Snyder, Gary (Sherman)
SNYDER, Gary (Sherman)
Nationality: American. Born: San Francisco, California, 8 May 1930. Education: Lincoln High School, Portland, Oregon; Reed College, Portland, B.A. in anthropology 1951; Indiana University, Bloomington, 1951–52; University of California, Berkeley, 1953–56; studied Buddhism in Japan, 1956, 1959–64, 1965–68. Family: Married 1) Alison Gass in 1950 (divorced 1952); 2) Joanne Kyger, q.v., in 1960 (divorced 1965); 3) Masa Uehara in 1967 (divorced), two sons;4) Carole Koda in 1991. Career: General lookout, Mt. Baker Forest, 1952–53; seaman 1957–58; lecturer in English, University of California, Berkeley, 1964–65. Since 1985 professor of English, University of California, Davis. Awards: Bess Hokin prize, 1964, and Levinson prize, 1968 (Poetry, Chicago); Bollingen grant, for Buddhist Studies, 1965; American Academy prize, 1966; Guggenheim fellowship, 1968; Pulitzer Prize, 1975; Before Columbus Foundation award, 1984; Bollingen prize for poetry, 1997. Address: c/o North Point Press, 850 Talbot Avenue, Berkeley, California 94706, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
Riprap. Kyoto, Origin Press, 1959.
Myths and Texts. New York, Totem, 1960.
Hop, Skip, and Jump. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1964.
Nanao Knows. San Francisco, Four Seasons, 1964.
The Firing. New York, R.L. Ross, 1964.
Across Lamarack Col. Privately printed, 1964.
Riprap, and Cold Mountain Poems. San Francisco, Four Seasons, 1965.
Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers without End. San Francisco, Four Seasons, 1965; London, Fulcrum Press, 1968; enlarged edition, Four Seasons, 1970.
Dear Mr. President, with Philip Whalen. Privately printed, 1965.
Three Worlds, Three Realms, Six Roads. Marlboro, Vermont, Griffin Press, 1966.
A Range of Poems. London, Fulcrum Press, 1966.
The Back Country. London, Fulcrum Press, 1967; New York, New Directions, 1968.
The Blue Sky. New York, Phoenix Book Shop, 1969.
Sours of the Hills. New York, Portents, 1969.
Regarding Wave. Iowa City, Windhover Press, 1969; enlarged edition, New York, New Directions, 1970; London, Fulcrum Press, 1971.
Anasazi. Santa Barbara, California, Yes Press, 1971.
Manzanita. Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Libraries, 1971.
Clear Cut. Detroit, Alternative Press, n.d.
Manzanita (collection). Bolinas, California, Four Seasons, 1972.
The Fudo Trilogy: Spell Against Demons, Smokey the Bear Sutra, The California Water Plan. Berkeley, California, Shaman Drum, 1973.
Turtle Island. New York, New Directions, 1974.
All in the Family. Davis, University of California Library, 1975.
Songs for Gaia. Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon Press, 1979.
True Night, illustrated by Bob Giorgio. Privately printed, 1980.
Axe Handles. Berkeley, California, North Point Press, 1983.
Tree Zen, with D. Steven Conkle. Columbus, Ohio, Broken Stone, 1984.
Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947–1985. Berkeley, California, North Point Press, 1986.
The Fates of Rocks and Trees. San Francisco, James Linden, 1986.
No Nature: New and Selected Poems. New York, Pantheon Books, 1993.
North Pacific Lands & Waters: A Further Six Sections. Waldron Island, Brooding Heron Press, 1993.
Mountains and Rivers without End. Washington, D.C., Counterpoint, 1996.
Three on Community. Boise, Idaho, Limberlost Press, 1996.
Recordings: Today's Poets 4, with others, Folkways; This Is Our Body, Watershed, 1989.
Other
Earth House Hold: Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries. New York, New Directions, and London, Cape, 1969.
Four Changes. Privately printed, 1969.
On Bread and Poetry: A Panel Discussion, with Lew Welchand Philip Whalen. Bolinas, California, Grey Fox Press, 1977.
The Old Ways: Six Essays. San Francisco, City Lights, 1977.
He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth. Bolinas, California, Grey Fox Press, 1979.
The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 1964–1979, edited by Scott McLean. New York, New Directions, 1980.
Passage Through India. Bolinas, California, Grey Fox Press, 1984.
Good Wild Sacred. Madley, Hereford, Five Seasons Press, 1984.
Gary Snyder Papers. Davis, California, University of California, Davis, 1995.
The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco, North Point Press, 1990.
A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds: New and Selected Prose. Washington, D.C., Counterpoint, 1995.
The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, 1952–1998. Washington, D.C., Counterpoint, 1999.
