In 1977, a few years after he’d won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of poems Turtle Island, Gary Snyder passed through New York City. The colossal World Trade towers had been inaugurated. The city was mired in a deep depression, one that would culminate later that summer in the July blackout. It must have felt like a far cry from California. While on that trip, Snyder conducted an interview with Peter Barry Chowka, who was editing the East West Journal. They did it sitting in Allen Ginsberg’s apartment, riding the heavily graffitied subway, and walking around the Village. Perhaps it was the movement or the rare combination of East-West kinship and curiosity, but Snyder gave one of his finest interviews. It began with a lucid description of how he’d fallen into a life in communion with nature. Nurturing a sense of wildness, within and without.
“When I was young, I had an immediate, intuitive, deep sympathy with the natural world, which was not taught me by anyone,” he said. “In that sense, nature is my ‘guru’ and life is my sadhana. That sense of the authenticity, completeness and reality of the natural world itself made me aware even as a child of the contradictions that I could see going on around me in the state of Washington, in the way of exploitation, logging, development, pollution. I lived on the edge of logging country, and the trees were rolling by on the tops of trucks, just as they are still. My father was born and raised on the Kitsap County farm that my grandfather had homesteaded; he was a smart man, a very handy man, but he only knew about fifteen different trees and after that he was lost. I wanted more precision; I wanted to look deeper into the underbrush.”
Snyder has been looking deeper for over 80 years now, on foot, by prop plane and aboard a dogsled, in cities but mostly not, with Indigenous elders and trackers, friends, fellow poets. He has done his probing perched on peaks, driving across deserts, and at home for the past 50-plus years on the western slope of the northern Sierra Nevada near the Yuba River watershed. The record of this search, of the ceremonies Snyder has participated in and the animals and landscapes with which he has become acquainted, trails behind him in more than 20 numinous books. They are less the work of an explorer—who quarries for exceptional events—than a kind of practice, a form of mind that is also part of the gift of economy. Works of poetry and prose, translation, conversations with fellow travelers, and journals kept at sea, among so much else, they all read like an offering in exchange for the hospitality the world itself has shown him.
Snyder’s sensitivity to geography and our connections to land have made him one of the most vital poets in North American history. He is the fork in the road after modernism, where William Carlos Williams’s key dictum, “No idea but in things,” becomes a question: Well, what is a thing? Can that include me? Can that include language? Can that include everything in the world if the world also is expanded to nature? Drawing on decades of study of Zen Buddhism, a great deal of time spent out of doors, and close reading of Chinese and Japanese poetry, among other literatures, Snyder found ways to ask these questions. He used various languages for them, ranging from the vernacular to the formal. Even though his poetic forms range, from terse short lines to folding epics, like the book Mountains and Rivers Without End, he has a singular voice through it all: genial, trickster-y, keen-eyed, and humble. His work is as image-rich as the Tang dynasty poets he read so closely and as musical as a work song.
To appreciate how steady this voice has been—how clear yet varied—it’s worth looking at two of his most notable books, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Snyder’s very first collection, published (in two parts) in the late 1950s, and The Practice of the Wild, a stirring book of essays that dates to 1990. What the poems accomplish in language, and sound, the essays open up in ideas and concepts with prose. This is not to say that poetry has no ideas but that neither the poetry of “Riprap,” Snyder’s own work, nor the “Cold Mountain” poems of Han-shan, which he translates and includes, are that kind. At least not here. Composed of poems written on mountain peaks, at sea, and later in Japan, where Snyder traveled to study Zen Buddhism, the collection is a compelling interaction with the elemental world: the earth and its stones, water and ice, and the mind itself.
And it all began with a job in California. In the summer of 1955, after two years of studying Japanese and classical Chinese at Berkeley, Snyder packed himself off to Yosemite National Park to work as a trail-crew laborer. Surrounded by evidence of the ice age, exposed to the extraordinary textures of bedrock, he found himself writing a very old kind of poem, which was a new one for him. A poem that he has said “surprised” him. “There are poets who claim that their poems are made to show the world through the prism of language. Their project is worthy. There is also the work of seeing the world without any prism of language, and to bring that seeing into language.”
This description is a quintessential example of Snyder’s trickster-y poetics, wherein the pathways of craft always lead back to questions of dharma—of the world and all that is. Snyder’s greatness is the rigor with which he commits, and the suppleness of his ear, to this exploration. Riprap is certainly one of the most beautiful books ever written with such restricted syllabics. Composed under the influence of Chinese poetry, the short line Snyder adopted contains mostly monosyllabic words. Riprap, the book tells us, is “a cobble of stone laid on steep, / slick rock to make a trail for horses / in the mountains.” And so we begin, in terse, lean, yet musical language, on a journey upward into the clouds.
