Blaise Zerega: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Alta Journal's California Book Club. It's a thrill to be here tonight for Gary Snyder as we talk about The Practice of the Wild and Riprap and Cold Mountain. In fact, it's a real honor to be here. Let me just say that straight up. Tonight, as usual, John Freeman will be the host, and we're joined by just an amazing, amazing roster of special guests, including: Peter Coyote, Kim Shuck, Brenda Hillman, Jack Shoemaker, Jane Hirshfield, Robert Haas, Rick Bass, Wang Ping, and Will Hearst.
My name is Blaise Zerega. I'm Alta Journal's editorial director, and I'm Zooming in tonight from San Francisco. I encourage everyone to post in the chat where they're joining from. In the meantime, while you do that, let me get some housekeeping out of the way. Tonight's California Book Club is our free monthly gathering featuring books that reflect the wonderful diversity and humanity of life in the Golden State.
We are an award-winning quarterly journal of arts and culture. Every issue, we have poetry, fiction, original essays, reported pieces. We think of culture as writ large from technology to science to history. In the weeks leading up to each of our book club events, we post online free essays about that month's selection. I encourage everyone, if you haven't visited, to go and read them.
We've got great essays by our California Book Club editor, Anita Felicelli, Hamilton Cain, John Freeman, and we even ordered a special cocktail. Maybe if some of you saw that recipe, you can be sipping that tonight. It's a gin and tonic. It's a spin on the gin and tonic. So I encourage you to look at that.
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I think that's it. So without further ado, let me turn this over to our host, my good friend, John Freeman. Thanks, everybody.
John Freeman: Thanks, Blaise. It's good to see everybody piling in from Tasmania, Kathmandu, and quite a few from Grass Valley this episode of the California Book Club. The whole idea behind this club was to try to focus on beautiful and important works of writing that had come out of California that were classics right in front of our eyes, that had changed the way we live and think, and I can think of no one more that has done that than the person we're here to honor and talk about, Gary Snyder.
You might be here because he's awakened you or maybe he's challenged you. Maybe he's delighted you in his work. Maybe you felt comforted by it, but whatever he is, poet, pacifist, practitioner of the wild, teacher, seeker, great listener to stories, especially those of Indigenous people, writer, essayist, ecological activist. From the person who has grown up in the Seattle public library, reading the works of the great ancient Chinese and Japanese poets to the ones he's translated, he has spent a life basically, as Robert Haas who is joining us here tonight, thinking hard about our residents on Earth. He's the author of more than two dozen books, and they've changed the way we live, the way we think. It's a huge honor to welcome him here to talk about two of them, Riprap and Practice of the Wild. Please join me in welcoming Gary Snyder.
Gary Snyder: Pleasure to be here. The first thing I want to say about riprap is be sure you know what the word means, because it's just barely in the dictionary, and yet it's a commonly heard word in the back country. We still have, with our English language takeover of the Western coast, a number of words and vocabularies that belong to the work of the woods and that people who don't work in the woods never hear them. 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 and what you have to get out of the way and what you can't get out of the way. It's all very entertaining. It was the 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.
It's true. There are not many poems in the English language of the West Coast that do exactly that. I'd like to read a poem from Riprap, if I might.
Freeman: Yes, please.
Snyder: Milton by Firelight.
"O hell, what do mine eyes with grief behold?" A quote from Milton. "Working with an old single jack miner who can sense the vein and cleavage in the very guts of rock, can blast granite, build switchbacks that last for years under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves. What use, Milton, of a silly story of our lost general parents, eaters of fruit?
"The Indian, the chainsaw boy, and a string of six mules came riding down to camp, hungry for tomatoes and green apples. Sleeping in saddle blankets under a bright night sky, the Han River, the Milky Way, slantwise by morning. Jays squall. Coffee boils.
"In 10,000 years the Sierra will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion. Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees. No paradise, no fall, only the weathering land, the wheeling sky, man with his Satan scouring the chaos of the mind. Oh, Hell!
"Fire down. Too dark to read now, miles from a road. The bell-mare clangs in the meadow that packed dirt for a fill-in, scrambling through loose rocks on an old trail, all of a summer's day."
You're welcome to be angry or bored or puzzled by such a poem.
Freeman: It's wonderful to hear you read it. I wondered if I could ask you what you learned about your place in the world by working among miners and people that were logging. It seems sometimes counterintuitive for someone who cared so much about the wild.
Snyder: It's all wild. Are you making a distinction between the wild and what?
Freeman: No. I mean as someone who cares about the preservation of the wild, to work among miners and loggers, I wonder what you learned.
Snyder: I learned to love the wild.
Freeman: Excellent.
Snyder: 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. The Forest Service, a guy with a graduate degree in firefighting, can organize your volunteer group and know how to go about responding to a little spot fire. But none of that is valuable, ultimately, if you don't know what's underneath it.
