’s poetry, and his thinking, are important and beautiful – the testimony of a man who cares for the earth and all its inhabitants and processes. Over sixty years or so I have learnt much from reading and enjoying his writings – texts that are both aesthetically pleasing and thought-provoking – challenging us to step outside our anthropocentric habits of thought in order to understand how nature works! I encourage you to read any of his books and hope you will share my enthusiasm for his work.  

Thank you for listening and bye for now.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Campbell, James. 2005, 16 July. The Guardian article: ‘High peak haikus.’ Online at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jul/16/featuresreviews.guardianreview19 - accessed 25 November 2024.

Davidson, Michael. 1991. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Kerouac, Jack. 1972. Desolation Angels. London: Granada Publishing.

March, Michael. 2007, 30 May. Article: ‘Poetry and action’ – interview with Gary Snyder. Online at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/may/30/culture.features - accessed 25 November 2024.

Snyder, Gary. 1966. A Range of Poems. London: Fulcrum Press.

Snyder, Gary. 1969. Earth House Hold. New York: New Directions.

Snyder, Gary. 1970. Regarding Wave. London: Fulcrum Press.

Snyder, Gary. 1974. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions. (Won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975)

Snyder, Gary. 2000. The Gary Snyder Reader. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.

Snyder, Gary. 2004. ‘Blue Mountains Constantly Walking’, in Urthona: Buddhism & the Arts magazine 20, summer 2004.

Snyder, Gary. 2015. This Present Moment: New Poems. Berkeley: Counterpoint.