Editor, with Gutetsu Kanetsuki, The Wooden Fish: Basic Sutras and Gathas of Rinzai Zen. Kyoto, First Zen Institute of America in Japan, 1961.
*Bibliography: Gary Snyder by Katherine McNeill, New York, Phoenix, 1980; revised edition, 1983.
Manuscript Collection: University of California, Davis.
Critical Studies: "Gary Snyder Issue" of In Transit, 1969; The Tribal Dharma: An Essay on the Work of Gary Snyder by Kenneth White, Dyfed, Unicorn, 1975; Gary Snyder by Bob Steuding, Boston, Twayne, 1976; Gary Snyder by Bert Almon, Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1979; Critical Essays on Gary Snyder edited by Patrick D. Murphy, Boston, Massachusetts, G.K. Hall, 1990; Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhabiting the Ground by Tim Dean, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1991; Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life edited by Jon Halper, San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1991; Understanding Gary Snyder by Patrick D. Murphy, Columbia, South Carolina, University of South Carolina Press, 1992; Journeys Toward the Original Mind: The Long Poems of Gary Snyder by Robert Schuler, New York, Peter Lang, 1994; "The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais" by David Robertson, in Western American Literature (Logan, Utah), 30(1), spring 1995; Poststructuralist Environmentalism and Beyond: Eco-Consciousness in Snyder, Kingsolver, and Momaday (dissertation) by Yong-ki Kang, Indiana University, Pennsylvania, 1996; "Gary Snyder" by John P. O'Grady, in Updating the Literary West, edited by Max Westbrook, Fort Worth, Texas, Western Literature Association, 1997; Identity, Masculinity, and Femininity in the Poetry of Gary Snyder (dissertation) by Maura Ruth Gage, University of South Florida, 1997; "Ecopoetical Poetry: The Example of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry" by Lothar Honnighausen, in Poetics in the Poem: Critical Essays on American Self-Reflexive Poetry, edited by Dorothy Z. Baker, New York, Peter Lang, 1997; "Semiotic Shepherds: Gary Snyder, Frank O'Hara, and the Embodiment of an Urban Pastoral" by Timothy G. Gray, in Contemporary Literature (Madison, Wisconsin), 39(4), winter 1998; "The Path to Endless: Gary Snyder in the Mid-1990s" by Susan Kalter, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Austin, Texas), 41(1), spring 1999; "Wilderness and the Agrarian Principle: Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and the Ethical Definition of the 'Wild'" by David M. Robinson, in Isle (Reno, Nevada), 6(1), winter 1999.
* * *Gary Snyder is a poet and an environmentalist of the American West and of the Asian Far East, a highly literate primitive (he calls himself "archaic") who loves the worlds of the California Sierras, the American Indian, and Zen Buddhism. It is not an accident that fellow poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry is a friend.
A characteristic example of Snyder's literate primitivism occurs in "Milton by Firelight," written in 1955, in which tension exists between the author of Paradise Lost and a single jack miner. Snyder sides with the miner:
What use, Milton, a silly story,
Of our lost general parents, eaters of fruit?...
In ten thousand years the Sierras
Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.
Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees.
No paradise, no fall,
Only the weathering land
The wheeling sky,
Man, with his Satan
Scouring the chaos of the mind.
"The Bath" is one of the most attractive poems in The Back Country. In it Snyder celebrates exuberantly the pleasures of bathing his two small sons and his wife. The question is asked,
is this our body?
and thrice the answer
this is our body
The fourth answer is not italicized but begins the line:
This is our body.
The poem is a pleasant excursion into male-female difference and identity, a therapeutic exercise in accepting one's own body, a religious statement.
"The Bath" is properly republished in Turtle Island, the Indian name for what thousands of years later became known to the white man as America. This book, which won a Pulitzer prize in 1975, owes much to Eugene Odum, whose Fundamentals of Ecology appeared in 1971, and to Zen Buddhism, which Snyder has practiced for most of his adult life.
Besides "The Bath," other good poems in Turtle Island include "I Went into the Maverick Bar," "Night Herons," "Straight Creek-Great Bum," and "What Happened Here Before." In "I Went into the Maverick Bar" the poet enters a bar that lives in the past, as the speaker once lived, something he now rejects. "Night Herons" apotheosizes the "ever-fresh and lovely dawn." "Straight Creek-Great Burn" celebrates a flight of birds: "never a leader / They arc and loop." "What Happened Here Before," as Sherman Paul wrote in a perspicuous review in Parnassus, "reminds us of our brief sovereignty."
Axe Handles, as the jacket blurb tells us, is the first collection of new poems after Turtle Island. The title poem recalls Wendell Berry's earlier "The Gathering," in which the son inherits a tradition from the father. As Snyder concludes, "How we go on." Two other poems in Axe Handles refer directly or indirectly to Berry. "What I Have Learned" continues the dialogue begun in Berry's "The Gathering." It begins with
What have I learned but
the proper use of certain tools,
and it ends with the Heraclitean
Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
but when you get it right,
you pass it on.