What's underneath it is this very ground itself with all kinds of life in it that is constantly expanding and moving, and you should be at home with it. So that's what I'm saying there over and over again in the Riprap poems is take a look at the rocks.
Freeman: That's wonderful. It feels, reading the poems now, that you are describing yourself on the verge of a great change. You want to leave. You want to go even further away. Did you feel that as you were writing them?
Snyder: I don't think so. No. It was just, except that I would have wanted to go farther and higher, yeah. I learned a lot about not just rocks, but about horses and about older people and about cooking over an open fire with a tin cup to get your coffee, the kind of thing that my grandparents, your grandparents did and knew that are not understood or known or even imagined today.
Freeman: My grandmother went to school on a horse, and I did not.
Snyder: Well, think about it because it may be more profound than one thinks, in some ways. The horses are kind of lonely now.
Freeman: Yes. I wonder if since you wrote about having chickens at your house and you no longer do because it was not practical, which animals around you, where you live, are you closest to?
Snyder: Now?
Freeman: Yes.
Snyder: Human beings.
Freeman: So-
Snyder: Domestic cats. Domestic cats have a lot to tell you, as I found out steadily. And dogs, of course. Talking to dogs that aren't your own dog when they come by and have a chat with them, and then they go on.
Freeman: It's one of my favorite things is to greet a dog. Most of them are up for it.
I wonder now if we could pause our conversation so I can bring on Peter Coyote to talk a little bit about Zen and your work. Peter, you've been in the audience. I think many of the people here listening have heard your voice before in one of the over 150 films you've been in, or the most recent, I think, might be you doing the voiceover for Buffalo, the Ken Burns special.
It's an honor to have you here. You came across Gary Snyder's work in the 1960s, and did it lead you to Zen?
Peter Coyote: Before that. I was born in 1941, and at that time, Jews were not yet white people. A lot of my relatives were communists and socialists. I watched the McCarthy period swathing through my community and grownups crying in my living room, and I had a lot of anger. I couldn't go around with my friends to the country club around the corner. That's the kind of thing a 10-year-old and 11-year-old thinks about.
By the time I was 12, I started reading the Beats, and they were the first grownups that gave me an armature to hang some of my thoughts and ideas around. They all seemed to be interested in Zen and Buddhism. They talked a lot about it. So I ran into Gary Snyder's name. Flash forward to California in the 1960s. I lived for a while with Lew Welch, who was an old friend of Gary's, who set up a meeting.
There was something about Gary that I couldn't quite fathom. But I knew that this guy, if anyone knew anything about Zen and living, it was him, and I resolved to learn from him. Growing up on a farm, I'm handy with tools, and so I started going up to his place in the Sierras. I got an idea of what a secular Zen life might look like, and I liked it. 50 years later, I'm an ordained priest and a transmitted teacher. Because of that, I've been handed the unenviable position of describing Buddhism's role in Gary's work, which is like talking to humans about oxygen.
I'm assuming that not everybody is a Buddhist, so I'm going to give a really quick primer, that Buddha discovered that everything in the universe was interconnected and interdependent. Because of that interdependence, you couldn't say that anything had a fixed and permanent self. That was a pretty radical thing to understand. If you look at your own being, you can't tell me what color your self is, where it's located, what shape it has.
There's a great freedom in that because what it means, and 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. The impermanence is actually where our freedom arises. If we had to fix self, we couldn't change. So Buddhist practice is also tied to an ethical system teaching us how to live in this interdependent world in a kindly, generous, non-stingy way, how to model our lives after the life of a Buddha. We do that by meditating and going deeply into the mind beyond the perimeters of the self to get some sense, some intuition of the vastness of the world out there. By repeated practice, we begin to dwell more and more permanently in that mind.
You learn a couple of things, which I always get from Gary's poems. One is that if we disregard the ego for a minute, what our nature is, is the nature of the universe. It's a vast pregnant energy that's constantly extruding itself as the multiple forms of the world. I think about standing on a cliff and looking at an ocean full of peaked little waves rising and falling, and each of those waves could stand for a named thing in the universe.
They come out of the formlessness of the ocean, and they assume shape for a while. And then they go back in the ocean. When they have a shape, we call them living. When they go back to the ocean, we say they're dead. But what those little waves forget and what we forget is that they've never, for an instant, not been part of the ocean. So it's not like oxygen and pollinating insects and water and sunlight are there to keep us alive. They are our life. Our life is inextricable from those things. So to begin to live in the world as comfortably as we live with the vagaries of the self and our envies and aggressions and all of that stuff, to begin to live in the world as one interdependent organism requires a lot of practice. The first step of it is to admit that you're not one of the good guys, that nature itself is half negative and half positive, and your human nature will encompass the potential to be any other human act. You can be Buddha. You can be Jesus. You can be Mother Teresa. You can be Hitler. You can be Donald Trump. If you don't know that, you're actually very dangerous.
