Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet (originally, often associated with the Beat Generation), essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Since the 1970s, he has frequently been described as the 'laureate of Deep Ecology'. From the 1950s on, he has published travel-journals and essays from time to time. His work in his various roles reflects his immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has also translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. As a social critic, Snyder has much in common with Lewis Mumford, Aldous Huxley, Karl Hess, Aldo Leopold, and Karl Polanyi. Snyder was for many years on the faculty of the University of California, Davis, and for a time served on the California Arts Council.

Early life

Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco, California to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder. Snyder is of German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestry. His family, impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to Kitsap County, Washington, when he was two years old. There they tended a small dairy and made cedar-wood shingles, until moving to Portland, Oregon ten years later.

Frequently left alone, the age of seven Snyder was laid up for four months by a razorblade accident. “So my guilty folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle public library,” he recalled in interview, “and it was then I really learned to read and from that time on was voracious — I figure that accident changed my life. At the end of four months, I had read more than most kids do by the time they're 18. And I didn't stop.”

Also during his ten childhood-years in Washington, Snyder became aware of the presence of the Coast Salish people and developed an interest in the Native American peoples in general and their traditional relationship with nature.

Snyder's parents separated and, in adolescence, Gary and his sister were raised by their mother, who worked during this period as a newspaper journalist. Gary's boyhood jobs included newspaper copy-boy and shoe-shine boy. Also, during his teen years, he worked as a camp counselor in an all boys camp, and often went mountain-climbing with the Mazamas youth-group. Perhaps not coincidentally, much of his later work addresses themes of immature sexual curiosity and nascent homo-erotic tendencies. Climbing remained an interest of his, especially during his twenties and thirties.

In 1947, he started attending Reed College as a scholarship-student. Here he met, and for a time roomed with, Carl Proujan, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. At Reed, Snyder published his first poems in a student journal. He also spent a summer working as a seaman (an experience he was to repeat in the mid 1950s). As much as a way to earn money and experience other cultures in port-cities, this work served to put him in more touch with the oceans and other aspects of the hydrosphere. In 1951, he graduated with a BA in anthropology and literature and spent the summer working as a timber-scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, experiences which formed the basis for some of his earliest published poems (including "A Berry Feast"), later collected in the book The Back Country. Snyder worked the next year as a fire-lookout in a national-park (Desolation Peak). He also encountered the basic ideas of Communism and, through its tenets, some of Asia's attitudes toward work. Going on to Indiana University to study anthropology (where Snyder also practiced self-taught Zen meditation), he left after a single semester to return to San Francisco and to 'sink or swim as a poet'.

The Beats

Back in San Francisco, Snyder lived with Whalen, who shared his growing interest in Zen Buddhism. Snyder's reading of the writings of D.T. Suzuki had in fact been a factor in his decision not to continue as a graduate-student in anthropology, and in 1953 he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley to study Oriental culture and languages. Snyder continued to spend summers working in the forests, including one summer as a trail-builder in Yosemite. He spent some months in 1955 living in a cabin in Mill Valley with Jack Kerouac. It was also at this time that Snyder was an occasional student at the American Academy of Asian Studies, where Saburo Hasegawa and Alan Watts, among others, were teaching. During these years, Snyder was writing and collecting his own work, as well as embarking on the translation of the "Cold Mountain" poems by the 8th-century Chinese recluse Han Shan; this work appeared in chapbook-form in 1969, under the title Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems.

Snyder met Allen Ginsberg when the latter sought Snyder out on the recommendation of Kenneth Rexroth. Then, through Ginsberg, Snyder and Kerouac came to know each other. This period provided the materials for Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, and Snyder was the inspiration for the novel's main character Japhy Ryder in the same way Neal Cassady had inspired Dean Moriarty in On the Road. It is sometimes said, with good reason, that Kerouac portrayed the main characters in his early novels as loving a dionysian life with more chaos in it than the norm of the era. As the large majority of people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds, writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac found Snyder, with his backcountry and manual-labor experience and interest in things rural, a refreshing and almost exotic individual. Lawrence Ferlinghetti later referred to Snyder as 'the Thoreau of the Beat Generation'.

Snyder read his poem "A Berry Feast" at the famous poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco (October 7 1955) that heralded what was to become known as the San Francisco Renaissance. This also marked Snyder's first involvement with the Beats, although he was not a member of the original New York circle, but rather entered the scene through his association with Kenneth Rexroth.

