When featured author Gary Snyder joined host John Freeman at the California Book Club celebration of his work, he commented that riprap is a commonly heard word in the backcountry, but it’s just barely in the dictionary. Snyder continued, “We still have, with our English language takeover of the western coast, a number of words in vocabularies that belonged to the work of the woods and that people who don’t work in the woods never hear. So riprap, for no good reason at all, refers to the rough, unpredictable, rocky landscape of the mountains. And it tells you what gets in the way. What you have to get out of the way, and what you can’t get out of the way, and it’s all very entertaining. And it was a discovery—in my labors up in the mountains—of this word that pushed me to find the poems that I thought might go with it.”
Freeman asked Snyder what he learned while working among miners and loggers, noting that these kinds of jobs seemed counterintuitive for someone concerned about the preservation of the wild. Snyder responded, “It’s all wild.” He went on, “I learned to love the wild. That’s what you have to do in a way. You have to be part of it, part of the time. You have to know what the tools are. You have to talk to the people who have worked in it.”
Peter Coyote, an actor and ordained Zen priest, joined Freeman and Snyder. He spoke about learning about Buddhism when he visited Snyder in his place in the Sierras and got an idea of what a secular Zen life might look like, and he liked it. He commented on the importance of Zen philosophy to Snyder’s work, saying, “What Buddha taught us was that everything is impermanent. And this world is full of affliction, which is the energy that keeps things moving, stirring the pot, as Gary once called it. And the impermanence is actually where our freedom arises. If we had a fixed self, we couldn’t change.”
In a first panel, poets Brenda Hillman and Kim Shuck and Snyder’s editor and friend Jack Shoemaker discussed Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. Hillman gave a lovely reading of “Riprap.” Freeman asked Shoemaker about the first time he heard this poem read aloud. Shoemaker said he’d heard Snyder read it in Isla Vista at one of the first poetry readings Shoemaker attended, noting that “Gary had the straight-ahead physical posture of an Olympic wrestler.… It was a presentation of assurance and intention, and he enjoyed a mastery of silence I’d never experienced before in a performance. I’ve never been able to read Gary on the page without recalling that voice.”
Hillman commented that “Gary was my first ecological Western inspiration.” She found him inspiring because of his “fidelity to fresh language” and explained of “Riprap” that “the way this poem works is so mysterious and so solid at the same time. It’s full of monosyllables that are hard and crisp, and they do exactly what he’s describing…putting a path down.”
Shuck commented that her poetic tradition comes from prayer forms, from her father’s culture, and that it has to do with transformation, “muddling around in the spectacular debris.” She observed that part of Snyder’s work was not only asking questions but also listening to the answers and noted, “Part of the responsibility of poetics is to listen, and I find that in the work.”
Poets Jane Hirshfield, Robert Hass, and Wang Ping, along with fiction writer, essayist, and environmental activist Rick Bass, formed a second panel to discuss Snyder’s work. Hirshfield commented that she’d first encountered Snyder when he gave a reading at a coffee shop, as well as a talk on the Yamabushi mountain monks. She said that he’d had a big influence on many who wound up coming to a Buddhist practice and “to a poetics of interconnection.” She said, “A great deal of that had to do with the way he opened a gate of the possible in his language, in his body, in his example of being.”
“Hard to convey to the young poets just starting now how disreputable Gary’s poetics seemed, just at that moment,” Hass said. In graduate school, when he heard the opening lines of “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” he thought, “Yeah, that’s what’s I want. Life is what I want. And this sounds like life.” He talked about how he found the layers of Snyder’s poetry unfamiliar, assimilating both a Taoist and a Buddhist sensibility with what seemed to Hass a wild time. Snyder was supposed to be of the Beats, but instead, Hass said, he was “a beautifully disciplined guy with an amazing ear writing poems that sounded like nothing that was being written at the time.”
Ping said that she’s been translating Snyder’s poems to Chinese since the start of the pandemic and noted a difficulty with translating “Riprap,” which felt like home but felt “so simple, so naked.” She explained that she felt Chinese poetics required a different aesthetic use of language. When she told Snyder, he showed her the definition in the dictionary, which said that riprap was a laying out of rocks on the shore without cementing them, “to let the rocks do the work, to prevent the shore from being eroded.” She realized that “language wants to cover the essence, the fire, the true spirit of each word with a lot of decoration” and the job of poets is to shine the rocks—clean up the words.
Bass told Snyder that he’d been an incredible mentor to him in the difficult conversation with loggers with whom Bass had been living in the forest—the loggers had felt that as a tree hugger, he was trying to put them out of work. But he came to believe that it was important to understand who they were and where they’re coming from “and how they do it.”
In the discussion of The Practice of the Wild, Will Hearst talked about meeting Snyder when Hearst was the editor of the San Francisco Examiner. He had cold-called Snyder to ask him to write something about the environment. Hearst saw something different, original, in Snyder’s voice and perspective. “He was saying, ‘You really need to start with something very close to you. What is your watershed?... Are you really in touch with your immediate environment? Before you give me some grand vision or I will give you [one]…you should know your immediate environment.’”•
Join us on June 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when author Javier Zamora, CBC host John Freeman, and a special guest will gather to discuss Solito. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