If you come to the conclusion that you're one of the good guys, you wind up dropping bombs on hotels in Baghdad in the middle of the night because your leader doesn't like their leader. So one of the reasons we meditate and one of the reasons we practice mindfulness is to make sure that the shadow sides of our nature don't get past our teeth and don't excite our muscles. We call it a practice because we fumble over and over again.
Anyway, Gary's work is so imbued with those values that I actually can't extricate them. He's lived a life. He lived nine years in a Buddhist monastery. But he's lived a life continuing that examination, pushing past the egoic boundaries, looking at the relationships between animals, species, terrain, people, politics. A couple of the contributions that he made I think might be even more important than his poetry, although as an artist, that was the first contact I had with him and that's what I continue to revere.
One of the things I also learned from Gary was that for many, many centuries, Buddhism existed under the permission of the king or the emperor or the shogun. As such, it always had political compromises to make. It really didn't push or think too much about all the implications of freedom when it came to ideas and concepts that might upset the emperor. Here we are in the West, and we have this golden opportunity because for the first time we can look at Buddhism within the whole political context.
We can look at our politics through this prism of kindness, of generosity, of interdependence. What does it mean when Americans stand by and allow other Americans to be deprived of their constitutional rights and don't step forward on their behalf and demand of their government that their citizenship should guarantee them equal protections, equal access?
So these are the things that Gary and Robert Aiken, with engaged Buddhism, began to take on in the West. These are the particular paths that excited me. They seem consistent with the ethics of kindness and inclusion, if we remember that Buddha was the first to bring women into the practice. He brought Dalits into the practice. He didn't recognize caste and status. So I think that, as Buddhists, we're responsible to mimic that model.
As we go through life, the final of the Four Noble Truths is marga, is the path. On that path is where we model the life of a Buddha, and we do that by looking at our speech, our consciousness, our energy, our occupations deep in our inner nature, looking to intuit from our deep nature the correct way to be in the world. As we do that, we hope to develop and model a noble and dignified life, which is helpful to other people.
To me, that's what Gary has done in his life. That's what he's done in his art and the constant inclusion of overriding supposedly contradictory boundaries. I had to laugh. The miner is not separate from the love of wilderness. Cutting a trail is not separate from the love of wilderness. Drinking whiskey is not separate from being a Buddhist. The Dalai Lama has now been prescribed meat in his diet for his health.
So we live in a boundary-less world, and what organizes our activity has to be intuitions because we can never think our way through. Those intuitions need to be refreshed by constant meditation and constant plunging into our inner depths and remembering that everything has an equal standing. I may not like the fact that I'm made of the same stuff as Donald Trump, but he has equal standing to exist.
My task is to figure out some way to either protect the weak or understand what circumstances and uprisings he had. Maybe if my father was a Ku Klux Klan guy, I might be like Donald Trump. But we're both indelibly human. We both have a human role to play, and I trust Buddhism as a reliable map to discover it. I don't know. That's nine minutes. So I think maybe that's enough, and we'll hear what someone else has to say.
Freeman: Thank you so much, Peter. Permanence is where our freedom lies is a very liberating idea. I want to ask one question of Gary Snyder on the back of those nine minutes, which is, Gary, do you still meditate daily? And how has your practice changed in that way over time?
Snyder: It hasn't changed much. I must say the best part or the earliest part of a practice that brought me something was working on trails since I learned that you have to pay attention to what you're walking on, and nothing can be said to be in the way. So there you go.
Freeman: Thank you. We're going to bring on some poets now, Kim Shuck, who is the poet laureate of San Francisco and the author most recently of Deer Trails, Brenda Hillman, who is a poet and translator and author of 10 collections, also winner of the California Book Award, and Jack Shoemaker, who I think should be called an honorary poet because he's published so much poetry at this point, bookseller, publisher, founder of the North Point Press, which published in its original form The Practice of the Wild, as well as Counterpoint Press, as well as Shoemaker & Hoard, and the relaunched Counterpoint Press.
I think the best way to go back into this is to maybe read a poem since we've been hearing about going up trails. Brenda, do you want to read one?
Brenda Hillman: Yes. Sorry for my voice here. Hello, everyone. Welcome. So happy to be here. I'm going to read Riprap. I have a few words to say about it, and we'll talk about it.
Riprap. "Lay down these words before your mind like rocks. Placed solid by hands in choice of place, set before the body of the mind in space and time, solidity of bark, leaf, or wall, riprap of things, cobble of Milky Way, straying planets, these poems, people, lost ponies with dragging saddles and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional game of Go. Ants and pebbles in the thin loam, each rock a word, a creek-washed stone, granite ingrained with torment of fire and weight, crystal and sediment linked hot. All change, in thoughts, as well as things."