As recounted in Kerouac's Dharma Bums, even at age 25 Snyder felt he could have a role in the fateful future meeting of West and East. Snyder's first book, Riprap, which drew on his experiences as a forest lookout and on the trail-crew in Yosemite, was published in 1959.

Japan

Independently, a number of the Beats, such as Philip Whalen, had become interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the more serious scholars of the subject among them. He, in fact, became a practitioner, spending most of the period between 1956 and 1968 in Japan, studying Zen first at Shokoku-ji and later in the Daitoku-ji monastery in Kyoto, working on translations with Ruth Fuller Sasaki, then finally living for a while with a group of other people on a small, volcanic island. His previous study of written Chinese assisted his immersion in the Zen tradition (with its roots in Tang Dynasty China) and enabled him to take on certain professional projects while he was living in Japan.

Snyder decided not to become a monk and planned eventually to return to the United States to 'turn the wheel of the dharma'. He was married from 1960 to 1965 to another American poet, Joanne Kyger, who lived with him in Japan.

During this time, he published a collection of his poems from the early to mid '50s, Myths & Texts (1960), and Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965). (This last was the beginning of a project that he was to continue working on until the late 1990s.) Much of Snyder’s poetry expresses experiences, environments, and insights involved with the work he has done for a living: logger, fire-lookout, steam-freighter crew, translator, carpenter, and itinerant poet, among other things.

Ever the participant observer, during his years in Japan Snyder not only immersed himself in Zen practice in monasteries but also was initiated into Shugendo, a form of ancient Japanese animism, (see also Yamabushi). In the early 1960s he travelled for some months through India with his wife Joanne, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky. Snyder and Joanne Kyger separated soon after their trip to India, and were later divorced.

Continuing on in the path of the naturalist while in Japan, Snyder educated himself on subjects like geomorphology and forestry. These interests have probably surfaced as much or more in his essays and interviews as in his poetry.

Snyder lived for a time with a group of Japanese back-to-the-land drop-outs on Suwanose (a small Japanese island in the East China Sea), where they beachcombed, gathered edible plants, and fished. On the Island, he married Masa Uehara, the mother of Snyder's two sons Kai and Gen, in 1967. Snyder was married to Uehara until 1989.

In 1968 his book The Back Country appeared, again mainly a collection of poems stretching back over about 15 years. Snyder devoted a section at the end of the book to his translations of 18 poems by Miyazawa Kenji (died 1933). Toward the end of the 1960s, Snyder and his wife moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where their second son, Gen, was born. In 1971 they moved onto rural land on San Juan Ridge ( 39°24′0″N, 120°52′0″W), Nevada County in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California, where they and friends built a house that drew on rural-Japanese and Native-American architectural ideas.

Later life and writings

Regarding Wave — a stylistic departure offering poems that were more emotional, metaphoric, and lyrical — appeared in 1969. In the late 1960s and after, the content of Snyder's poetry increasingly had to do with family, friends, and community. He continued to publish poetry throughout the 1970s, much of it reflecting his re-immersion in life on the American continent and his involvement in the re-inhabitation (or back to the land) movement in the Sierra foothills. His 1974 book Turtle Island, titled after the aboriginal name for the North American continent, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Snyder also wrote numerous essays setting forth his views on poetry, culture, social experimentation, and the environment. Many of these were collected in Earth House Hold (1969), The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work (1980), The Practice of the Wild (1990), A Place in Space (1995), and The Gary Snyder Reader (1999). In 1979, Snyder published He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth, based on his Reed thesis. Snyder's journals from his travel in India in the mid 1960s appeared in 1983 under the title Passage Through India.

In interviews and in articles about him, Snyder provided much food for thought, starting back in the mid 1960s. In these, his wide-ranging interests in cultures, natural history, religions, social critique, contemporary America, and hands-on aspects of rural life, as well as his ideas on literature, were given full-blown articulation. In 1967, for instance (in a taped round-table discussion in the San Francisco Oracle), Snyder's friend Alan Watts brought up the world problem posed by the population-explosion. Snyder's comment was the "change or bend of mind that seems to be taking place in the West, today especially, is going to result — can result ultimately — in a vast leisure society in which people will voluntarily reduce their number." It was a prediction that would prove partly true.

Snyder had readily accepted the far-reaching implications of the Hubbert "peak oil" prediction emerging into public policy discussion in the 1970s. Snyder often spoke of the "fossil-fuel subsidy," in the form of fairly cheap petroleum and coal, that had distorted many aspects of human activity and relationships (e.g., farming, suburban life, wealth and poverty).