The second poem, which is called "Berry Territory," begins with Berry's wife, Tanya:
Under dead leaves Tanya finds a tortoise
matching the leaves—
legs pulled in—
and then
Wendell, crouched down,
Sticks his face in a woodchuck hole
"Hey, smell that, it's a fox'."
It ends with "Some home." This is a love poem for close friends and wild animals. "Changing Diapers" is another love poem, this one to a Snyder baby. Its last stanza opens out from an intimate task to a wide perspective:
No trouble, friend,
You and me and Geronimo
Are men.
"Arts Council" is both personal and impersonal, personal because Snyder has for many years been on the California Arts Council, part of that time as its chairman, and impersonal because Snyder and his colleagues cannot take themselves too seriously, for their tasks are essentially irrelevant. I quote the poem in full:
Because there is no art
There are artists
Because there are no artists
We need money
Because there is no money
We give
Because there is no we
There is art
"For All," the last poem in Axe Handles, effectively summarizes Snyder's view of allegiance:
I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island
one ecosystemin
diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.
Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947–1985 collects more than 150 poems that did not appear in previous books. The volume begins with a teenager's approach to what becomes a lifelong subject, the archaic. "Elk Trails," written on Mount Saint Helens, in Washington State, begins,
Ancient, world-old Elk paths
Narrow, dusty Elk paths
Wide-trampled, muddy,
Aimless … wandering …
Everchanging Elk paths
The last poem in the book is "Sherry in July," a title that immediately proclaims Julius Caesar, a lifelong interest in linguistics, and drinking:
Julius Caesar, cut from his mother's womb
Caedere to cut off (caesura)
Sanskrit Khidati—tear—
(Jack Wilson, Wovoka, Paiute "Cutter")
Caesar to Kaiser to Tsesari, Tsar.
and a town in Spain, Caesaris
—Xeres—Jerez—
have some sherry.
Snyder's 1992 collection, No Nature: New and Selected Poems, is another attempt at an overview, this time of poems spanning thirty years. The hallmarks of Snyder's focus continue to be environmentalism and nature, Eastern languages, and religion. For him "no nature" is a claim that the division between humanity and nature is false. "Taste all, and hand the knowledge down," he encourages. The interrelatedness of matter and spirit is the force of the poems in this volume. "Axe Handles" attempts to articulate truths without reducing itself to truisms:
And I see: Pound was an ace,
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.
Some of the poems express a mildness that comes with experience, age, and establishment. In "The Sweat" Snyder is reconciled:
Older is smarter and more tasty.
Minds tough and funny—many lovers—
At the end of days of talking
Science, writing, values, spirit, politics, poems—
In 1956, moved by a Chinese scroll painting, Snyder began a long poem that ultimately took forty years to write. Including details from the varied range of his life's experiences, he touches on hitchhiking Route 99 from Oregon to San Francisco, trail work in the Sierras, Zen studies, and working on the high seas. He writes, "In my small spare time, I read geology and geomorphology. I came to see the yogic implications of 'mountains' and 'rivers' as the play between the tough spirit of willed self-discipline and the generous and loving spirit of concern for all beings."
Snyder's impulse is the creation of poetry that sings of the whole earth, in keeping with the sweeping tradition of Ezra Pound's The Cantos or William Carlos Williams's Patterson. Snyder tirelessly addresses the existence and nuance of the real and the true: Dogen's painted Zen hunger for a rice cake, the Chinese scroll "Endless Streams and Mountains," the poet's own Sierra foothills. Even in the history of rocks, the poet finds "lime-rich wave-wash soothing shales and silts / a thousand miles of chest-deep reef …"
Snyder's take on high-rise occupants, "cliffdwellers," has a distinctly populist feel:
Towers, up there the
Clean crisp white dress white skin
women and men
Who occupy sunnier niches,
Higher up on the layered stratigraphy cliffs, get
More photosynthesis, flow by more ostracods,
get more sushi,
Gather more flesh, have delightful
Cascading laughs...
The most interesting and successfully imagined sections of this long poem involve Snyder's construction of a world of wild nature beneath the structures of civilization, as in "Walking the New York Bedrock/Alive in the Sea of Information":
Squalls From the steps leading down to the subway. Blue-chested runner, a female, on car streets, Red lights block traffic but she like the Bean of a streetlight in the whine of the Skilsaw, she runs right through. A cross street leads toward a river North goes to the woods South takes you fishing Peregrines nest at the thirty-fifth floor …
—James K. Robinson and
Martha Sutro