Backwoods Blog

GARY SNYDER

Backwoods Blog;

in the woods and on the road…

It’s helpful to remember that what we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds…I believe we can have neighborhood and community. Communities strong in their sense of place, proud and aware of local and special qualities creating to some extent their own cultural forms, not humble or subservient in the face of some “high cultural” over-funded art form or set of values, are in fact what one healthy side of the original American vision was about. They are also, now, critical to “ecological survival.” No amount of well-meaning environmental legislation will halt the biological holocaust without people who live where they are and work with their neighbors, taking responsibility for their place, and seeing to it: to be inhabitants, and to not retreat. We feel this to be starting in America: a mosaic of city neighborhoods, small towns, and rural places where people are digging in and saying “This is the place.”

The price people pay for living in the production called American society is that they are condemned to continuallywatch television and read newspapers to know “what’s happening,” and thus they have no time to play with their own children or get to know the neighbors or birds or plants or seasons. What a dreadful cost! This explains why I do not even try to keep up with what’s going on in nationwide poetry publishing. We are talking about real culture now, the culture that things grow in, and not the laboratory strains of seeds that lead to national reputation. Poetry is written and read for real people: it should be part of the gatherings where we make decisions about what to do about uncontrolled growth, or local power plants, and who’s going to be observer at the next county supervisor’s meeting. A little bit of music is played by the guitarists and five-string banjo players, and some poems come down from five or six people who are really good-speaking to what is happening here. They shine a little ray of myth on things; memory turning to current legend.

From a talk delivered by Gary Snyder at Oberlin College and Brown University in the fall of 1978

Sunday
by Gary Snyder

Well I know Sunday is the Sabbath
but who ever does it?
Except Berry*. Nice poems.
It just happens I’m free
the first time in weeks from
chores and promises,
cracked valves, late bills,
and I think I’ll take time
to brush the dog. She likes that.
& oil dry hard leather for sheath for shears,
for the tape rule, hatchet -
read a recipe for an aubergine salad,
this isn’t work -

Then go for a hike
toward the bobcat dens and gravels,
hope no wildfires start today
- I’ll get there and back
and just for a second,
maybe play.



* Wendell Berry. For more on the poet and contrarian 
  farmer see Isolation Blues .68 at backwoodsblog.com 

Gary Snyder was one of the poets that read at the famous Six Gallery Reading in San Francisco on October 7th, 1955 (sixty seven years ago this week). This was the night Allen Ginsberg first read his poem Howl launching the Beat Generation that included such writers as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Diane di Prima. Snyder was born in 1930 and grew up in the Pacific Northwest cultivating rural skills and gained an appreciation of the local Native American Haida people and the Coast Salish people. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon and graduated with a dual degree in anthropology and literature in 1951. During his twenties he worked in logging as a timber scaler and choke setter and joined a union to become a seaman on a freighter. Snyder also enjoyed hiking, mountain-climbing and worked two summers in the North Cascades in Washington as a fire lookout, on Crater Mountain in 1952 and Sourdough Mountain in 1953, both locations on the upper Skagit River.  In 1955 Snyder went to Japan to study Zen Buddhism with Abbott Miura Isshu at Rinko-in, a temple in Shokoju-ji in Kyoto and was initiated. In Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums (1958), the Japhy Ryder character was based on Gary Snyder. Japhy Ryder was the back-packing, cosmic zen-saint leading the ruck-sack revolution with nothing but a book of poems and a tin cup hooked to his hiking belt. Lawrence Ferlinghetti once referred to Snyder as “the Thoreau of the Beat Generation.” He travelled between California and Japan until 1969 when he returned and purchased land in the Sierra foothills, north of Nevada City, California. He built an off-the-grid homestead called Kitkitdizze which is the name of a native plant, commonly called bear clover or mountain misery. His first book of poems, Riprap, drew on his experiences as a forest lookout and on the trail crew in Yosemite, and was published in 1959. Snyder won the Pulitzer prize in 1974 for Turtle Island and an American Book Award for Axe Handles in 1983. Snyder’s career is too voluminous to detail here, but I’ve attempted to highlight a few of his contributions. If I had a personal Top-Ten Poets List, Gary Snyder would be on it. I’ll share some more of his work in a future post. 

In the woods,

Dave

October 7, 2022