I have so much to say about this, but I'd love to hear. I don't know, John, if you want me to speak about it or-
Freeman: I'll come back to you in one second because I think that poem, it almost leads us into a state of meditation. I've been reading it every day, the last 30 days, and you can almost feel your body change as you read it and your mind slow down and contemplate the actual meanings of words. And, Jack Shoemaker, you published Gary Snyder over I think almost 50 years or close to it, and I wonder if you can tell us about the first time you heard that poem being read aloud, and whether that was your introduction to Gary or if it came in a different way.
Jack Shoemaker: Thank you, John. I'd love to. Can you hear me? Am I on?
Freeman: Yes.
Shoemaker: It's a cliche to say that books could change your life, but I'm the very embodiment of that deep truth. In a small town high school on the Central Coast of California, a young teacher suggested that I read Walden. I was being offered, I see now, some source of authority. Not long after that, I read Riprap by Gary Snyder, or more to the point, I heard Gary Snyder read Riprap at one of the first poetry readings I'd ever attended, in Isla Vista of all places. If memory serves, he led off with that poem.
That evening, Gary had the straight-ahead physical posture of an Olympic wrestler, legs spaced apart, shoulders aligned, an upright confrontational attitude with a blunt breath control that precisely mimicked his physical stance. It was a presentation of assurance and intention, and he enjoyed a mastery of silence I'd never experienced before in a performance.
The reading of that poem, Riprap, exactly described the action of the poem itself. I've never been able to read Gary on the page without recalling that voice. The poem in that incredible collection and the others he read that evening, especially A Berry Feast, began to assemble in my mind an agenda, a sort of devotion, and one that has guided me for 60 years. Riprap is a collection of poems about work and occupation, a mixture of common and exotic location, and yet it is all grounded in a common American speech that one might finally call Western. It is almost as if William Carlos Williams had grown up reading Chinese landscape poems while hiking and working in the Pacific Northwest. I quickly added Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Rexroth to the mix. And I had my poetics of the Pacific Edge, one that has occupied me ever since, but Gary Snyder was the key.
Freeman: Oh, Jack, thank you so much for that. It's so nice to hear you highlight the fact that these are poems of work and occupation. Before we go to Kim, I want to come back to you, Brenda, just what it means to write poetry sonically about work and if that means anything to you in the context of the tight syllabics and the beautifully controlled but open syntax of Riprap itself.
Hillman: Yes, I wanted to inscribe what Jack just said. Gary was my first ecological Western inspiration. And for so many people of my generation, I had a gigantic hippie crush on him, of course, like everybody. And mainly what he was inspiring so many of us with were his lines and his fidelity to fresh language. And 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 if they do exactly what he's describing and what Gary said earlier about putting a path down, it's ultimately a poem about writing and language as well as other forms of work and being in the world and so many uses of the monosyllable.
And I love the way he's very irregular with the punctuation. There are these sort of random periods and it's a creative collage of sounds. So I think all that we'll say this evening is so true. He is a massive culture hero and Buddhist and a spiritual leader and all of that, but we wouldn't be here if it weren't for his lines and just the way he puts things next to each other. So I'm not surprised, John, that you spent a lot of the week listening. I was listening to him read Riprap as I took my walks, and it was incredible.
Freeman: It is. And in the way that he uses language, mind work becomes similar to work that when we work, we often make sounds and we interact with inanimate objects sometimes. And in his Zen practice, he obviously respects the entire world is having value in and of itself, not just humans. Rocks have sentience almost in value as well. Kim, you've published a book called Deer Trails, and Gary was talking about how much he learned about poetry and life being on trails. I wonder if there's any thread here you want to pick up from something that Gary said or Jack and Brenda.
Kim Shuck: Well, my experience of Gary's work is probably different from a lot of the people here. My poetic tradition that I come from is prayer forms from Aniyunwiya culture, my father's culture. And it has to do with transformation, thinking about transformation kind of muddling around in the spectacular debris, that is what we think about. And one of the things I really love is that there's a sense of not just bringing the questions that we all have to things like logging trails and deer trails, but also listening to the answers and not getting too caught up in expectation of what those answers will be and what they mean. Sorry, my voice suddenly has decided to crap out. I don't know if it's Buddhism or whatever else, but that part of the responsibility of poetics is to listen and I find that in the work. So I always learn things from that.
Freeman: Kim, you're also a beadworker. And I wonder if the way that Gary uses words in this particular book, which is different than some of his other books of poems where he's trying to use a seemingly plain style with monosyllables, if the way that he's arranging words on the page mean anything to you in terms of your other craft as an artist, if it resonates.
Shuck: Well, in my master's thesis, I managed to excuse some of the way that I bead by evoking poetics because it's all an activity of assembling small pieces that may or may not have anything to do with one another. So yeah, to get to other answers.