The first poem, “Mountain Lookout,” begins with the poet on a peak, staring down a valley through “a smoke haze”: “Pitch glows on the fir-cones / Across rocks and meadows / Swarms of new flies.” Thanks to the assonance of all those s’s, you can actually hear the valley buzzing with insects. And thanks to the spareness of the line, it’s also easy to remember—or imagine—what it feels like to look into an enormous view. There are just two five-line stanzas in the poem: two commas and three periods. The word I doesn’t appear until the second stanza, as if the view has obliterated or dwarfed the self. When it returns, it is nearly in the past tense:
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
These lines were written years before W.S. Merwin would remove all the commas and periods from his own poems, yet here’s Snyder demonstrating that with careful joinery, poetic lines will hang true without punctuation. Out of this decision would emerge a style. In later books, Snyder used warmer, more elaborate, and direct or literary approaches, but the removal of articles and compound adjectives remained in his poetry—so, too, did adjectives without commas. It creates a hustling, spoken sound, one that is deeply American. In one poem, he writes of a “long old chorus” and in another of “high wild notes.”
Perhaps this is one reason why Snyder is so good at writing about work. This book features one of the best poems he’d ever write on labor, “Hay for the Horses,” which recounts a day the poet spends bucking hay alongside a farmer much older than him. “He had driven half the night / From far down San Joaquin / Through Mariposa, up the / Dangerous mountain roads” to simply get there to be able to work. It helps that Snyder clearly respects work and workers. He knows the rhythms of a day, how delicious a pause is when you’ve worked hard, and how talk then takes over. “At lunchtime under Black oak / Out in the hot corral, / —the old mare nosing lunch pails, / Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds—‘I’m sixty-eight,’ he said, / ‘I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.’”
What a pleasing music these lines make, how much they mimic the feeling of what they’re describing. “We stacked the bales up clean / To splintery redwood rafters / High in the dark, / flecks of alfalfa / whirling through shingle-cracks of light.” Has there ever been a more balletic but apt description of a body in motion? Like songs, Snyder’s best poems and translations can be read and read again in close succession and deliver the same pleasure. You can hear that his ear is tuned by the poetry he has read from the East, too. “A hill of pines hums in the wind,” he translated Han-shan’s words in Cold Mountain. Even rhyming couplets seem natural, not like a music box but rather a part of the elemental music. “In the thin loam, each rock a word / a creek-washed stone,” he writes in Riprap. Because there are no ideas pressing down on the verse, we can simply observe with the mind’s eye what Snyder wishes us to witness. At sea, where so many poets railed against the void, Snyder simply looks up at the starry sky and sees evidence of “the universe as playful, cool, and infinitely blank.”
Snyder had come to Chinese poetry through Ezra Pound, who had popularized Ernest Fenollosa’s critical text, The Chinese Written Character As a Medium for Poetry. It was a favorite little book of Ginsberg’s. Fenollosa’s ideas, though not in favor now, were hugely influential on the poets of his time. Snyder was one of the only ones to learn Chinese and Japanese well enough to begin translating these languages to the extent that he did. In another lifetime, he would have simply been a translator, and judging from his Han-shan renditions, he would have had a long and fruitful career doing just that. The best thing one can say about a good translator is that they are at least as good a writer as the lines require. Snyder is that and then some. Like all good translations of Han-shan, the poems re-create both the voice and the stillness, the poise of the line and their dart into paradox:
I’ve lost the shortcut home,
Body asking shadow, how do you keep up?
Placed side by side with his own work, Cold Mountain reveals Snyder ever more to be the hermit, but never does he presume to be the wise elder Han-shan was in his time. The music of the place is eerily similar, though. Pine trees sing in the window. Off the Cold Mountain trail, “Sharp cobbles—the icy creek bank. / Yammering, chirping—always birds…. Whip, whip—the wind slaps my face.” These translations, begun in a Berkeley graduate-seminar classroom, must have made a lot more sense to Snyder after his time in Yosemite, but they also begin to walk him toward a practice of the eco-poetics of coexistence. When the natural world speaks to Han-shan, the existence of the poet is drawn to a finer point as part of a wheel of living beings, of simultaneous fields of life—all of them interdependent.
When the moon shines, water sparkles clear.
When the wind blows, grass swishes and rattles.
On the bare plum, flowers of snow.
On the dead stump, leaves of mist.
As in the shorter poems that Snyder has written, the clean page allows the spare palette of elements to shine: especially water in all its formations. Rain, clouds, snow, mist, even tears move through the book as if drawn down by gravity, moving—as water does—down through the terrain.
