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Gary Snyder's reverence for the environment is not passive. His message is
not to sit back in awe of your surroundings, but to fully engage in the pulse
of life, wherever that may be. "If there is any one thing that's unhealthy
in America, it's that it is a whole civilization trying to get out of work."
Work for Snyder is an involvement with your environment, not just punching a
clock. It is knowing what dirt really feels like. It is understanding what
it takes to create a meal, not just how to pop theater-quality popcorn. "A
hand pushing a button may wield great power, but that hand will never learn
what a hand can do." His prose lays bare our disregard for the world, and his
poetry tells us why we should care. The Gary Snyder Reader might
not save the planet, but it can save us from ourselves.
Snyder was born in San Francisco on May 8, 1930, but grew up in the Pacific
Northwest. He roomed with Lew Welch and Philip Whalen while studying
anthropology and literature at Reed College (both Welch and Whalen would
later join Snyder in the San Francisco movement of the mid-'50s). After
graduating from Reed, Snyder entered the Asian Languages program at
Berkeley. His interest in Japanese and Chinese cultures would lead him to
spend the 1960s in Japan studying Buddhism.
In 1955 at the 6 Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco, Snyder read
alongside Allen Ginsberg (there reading his just-completed Howl),
Michael McClure, and others. Jack Kerouac was in attendance and was so drawn
to the calm and woodsy poet that Snyder became the inspiration for Kerouac's
Dharma Bums. His first book was championed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
his second published by LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Bakara).
His writing is more secure than that of his peers. Although he shares many
themes with his contemporaries, Snyder manages to transcend the frantic
purging epitomized by many of the Beat poets. "Poetry is to give access to
persons -- cutting away the fear and reserve and camping of social life.
Playing with the tools -- language, myth, symbolism, intellect -- fair enough
but childish to abuse."
The strength of his poetry is its subtlety. He isn't a mouthpiece of the
environmental movement and doesn't parrot its dogma. Instead, he takes you so
completely into the wonder of the world that it becomes unimaginable to harm
it. His maturity as a poet gives him a calming confidence. This
self-assuredness is not a fluke but a result of connecting to his
environment. Snyder's summers were spent working in logging camps, mountain
fire-lookouts, trail work crews, and anywhere else that would take him back
to the familiar forests of the Sierras. The physical work led him to
contemplation:
Almost had it last night: no identity
my language fades. Images of erosion.
That which includes all change never changes; without change time is
meaningless;
without time, space is destroyed. Thus we arrive at the void.
(Lookout's Journal -- Cratershan 15 August)
Void. No identity. No ego. No Snyder. During a 1977 interview by Peter Barry
Chowka in New York, he shared a lesson from his study in Japan:
"During the first year or two that I was at Daitoku-ji Sodo, I noticed a
number of times little improvements that could be made. Ultimately I
ventured to suggest to the head monks some labor- and time-saving
techniques. They were tolerant of me for a while. Finally, one day, one of
them took me aside and said, 'We don't want to do things any better or any
faster, because that's not the point - the point is that you live the whole
life'".
Then, with typical Zen humor, the monk added, "If we speed up the work in the
garden, you'll just have to spend that much more time sitting in the zendo,
and your legs will hurt more."
Snyder returned to California in late 1969 and moved with his family to San
Juan Ridge in the Sierra foothills. He got involved in local politics and
continued to write, expressing his concern with our encroachment into wild
places and in our gorging on the earth's resources. He connects this
constant destruction to the unhinged release of modern life:
On the wood floor, glass in hand,
Laugh and cuss with
somebody else's wife,
Texans, Hawaiians, Eskimos,
Filipinos, Workers, always
on the edge of a brawl -
In the bars of the world,
Hearing those same new songs...
The pain
of the work
of wrecking the world.
Finding little to praise in modern societies' path of retreat from balanced
living, he spent years studying "primitive cultures". Their cultural
expressions and respect for their environment acknowledge the gifts given by
the earth, and honor this bounty by living within the natural ecosystem.
This is a direct contrast to how he sees our acquisitive and destructive
behavior. Snyder doesn't expect us to abandon the concrete jungle, but asks
that we understand that progress does not have to be measured by the length
of our SUV or the power per channel of our 5.1 DVD system. Snyder
illustrates that the wealth of a society lies not in its conspicuous
consumption, but in how it keeps a life like his available to those who
follow.
-- Joe St. John
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About the Publisher:
Counterpoint Press publishes serious literary work, with an emphasis on
natural history, science, philosophy and contemporary thought, history, art,
poetry, and fiction. In the short time Counterpoint Press has been
publishing, its authors have received many awards, including the
PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen
Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Bay Area
Book Reviewers Award, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the
Los Angeles Times, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Harold
Morton Landon Prize from the Academy of American Poets.
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