Freeman: Jack, I have a question for you. After you began to read Gary's poems, as a publisher, you're supposed to be the sober person in the room getting the books out, but you also studied Zen Buddhism yourself, if I understand it correctly. And it also seemed to lead to a transformation. Did that change the way that you thought of publishing as a practice, as an ethic?
Shoemaker: That's a question I hadn't really thought of, but from the very beginning, I was publishing Gary and publishing Buddhist texts and some Christian texts, and it all seemed to have a peace to me. It seemed like I had this path to travel on, and Gary gave me so many ideas for what that path might contain or where it might lead in terms of book publications. Because of Gary, I met Wendell Berry, because of Wendell Berry, Wendell met Gary. So I had this confluence of opportunities and advice. But also, you have to remember in the 60s, it was a very small but extraordinarily lively scene. And I was able to go forward as a reader and finally as a book publisher on the advice of poets here, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, as well as Gary and Wendell. So it was a very lively scene that I found myself a part of or integrated with.
And one book, as they always say, one book leads to another, and I was working with these men now for all these years. We're still working together. Gary Wendell and I probably have four or five books in the pipeline each of things that we want to do and want to see out. So it's been a continuous education for me, an incredible opportunity that these men trusted me to publish their books without me having any credential. I was a high school student, I was a kid, and I simply had the idea that this was possible and why not do it? And no one told me that I couldn't, so I did. I remember the first year of North Point's existence in 1980, we showed our books at the Book Sellers Association in Chicago, the annual meeting, and the then-director of Yale University Press came over to our booth. We had two books on the table in front of us, and she said, "Thank God you don't know you can't do this anymore." And I thought, "Well, thank God."
Freeman: I'm going to bring in a comment from the audience, someone named Bill Corcoran who says, "Well, these are poems of work and occupation. I see a deep continuous thread throughout Gary Snyder's poetry and prose and Buddhist practice, which is the uncovering of kinship." And I really love that idea because we're going to be talking about The Practice of the Wild in a little bit.
And after this, shortly, very soon, this group of poets will trade for another group of poets. And you can see in this Zoom already, there's 12 other people. And I'll relay a fact from Jack Shoemaker's biography, which is that Gary Snyder also helped him choose the books in his early bookstores in California, which is yet another way that he sort of enriched the lives of others. Brenda, do you want to say anything about kinship and poetics in Gary's work or in ways that his work led you to other poets?
Hillman: Well, that's such an interesting question. I do think of kinship as we're speaking of it in the largest sense for Gary. And in fact, I was taking it back to language again, which the main thing for me really is Gary's language. And I think about the kinships that he brings, and I think we'll talk about it probably in The Practice of the Wild session, but just the kinships that he brings in the etymologies of the words themselves. And he shows that development of how a word comes out through an ancient thread of Sanskrit into what our common usages are and how language is such a living thing for Gary.
And it seems so simple and plain, but it is so memorable and so unforgettable when you hear his lines. And in part because I think he lingers over the meanings of the words and their context and their relationships to each other. So, that's the first thing about kinship that comes to me, and of course, what Peter was talking about in his talk about interrelationship with other beings and the land itself. Anyway, I'm hoping we'll have time to read one more poem before the break because I would love the audience to hear just the Sourdough Mountain poem, which starts the-
Freeman: I adore that poem. Kim, do you want to read it or do you want to read it, Brenda?
Hillman: Well, Kim, do you have it in front of you?
Shuck: I have the book. Why don't you read it, Brenda? I'm enjoying hearing you. This is the master class for me.
Hillman: I was enjoying hearing you. Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout. Down valley a smoke haze. Three days heat, after five days rain. Pitch glows on the fir-cones. Across rocks and meadows. Swarms of new flies. I cannot remember things I once read. A few friends, but they are in cities. Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup. Looking down for miles. Through high still air. Whoa. Excuse me, how he manages to make it so fresh that it lasts for-
Freeman:Yeah. For anyone who's listening, there's someone who's put a whole essay in the chat about that particular poem. I agree. You could study that poem for years. Unfortunately. We're out of time for this group for now. So I'm going to ask Brenda and Kim and Jack, thank you for your contributions. And I'd now like to bring on Jane Hirshfield, Robert Hass, Rick Bass, and Wang Ping.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of The Asking: New and Selected Poems. Robert Hass, a poet translator, teacher, former poet laureate, is the Pulitzer National Book Award prize-winning poet of many books including Summer Snow. Rick Bass, the writer, essayist, and activist, is the author of many books, including most recently, With Every Great Breath: New and Selected Essays. And Wang Ping is the poet, photographer, multimedia artist, and retired Macalester Professor, congratulations on that stage of your life. Her latest book is My Name is Immigrant. I would like to start with you, Jane. Hearing Peter Coyote talk about Zen, hearing Gary talk about some of the backgrounds for those poems, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about what it means for Zen to influence the way we use language, the way we tell poetry, the way we live.