In the 1980s and ’90s, Snyder expressed a lot of his insights and ideas in public lectures and in essays, including ones published in major outdoor and environmental magazines (and later collected in books).

In 1985, Snyder became a professor in the writing-program at the University of California, Davis. Here he began to influence a new generation of authors interested in writing about the Far East, including Robert Clark Young, whom he mentored. Snyder is now professor emeritus of English.

Snyder married Carole Koda in 1991 and remained married to her until her death in 2006.

As Snyder's involvement in environmental issues and his teaching grew, he seemed to move away from poetry for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, in 1996 he published the complete Mountains and Rivers Without End, which, in its mixture of the lyrical and epic modes celebrating the act of inhabitation on a specific place on the planet, is both his finest work and a summation of what a re-inhabitory poetics stands for. This work was written over a 40-year period. It has been translated into Japanese and French. In 2004 Snyder published Danger on Peaks, his first collection of new poems in twenty years.

Along the way, Gary Snyder was awarded the Levinson Prize from the journal Poetry, the American Poetry Society Shelley Memorial Award (1986), was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1987), and won the 1997 Bollingen Prize for Poetry and, that same year, the John Hay Award for Nature Writing. Snyder also has the distinction of being the first American to receive the Buddhism Transmission Award (for 1998) from the Japan-based Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation. For his ecological and social activism, Snyder was named as one of the 100 visionaries selected in 1995 by Utne Reader.

Snyder's poetics

Gary Snyder uses mainly common speech-patterns as the basis for his lines, though his style has been noted for its "flexibility" and the variety of different forms his poems have taken. He does not typically use conventional meters nor intentional rhyme. "Love and respect for the primitive tribe, honour accorded the Earth, the escape from city and industry into both the past and the possible, contemplation, the communal" – such, according to Glyn Maxwell, is the awareness and commitment behind the specific poems (Maxwell in "The Online Companion to the Anthology of Modern American Poetry").

The author and editor Stewart Brand once wrote: "Gary Snyder's poetry addresses the life-planet identification with unusual simplicity of style and complexity of effect." (CoEvolution Quarterly, issue #4, 1974)

Snyder has always maintained that his personal sensibility arose from his interest in Native Americans (“Indians”) and their involvement with nature and knowledge of it; indeed, their “ways” seemed to resonate with his own. And he has sought something kindred to this through Buddhist practices, Yamabushi initiation, and other experiences and involvements. However, since his youth he has been quite literate, and he has written about his appreciation of writers of similar sensibilities, like D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, and some of the great ancient Chinese poets. William Carlos Williams was another influence, especially on Snyder’s earliest published work.

"I have some concerns that I'm continually investigating that tie together biology, mysticism, prehistory, general systems theory," Snyder once said in interview (New York Quarterly "Craft Interview," 1973). Besides 'non-human nature', sexuality is something often expressed or contemplated in Gary Snyder's poetry. A self-admitted and somewhat famed ladies' man through most of his life, Snyder has also been married four times.

Aside from content and style, Snyder's interests in anthropology and Native cultures, along with his Buddhism and environmentalism, have formed his attitude to poetry. He has often spoken of the poem as work-place, and, for him, the work to be done there is learning to be in the world.

Snyder argues that poets, and humans in general, need to adjust to very long timescales, especially when judging the consequences of their actions. His poetry examines the gap between nature and culture so as to point to ways in which the two can be more closely integrated.

Is Snyder “a Romantic”?

Many people would say that poetry, inherently, is ”romantic.” Certainly there are many aspects of Gary Snyder’s work that smack of romanticism, apart from the mere fact that he writes poetry: his love of the untamed wilds of the Earth and the play of natural forces; his interest in, and often enthusiasm for, foreign cultures, and his devotion to ancient things; his belief in the importance of intuition in his life-path; his openness to the validity of magic and “the unexplained.”

Snyder is among those writers who have sought to dis-entrench conventional thinking about primitive peoples that has viewed them as simple-minded, ignorantly superstitious, brutish, and prone to violent emotionalism. In the 1960s Snyder developed a "neo-tribalist" view akin to the "post-modernist" theory of French Sociologist Michel Maffesoli. Deeply interested in traditional primitive or tribal peoples, Snyder seemed so sympathetic to them in his writings of the 1970s that he seemed scarcely able to imagine bullies, selfish individuals, or spiteful miscreants as ever having lived among them. He seemed ever inclined to let belongingness within the tribe outweigh (as a value) the xenophobia, frequent raids, and generations-long strife that have been established as so often prevailing between one tribe and another.

