A few more choice quotes from 'The Green Reader'

John Elder in 'Culture as Decay':

Poetry [...] belongs on the one hand to the culture of the book, achieving formal and thematic relationship with the West's tradition of 'high poetic' expression. But poetry also makes possible for a writer as alert to its incantationory power as Snyder a connection with oral tradition oral tradition of mythology and ritual. He termed poetry 'national parks of the mind'.

p. 232, quoting from Gary Snyder, The real work: interviews and talks 1964 - 79, (ed .W. Scott Mclean) New York: New Dimension, 1980 pp 173 -4

Art is an assimilation of unfelt experience, perception, sensation and memory for the whole of society when all that compost of feeling and thinking comes back to us then, it comes not as a flower - but to complete the metaphor as a mushroom: the fruiting body of the buried threads of mycelia that runs widely through the soil and are intricately wound round the roots of the trees.

http://vimeo.com/12778046

Gary Snyder, Reading, 10 November 1999

from Lannan Foundation