Hirshfield: Of course. And I'll begin just by saying what an honor it is to be part of this conversation and this celebration of Gary's starting point, and then the prose midpoint. For me, I'm a little bit younger than Peter and Jack who read Gary from the very beginning. I discovered him when I was I think 18, 19 years old. He came to my college, he gave a reading in the coffee shop, but he also gave an East Asian studies coffee hour talk about the Yamabushi mountain monks. And it was the first time that I had seen an American practitioner of Zen in person. I knew my Buddhism. What I knew of it was from reading ancient Chinese and Japanese poems. And I think Gary's particular gift to the language, to the culture, and to the understanding of the great many of us who ended up one way or another coming to Buddhist practice and coming to a poetics of interconnection, a great deal of that had to do with the way that he opened a gate of the possible in his language, in his body, in his example of being.
So Riprap is organized as it was published with the Cold Mountain Poems at the end. It is a kind of dialogue of two ways of speaking of Zen. First, we have Gary's voice, and I think the organization of the book is really interesting to look at, but I won't detour into that. And then we have the voice of the long-ago mountain hermit monk speaking with equal humor and with equal groundedness in their own actual lives. But for an American, what Gary's work in particular brought was the sense of Buddhism, not only in the high granite aspects of understanding, transience of understanding, interconnection of understanding, tender-hearted compassion, which will arise if you feel your life inseparable from other lives, if you don't define yourself as special or different from everything that we touch intimately and distantly.
And here we have these poems, not of high granite, forgive me if you don't like this, Gary, I'm not sure, but of melange. So of the labor of trail building, the labor of working on freighters, the joy of eating food, the animal lives, the sympathy for horses that Gary himself mentioned, and especially also the diction of a kind of poem that had not existed before. So I love that Gary chose to read his poem with Milton because that is such an example of unexpected melange. We expect a reference to... When he says 10,000 years, we hear the echo of the classical Chinese poets and worldview, but when he brings in, right from the beginning of his work, Milton, we understand that this is a poet of West and of East, of non-separation, of understanding world culture as fully each person's own to draw from the indigenous cultures, the labor, the classical traditions of both East and Western literary traditions.
So all of that, for me, was a gate-opening thing to discover at 20. I had no idea when I heard Gary that two years later I would be driving down the road to my own monastic years of Zen practice. I didn't even know when I heard him that a monastery existed in America. But I think if I had not seen and heard his huge affection for the world and his inhabitants as a living American hippie with a ponytail and an earring, I would not have known that this was accessible to me as a person or as a poet. And I've talked long enough, so onto the next.
Freeman: Oh, thank you so much, Jane. I wonder, Robert Hass, if I could ask you to come on and talk a little bit more because you've done some translating yourself. You once said that you became a poet, not a novelist, because you read Gary Snyder and it seemed like the action was in the poetry, not in the novel writing world.
But since we've been talking around the way that the juxtaposition of the Han-shan poems in the second half of this book and the mountain-going, seafaring, trout-eating, Berkeley life-living poems of the first half, was that a new kind of juxtaposition in American poetry, or was it something that was being reignited?
Robert Hass: That's an interesting question, and I'm not sure I know the answer or that two people who started reading at that time would have the same or different answers. There's an early poem of Robinson Jeffers that rejects what he thought of as Eastern ways of thinking. It's a poem saying the ocean in the brain is only the brain's ocean out there as the oceans. That was the hard-ass California nature aesthetic. And I'm not sure that I had any clue to the kind of intricate thinking that happens in Practice of the Wild, for example, about how one thinks about the idea of nature in Western poetry and the idea of nature that was implied by Gary's work with Han-shan.
I have to say that during this period, at some point when I came to Berkeley to teach, I got to meet Ed Schafer, the great Tang dynasty scholar who was Gary's teacher. And I sat in whose class, I think, or just after Gary did the Han-shan poems, which by then Jack Kerouac, having published his novel based on his hiking with Gary, The Dharma Bums, became the idea that you should walk around with a copy of either a book of Bashō or a book of Du Fu or Han-shan in your pocket kind of became standard behavior for people on the beat hippie cusp. So I got to ask Ed Schafer, I said, "You were Gary Snyder's teacher?" And he said, "Yes, he was much better than average intermediate student of classical Chinese." And I said, "What about the Han-shan translations?" Anyway, he said, "Amazing, but he had no notion that they had become the secret tea of a whole generation."
Freeman: Gary Snyder has written himself about moving away from looking at nature as if it's this other thing or the idea of beautifying from a distance and of reflection. And I think his style of writing into the natural world is really revolutionary still now. And as the author of Meditation at Lagunitas, which is one of the most amazingly beautifully placed poems of also the last 50 years, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how Snyder's poetics place us in California, in the West, and perhaps in ways that are different than had been done until then.