The "re-tribalization" of the modern, mass-society world envisioned by Marshall McLuhan, with all of the ominous, dystopian possibilities that McLuhan warned of — subsequently accepted by many modern intellectuals — is not the future that Snyder expects or works toward. Snyder's is a positive interpretation of the tribe and of the possible future.

Be these things as they may, in Snyder’s work what some of his critics may deem romanticism is balanced by an evident devotion to facts, appreciation of human practicality and capability, expressions of joy found in physical work, interest in science, and continual rumination on responsibility.

Is Snyder "a Beat"?

Gary Snyder is widely regarded as a member of the Beat Generation circle of writers: he was one of the poets that read at the famous Six Gallery event mentioned above, and was written about in one of Kerouac's most popular novels, The Dharma Bums. Some critics argue that Snyder's connection with the Beats is exaggerated and that he might better be regarded as a member of the West-Coast group the San Francisco Renaissance, which developed independently. Snyder himself has some reservations about the label "Beat," but does not appear to have any strong objection to being included in the group. He often talks about the Beats in the first person plural, referring to the group as "we" and "us".

A quotation from a 1974 interview at the University of North Dakota Writers Conference (published in The Beat Vision):

"... I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen [Ginsberg], myself, Michael [McClure], Lawrence [Ferlinghetti], Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory [Corso], for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years. ...

"Where we began to come really close together again, in the late '60s, and gradually working toward this point, it seems to me, was when Allen began to take a deep interest in Oriental thought and then in Buddhism which added another dimension to our levels of agreement; and later through Allen's influence, Lawrence began to draw toward that; and from another angle, Michael and I after the lapse of some years of contact, found our heads very much in the same place, and it's very curious and interesting now; and Lawrence went off in a very political direction for awhile, which none of us had any objection with, except that wasn't my main focus. It's very interesting that we find ourselves so much on the same ground again, after having explored divergent paths; and find ourselves united on this position of powerful environmental concern, critique of the future of the individual state, and an essentially shared poetics, and only half-stated but in the background very powerfully there, a basic agreement on some Buddhist type psychological views of human nature and human possibilities."

Yet it might be remembered that while the Beats' major influence is often regarded as having been greatest during the 1950s, Snyder's influence has been greatest since the 1970s (or possibly since the very late 1960s).

Bibliography

• Myths & Texts (1960)
• Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965)
• The Back Country (1967)
• Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1969)
• Regarding Wave (1969)
• Earth House Hold (1969)
• Turtle Island (1974)
• The Old Ways (1977)
• He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (1979)
• The Real Work (1980)
• Axe Handles (1983)
• Passage Through India (1983)
• Left Out in the Rain (1988)
• The Practice of the Wild (1990)
• No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992)
• A Place in Space (1995)
• narrator of the audio book version of Kazuaki Tanahashi's Moon in a Dewdrop from Dogen's Shobogenzo
• Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996)
• The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations (1999)
• Danger on Peaks (2005)
• Back on the Fire: Essays (2007)

References

• Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life, edited by Jon Halper, 1991
• Snyder, Gary. 1980. The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979. New Directions, New York. ISBN 0-8112-0761-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-8112-0760-9 (pbk)
• Autobiographical notes in Mountains and Rivers Without End, by Gary Snyder, 1996
• “Chronology” (c.v. for Gary Snyder) in The Gary Snyder Reader, 1999
• “The East-West Interview” by Peter Barry Chowka in The Real Work, by Gary Snyder, 1980
• Gary Snyder at the UC Davis English Department
• Gary Snyder at Modern American Poetry
• Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)
• Anthony Hunt, "Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder's 'Mountains and Rivers Without End'." Detailed, book length commentary on Gary Snyder's "Mountains & Rivers Without End"
• Aronowitz, Al "The Dharma Bum," Chapter 14, The Beat Papers of Al Aronowitz
• Knight, Arthur Winfield. Ed. The Beat Vision (1987) Paragon House. ISBN 0-913729-40-X; ISBN 0-913729-41-8 (pbk) This includes an interview with Gary Snyder conducted by James McKenzie on March 19, 1974 at the University of North Dakota Writers Conference.

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