25 February “Guest” Poet – Gary Snyder

Excerpts from the Biography updated by the Poetry Foundation, 2009 (Leon Borensztein)

Gary Snyder began his career in the 1950s as a noted member of the “Beat Generation,” though he continued to explore a wide range of social and spiritual matters in both poetry and prose. Snyder’s work blends physical reality and precise observations of nature with inner insight received primarily through the practice of Zen Buddhism. While Snyder has gained attention as a spokesman for the preservation of the natural world and its earth-conscious cultures, he is not simply a “back-to-nature” poet with a facile message. Snyder has looked to the Orient and to the beliefs of American Indians for positive responses to the world, and he has tempered his studies with stints of hard physical labor as a logger and trail builder. 

Snyder was born in San Francisco and raised on small farms in Washington state and Oregon. Because he lived close to nature from earliest childhood, Snyder was distressed at a young age by the wanton destruction of the Pacific Northwestern forests, and he began to study and respect the Indian cultures that offered a more harmonious relationship with nature. Wild regions continued to fascinate him as he matured; he became an expert mountain climber and learned back-country survival techniques. A visit to the Seattle Art Museum introduced him to Chinese landscape painting, and he developed an interest in the Orient as an example of a high civilization that had maintained its bonds to nature. 

After high school Snyder divided his time between studies at Reed College—and later Indiana University and the University of California-Berkeley—and work as a lumberjack, trail maker, and firewatcher in the deep woods. In the autumn of 1952 Snyder moved to the San Francisco Bay area in order to study Oriental languages at Berkeley. He was already immersed in Zen Buddhism and had begun to write poetry about his work in the wilderness. He became part of a community of writers, including Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, who were soon heralded as the forerunners of a counterculture revolution in literature. 

In an essay published in A Controversy of Poets, Snyder offered his own assessment of his art. “As a poet,” he wrote, “I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”

Thin Ice

Walking in February
A warm day after a long freeze
On an old logging road
Below Sumas Mountain
Cut a walking stick of alder,
Looked down through clouds
On wet fields of the Nooksack—
And stepped on the ice
Of a frozen pool across the road.
It creaked
The white air under
Sprang away, long cracks
Shot out in the black,
My cleated mountain boots
Slipped on the hard slick
—like thin ice—the sudden
Feel of an old phrase made real—
Instant of frozen leaf,
Icewater, and staff in hand.
“Like walking on thin ice—”
I yelled back to a friend,
It broke and I dropped
Eight inches in

“Thin Ice” by Gary Snyder from No Nature. © Pantheon books, 1992. 

Axe Handles

    One afternoon the last week in April

    Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet

    One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.

    He recalls the hatchet-head

    Without a handle, in the shop

    And go gets it, and wants it for his own.

    A broken-off axe handle behind the door

    Is long enough for a hatchet,

    We cut it to length and take it

    With the hatchet head

    And working hatchet, to the wood block.

    There I begin to shape the old handle

    With the hatchet, and the phrase

    First learned from Ezra Pound

    Rings in my ears!

    "When making an axe handle

                 the pattern is not far off."

    And I say this to Kai

    "Look: We'll shape the handle

    By checking the handle

    Of the axe we cut with—"

    And he sees. And I hear it again:

    It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century

    A.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in the

    Preface: "In making the handle

    Of an axe

    By cutting wood with an axe

    The model is indeed near at hand."

    My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

    Translated that and taught it years ago

    And I see: Pound was an axe,

    Chen was an axe, I am an axe

    And my son a handle, soon

    To be shaping again, model

    And tool, craft of culture,

    How we go on.

Gary Snyder, "Axe Handles" from Axe Handles. Copyright © 1983 by Gary Snyder.  Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

Source: Axe Handles (North Point Press, 1983)

A Dent in a Bucket

    Hammering a dent out of a bucket

      a woodpecker

               answers from the woods

Gary Snyder, Danger on Peaks. Copyright © 2004 by Gary Snyder. Counterpoint Press.

Source: Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker Hoard, 2004)

Old Woman Nature

BY GARY SNYDER

    Old Woman Nature

    naturally has a bag of bones

                tucked away somewhere.

                a whole room full of bones!

    A scattering of hair and cartilage

               bits in the woods.

    A fox scat with hair and a tooth in it.

               a shellmound

                      a bone flake in a streambank.

    A purring cat, crunching

               the mouse head first,

                       eating on down toward the tail--

    The sweet old woman

               calmly gathering firewood in the

               moon . . .

    Don't be shocked,

    She's heating you some soup.

    VII, '81, Seeing Ichikawa Ennosuke in "Kurozuka"—"Demoness"— at the Kabuki-za in Tokyo

Gary Snyder, "Old Woman Nature" from Axe Handles. Copyright © 1983 by Gary Snyder.  Rep Counterpoint Press. Source: Axe Handles (North Point Press, 1983)

I Went into the Maverick Bar

I went into the Maverick Bar   

In Farmington, New Mexico.

And drank double shots of bourbon

                         backed with beer.

My long hair was tucked up under a cap

I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay

                         by the pool tables,

A waitress asked us

                         where are you from?

a country-and-western band began to play   

“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”   

And with the next song,

                         a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances   

                         in the fifties;

I recalled when I worked in the woods

                         and the bars of Madras, Oregon.   

That short-haired joy and roughness—

                         America—your stupidity.   

I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders—

                         under the tough old stars—

In the shadow of bluffs

                         I came back to myself,

To the real work, to

                         “What is to be done.”

Gary Snyder, “I Went into the Maverick Bar” from Turtle Island. Copyright © 1974 by Gary Snyder. New Directions Publishing Corporation. Source: No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992)

Exploration 1: In what ways does “Thin Ice” remind you of Northwest Minnesota, especially if you live in that region?

Exploration 2: Is the axe handle symbolic of anything?

Exploration 3: “Á dent in a bucket” is extremely short, in the manner of Japanese haiku or a Buddhist koan. In its shortness, can you identify the poems key elements?

Exploration 4: Who is the “old woman” in Óld Woman Nature”?

Exploration 5: Does the Maverick Bar remind you of any place you have been?

Background:

Snyder’s involvement with Buddhism has been important to his poetry from the outset. However, Buddhism is by no means the sole departure point for Snyder’s work. Well-versed in anthropology and so-called “primitive” cultures, Snyder reveres myth and ritual as essential demonstrations of man-in-nature and nature-in-man. Harking back to the Stone Age, Snyder sees the poet as a shaman who acts as a medium for songs and chants springing from the earth. It is not surprising, therefore, that Snyder draws on the traditions of oral literature—chants, incantations, and songs—to communicate his experiences.

Many of Snyder’s poems aim specifically at instilling an ecological consciousness in his audience. This theme pervades Snyder’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Turtle Island.

The long poem, Mountains and Rivers without End, titled after a Chinese sideways scroll painting, spanned much of Snyder’s career and was finally published in 1996 to glowing praise from critics. The poem is a conscious effort to recreate the social function of ancient epics: to tell a good story, while offering instruction in life by way of myth and history. Snyder’s narrative is “less heroic in tone than Homer’s,” found Tom Clark in his San Francisco Chronicle review, but like classic works such as the Odyssey, it is “a universalizing, picaresque spiritual journey, the story not only of one man, but also of the human event on this planet.” Snyder evokes an ancient civilization blessed by self-awareness, thriving in an unpolluted world.