Hass: Yeah. Well, it begins with Riprap, of course, which came to us. And those poems that came to us partly from Donald Allen's anthology, which appeared around that time of the New American Poetry, the sense that there's a lot of new kinds of energy going on. And there were one or two other poets, the late poems of Theodore Roethke, for example, and the poems of Denise Levertov that came into the same territory. Hard to convey to the young poets just starting now how disreputable Gary's poetic seemed just at that moment, and also the layers of things that were going on in contemporary poetry that he brought together in poems that seemed totally simple.
My experience is somewhere between Peter's, Jane's and Jack's that just hearing those lines, I was in graduate school. Because I liked to read, I thought I wanted to be a writer. I didn't know how or what kind, and then I saw a down valley a smoke haze, three days heat, after five days of rain, pitch glows on the fir. And I thought, "Yeah, that's what I want. Life is what I want. And this sounds like life." It sounded to me with my 1950s, 60s education, not unfamiliar because of William Carlos Williams and also because of Ezra Pound, and in fact, the jump in Gary's work in that time from Riprap through the Cold Mountain poem in which he assimilated both the Taoist and Buddhist sensibility to what I thought was the wild time. It's another thing to say among all the confusing thoughts I'm having about this, that at the time because of the stuff of the beat generation, these poems on the one hand seemed like the poems of a wild guy of this wild new generation who were for Peter, Coyote and me, probably older brothers and sisters were the ones of the beat era down there.
That Gary's poetry. Gary was supposed to be a beat poet and therefore he was supposed to be a wild man. And here's this beautifully disciplined guy with an amazing ear writing poems that sounded like nothing that was being written at the time. And lines, "A hawk drifts into the far sky, a Marmot whistles across huge rocks, rain on the California hills, mussels clamped to sea boulders, sucking the spring tides."
It was all the East Coast poets were busy writing about having a nervous breakdown and Snyder was animating the whole world and making it seem suddenly totally alive. And without my knowing it, layering... I remember finding my way into the basement of city lights then to a journal that Lawrence Ferlinghetti published called Journal for the Protection of All Beings.
I think Gary was in Japan at this time, and what was happening in this country was the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. There were terrific stuff going on and in the midst of it here is this essay called Buddhist Anarchism by the guy who had written Down valley a smoke haze. And it meant layering Buddhist sensibility, the connection between Taoism and ecology.
Nobody was making those connections. The anarchist and socialist sensibility of the Wobblies and the Labor movement in the Pacific Northwest his study. And that was what happens in the berry feast and then in myths and text, the influence of Ezra Pound, I think. And the whole modernist effort to reinvent something like the mythologies of classical Greece and Roman poetry as poetry connected to the primitive.
Gary was also, as everyone knows, studying Northwest Native American mythologies for his undergraduate thesis. The stuff he was drawing together at a time when the economic boom of the 1950s was causing clear-cutting of Western forests was quite amazing. And so, for a bunch of us, I think for Jack, Peter, Jane, he was a curriculum as much as anything, and the surprise when Wallace Stegner was the one person at Stanford, who was connected to my thinking about environmental thinking and literature. And he had asked me, well, because the political poetic atmosphere at my graduate school was pretty conservative. He said, "Who would you like to hear read?" And I said, "Gary Snyder," and he invited Gary Snyder.
I also noticed, first thing I noticed about Gary was that he's wearing an earring. Oh my God, he's wearing earrings. Probably turquoise, it looks like earring. And he came, the legendary, already famous Gary Snyder, and you realize that he was this incredibly intellectually disciplined human being who'd mastered a whole bunch of disciplines, ecology, forest ecology. He's thinking about Buddhism. He's been, he's not just talked about it. He went and did it. And for me, all of this was not reducible to, but funneled into just the absolute sureness and gorgeousness of the music of his poems.
Freeman: Wow. I mean, we could transcribe that and make it into an essay. Robert Hass, I'm so grateful for you coming on. I want to take a bridge from some of what you've just said to a comment that Carol Deschamps says. She says, "I'm a resident of Bolinas. Gary offered a point raise reading with a twist in perception regarding our West Coast, suggesting that in fact, we live on the eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean. What more could be true?" And I want to use this as a bridge to talk to you, Wang Ping, you've just translated, I believe some of Gary's poems into Chinese. And as a Chinese speaker as well as writer, I think you could talk a little bit about the way that the Hanshan poems are interacting with the poems he himself is writing in English.
Wang Ping: Right. Well, thank you first of all. I have been translating Gary's poems into Chinese since the pandemic started. Everything seems pretty smooth until I came upon Riprap. This poem, every time I read it seems I'm home, but at the same time, when I try to translate it, it seems too much at home at first because the words are so simple and so naked. And the Chinese poetics, you need something more beautiful.