Snyder had a running start to hearing this well. As I mentioned before, he grew up on a farm between Lake Washington and Puget Sound on the land of the Snohomish people. His family kept animals, and not far out his back window were second-growth Douglas firs. As he writes in The Practice of the Wild, “my usual pastimes were watching the migratory waterfowl in the sloughs along the Columbia River or sewing moccasins.” Retreat into the wilderness isn’t, for such a person, a retreat so much as a return to the wholeness among which he was raised. Snyder is simply unusual in that he understood it as something worth returning to.
The Practice of the Wild seeks to repair the impoverishment of our estrangement from nature. To Snyder, this condition affects our forms of government, our capacity for joy and pleasure, our language, our sense of home, and our ability to share and tolerate our neighbors. It is not, for him, simply an act of stewardship of land and the biosphere in which we live; it is a spiritual and psychological restoration that must be affected, too. “The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas,” he writes. “We need to make a world-scale ‘Natural contract’ with the oceans, the air, the birds in the sky.… Take back, like the night, that which is shared by all of us, that which is our larger being.”
Snyder is a skilled etymologist, and he frequently breaks down words—from nature to wild to cultivate—locating in their roots a greater complexity than their everyday usage suggests. To read these essays is to feel a wise elder replacing diminishing categories with enlarging ones. Instead of a nation or state, Snyder talks of bioregionalism, so when he addresses the compact he has made with the land on which he lives in the Sierras, it’s important to point out that his part of the Sierras shares a lot of qualities with the Pacific Northwest where he grew up. Why are they different states?
What is far more different, Snyder suggests, than Washington and California is the eastern side of the Sierras, which are dry and required the Native people of that side to trade with the Miwok and Maidu of the West. “The two sides met and camped together for weeks in the summer Sierra meadows,” Snyder writes, “their joint commons…. There are numerous examples of relatively peaceful small-culture coexistence all over the world.” In his pages, one feels the loamy idea-soil of the movement to live and act locally taking root 20 years before it would become a meme.
And yet travel has been an essential part of informing Snyder’s commitment to Native cultures, to the power of storytelling and teaching, and to being—as Barry Lopez was in his own way, too—a land bridge between literatures across the globe. Other sections of the book chronicle Snyder’s travels in Inupiaq lands in the Alaskan Arctic, learning from language-preservation movements and telling poems. So many writers of Snyder’s stature would have traveled through with an idea of perhaps giving service. Instead, Snyder sees ever more clearly the values of the country whose passport he holds:
American society…operates under the delusion that we are each a kind of “solitary knower”—that we exist as rootless intelligences without layers of localized contexts. Just a “self” and the “world.” In this there is no real recognition that grandparents, place, grammar, pets, friends, lovers, children, tools, the poems and songs we remember, are what we think with. Such a solitary mind—if it could exist—would be a boring prisoner of abstractions. With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free. No wonder the parents of Eskimo children of the whole Kotzebue Basin posted the “Inupiaq Values” in their schools.
The Practice of the Wild is an unusual book, for it invites the reader to consider radical shifts in how they may live, but Snyder never presses his case with the petty despotism one can find in a guru. He simply beckons the reader into communal spaces from which he seeks to tease out lessons. Admittedly, they are the kinds of places most of us will see rarely, if ever, in our lifetimes, from the dogsled teams Snyder rides from home to house in Alaska, pausing upon arrival to feed the howling animals fish stew, to the community life of apprenticing as a lay adept in a monastery outside Kyoto, where Snyder studied in the 1960s. He never presents these experiences with breathless access, though, or with self-aggrandizement; always it’s in the tones of someone who has simply been allowed to do something with a history much older than himself.
He also takes pains to translate these experiences into everyday form. “It is as hard to get the children herded into the car pool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on a cold morning,” he writes. “One move is not better than the other, each can be quite boring, and they both have the virtuous quality of repetition.” It is so unusual for a writer so restless, so prone to moving around the world, to reference the domestic space as a baseline reality for reality itself. Not for nothing is one of Snyder’s finest poems—outside the ones discussed here—about giving his son Kai a bath. “The truly experienced person, the refined person,” he writes, “delights in the ordinary.”
How refreshing for a man whose lifeline overlapped with publications such as Green Hills of Africa to turn away from the models of masculinity Hemingway and others demonstrated to great popularity in his time—of detachment, of domination, of delegation—at least here on the page. Snyder’s vast work is full of such surprises today. It remains the descent, the open invitation it was back in 1959. To read it, to wade into its lines, is to feel the shock of its necessity, in an era when our habitat’s emergency is felt in every season, when every Californian is becoming a fire lookout, as Snyder once was with his friend Jack Kerouac on Desolation Peak. This work, so bracing, so still, invites us now to awaken the wild within us, to recognize it without, and to do this in the way that it can last—together.•
Join us on May 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when an array of panelists and CBC host John Freeman, with an appearance by Snyder, will gather to discuss Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems and The Practice of the Wild. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
