Gary Snyder - Poet of the Wild

I had come across poems by Gary Snyder over the years in various anthologies and enjoyed them. Dismissed in half a sentence by Helen Vendler in her introduction to The Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (New York, I B Tauris, 2003) as 'the spare West Coast rituals of Gary Snyder, I had pigeon-holed him as a poet of the Beat generation, an ageing hippy with an interest in nature. In terms of American landscape poets Elizabeth Biishop and Jane Kenyon were the writers that had caught my eye. It was Rebecca Solnit's reference to 'Rivers and Mountains Without End' in  Field Guide to Getting Lost that alerted me to the fact that Snyder's work was more significant than I had reckoned. Over the lasr couple of weeks I have been engrosed by two books of his poetry - the Pulitzer Prize winning 'Turtle Island', and his epic 'Rivers and Mountains Without End' written over 30 years between 1956 - 1996. This latter book will, I believe, come to be regarded as a canonical work, a re-imagining of the relationship between man and nature; the poem's reach and scope, the sense you get within it of a life's good work reminded me of The Prelude. The older you get, the less often you sense that you have experienced an idea, or a book or a place which is truly inspirational, but Snyder's ecological epic has had that kind of profound impact.

His essay writing too is thought provoking and engaging. The Practice of the Wild, (New York, North Point Press, 1990) contains a range of essays including, in the opening 'The Etiiquette of Freedom' a useful clarification of terms - what do we mean by 'nature' and how, in turn does that relate to wilderness and the wild? His interests range widely, from lore and rituals experience of native peoples, Chinese Landscape painting and Zen Buddhism, to reflections on his time as a logger, in his descriptions of practice, whether it is managing lumber, navigating a wilderness or meditating upon a koan is he is precise, the language spare, exact and vivid, but never effusive, his descriptions and rooted in dwelt experience and evocative of place. It is elemental writing which expands into deep time and seeks out the fount of our common humanity. Like here - a poem from Turtle Island, his preferred Native American name for America:

What Happened Here Before

— 300,000,000— 

First a sea: soft sands, muds, and marls 
 — loading, compressing, heating, crumpling, 
 crushing, recrystallizing, infiltrating, 
several times lifted and submerged, 
intruding molten granite magma 
 deep-cooled and speckling, 
  gold quartz fills the cracks— 

— 80,000,000— 

sea-bed strata raised and folded, 
 granite far below. 
warm quiet centuries of rains 
 (make dark red tropic soils) 
 wear down two miles of surface, 
lay bare the veins and tumble heavy gold 
 in streambeds 
  slate and schist rock-riffles catch it – 
volcanic ash floats down and dams the streams, 
 piles up the gold and gravel— 

— 3,000,000— 

flowing north, two rivers joined, 
 to make a wide long lake. 
and then it tilted and rivers fell apart 
 all running west 
 to cut the gorges of the Feather, 
  Bear, and Yuba. 
Ponderosa pine, manzanita, black oak, mountain yew, 
 deer, coyote, bluejay, gray squirrel, 
ground squirrel, fox, blacktail hare, 
 ringtail, bobcat, bear, 
  all came to live here. 

—40,000— 

And human people came with basket hats and nets 
 winter-houses and underground 
 yew bows painted green, 
 feasts and dances for the boys and girls 
  songs and stories in the smoky dark. 

—150— 

Then came the white man: tossed up trees and 
 boulders with big hoses, 
 going after that old gravel and the gold. 
horses, apple-orchards, card-games, 
 pistol-shooting, churches, county jail. 



We asked, who the land belongs to. 
 and where one pays tax. 
(two gents who never used it twenty years, 
and before them the widow 
 of the son of the man 
 who got him a patented deed 
 on a worked-out mining claim,) 
laid hasty on the land that was deer and acorn 
 grounds of the Nisenan? 
 Branch of the Maidu? 
(they never had a chance to speak, even, 
 their name.) 
(and who remembers the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.) 

 the land belongs to itself. 
 “no self in self: no self in things” 

 Turtle Island swims 
 in the ocean-sky swirl-void 
 biting its tail while the worlds go 
  on-and-off 
   winking 

& Mr. Tobiassen, a Cousin Jack, 
 assesses the county tax. 
(the tax is our body-mind, guest at the banquet 
 Memorial and Annual, in honor 
 of sunlight grown heavy and tasty 
 while moving up food-chains 
in search of a body with eyes and a fairly large 
    brain— 
 to look back at itself 
    on high.) 

now, 

we sit here near the diggings 
in the forest, by our fire, and watch 
the moon and planets and the shooting stars— 

my sons ask, who are we? 
drying apples picked from homestead trees 
drying berries, curing meat, 
shooting arrows at bales of straw. 

military jets head northeast, roaring, every dawn. 
my sons ask, who are they? 

 WE SHALL SEE 
 WHO KNOWS 
 HOW TO BE 

Bluejay screeches from a pine.

And as regards the power of the West, - America's ever expanding empire, an empire of likes and tweets, big Macs and Blackbird stealth bombers, of drones and iphones, the whole earth observed through Windows, explored via streetview, sent-up on Youtube, Pentagon monitored, Nimitz patrolled, in warehouses of data, in pixelated clouds. hidden algorithms size our desire and feed our greed for more...But, as Mr Snyder says, whatever we do, the world does as it pleases:

Far above the dome
Of the capitol--
            It's true!
A large bird soars
Against white cloud,
Wings arced,
Sailing easy in this
humid Southern sun-blurred
            breeze--
         the dark-suited policeman
         watches tourist cars--
And the center,
The center of power is nothing!
Nothing here.
Old white stone domes,
Strangely quiet people,
Earth-sky-bird patterns
          idly interlacing
The world does what it pleases.

Washington D.C. XI:73