And so I translate it, put it down, translate, put it down. I said, "How can I make it more poetic, more beautiful?" At the same time, I knew I cannot try to change it otherwise it's no longer Riprap. It's no longer Gary Snyder. Then two years ago, I think, yeah, two years ago, a year and a half ago I was with Gary. I asked him, I told Gary this problem I'm having translating Riprap.
Then he immediately went to his house. It's four books right. At the bottom he tried to pull out those gigantic dictionaries to find the word riprap. And he was having a hard time finding, looking, seeking that word. Those dictionaries were pretty heavy, and Gary had shoulder issues. He was moaning, groaning, trying to carry the big books, dictionaries to the table to show me. And then Kai was not happy. He said, "Gary, you should not carry these books."
The father and son was having a little argument. And I started laughing. And then Gary finally found the book with a looking glass, and he was just so ecstatic when he found this book and he started telling me what it means. Suddenly, the Confucius word, Confucius who anthologized the first Chinese poetry anthology called Shijing, the Poetry Bible, his first word is, which is straighten the word.
Then to suddenly I realized the Riprap, adding what Gary told us the meaning of the riprap, but riprap from the dictionary I also saw that it's like just laying out those rocks on the shore without cementing it, with cement, without solidifying. To let the rocks do the work to protect the shore from being eroded by water. Immediately I thought about when we build buildings, tall buildings in the earthquake zone, we have to let loose. We cannot solidify the buildings, to enforce the buildings with too much cement. Or just basically to make room to let the building deal with the force coming forth. And immediately, I just started laughing. I said, "I found the key how to translate this poem." That is, it explained why I felt so close to Riprap is because it is embedded in Chinese politics that use the bare words.
The language wants to cover the essence, the fire, the true spirit of each word with a lot of declaration, and then make it grimy and make it cliche. And the poetry, actually the job of poets is to shine. Each word is like a rock. We use our hands to move it while we're moving it and bring the rocks to the shore or to make the walls that can compact the earthquakes is like cleaning the words, like cleaning up the rocks, cleaning up the words to make a poem.
And so that's why I felt like that's the key. This poem is the key to teach us how the universe, how the cosmos is created, how a poem is created. Life is there with earthquakes, with the treasures. It's really up to us to do we want to make a burned out misery of pizza? Or we make our own pizza with a touch of surprise, which is also a full dimension game of gold. All the materials, raw materials is there.
And Gary already showed us how to make a delicious pizza as a full dimension game of gold. After I laughed, I went back to the tatami room and finished the translation, which is just published in the Mongolian Poetry magazine and people just loved it. I'll read a little bit of this Chinese version. Thank you.
Freeman: Thank you so much, Wang Ping. I want to tell you and everyone who's not watching the chat that the Japanese translator of Riprap is also watching. And she's said that Gary has had a great influence on Japanese poets as well, and thanks you for a wonderful event.
Several other people have pointed out that your definition of riprap is also used where they're from. I want to bring back Gary as we move to Rick Bass, if Gary is still there. Rick, I know that you and Gary have known each other for a very long time, and we've talked a lot about Gary's influence on poetics and on people's attitudes towards Zen. But I wonder if you can talk about your life as a essayist, as an advocate for forests in Montana, how Gary has influenced you and how your friendship has influenced you as much as his work.
Snyder: Who?
Freeman: I'm talking about Rick Bass.
Snyder: Who did he say? Oh, Rick Bass. Yeah. What's the question?
Freeman: I'm asking, Rick, how much your friendship has influenced his attitudes about ecology and preservation?
Snyder: Ask him. Well, does it?
Rick Bass: Thanks, John and Gary and all of the panelists. What an amazing what gateway as I knew it would be. Let's see, Nick. Brenda, your reading of Riprap was so perfect and wonderful. I mean, you could feel the words each individual word being picked up like a rock and heavy and then set down in one place where it had to go.
And Wang Ping, likewise, yours were, it was really wonderful to hear that difference. I could feel your hands pushing little rocks into place on that trail. And I want to thank Tom Lyon for asking me to read, Hay for the Horses in Utah state, a long time ago when I was there to play football and skiing, not to read poetry. He didn't even say who wrote the poem. He just said, "Read this. It's a lovely poem." I did not know I'd leave Utah and end up in Montana living in the forest among loggers who thought I was trying to put them out of work by being a tree hugger.
And Gary, yeah, you've been an incredible mentor for me in that conversation. I want to say struggle, but it is a conversation. And like when Barry says, "The people who know the most about trees are often the ones who cut them down and look at their insides and see where are the growth rings compensating for darkness, for life, or nutrients for moisture, for shade, for competition."
And I think of... I mean, when I went to see you the first time your chainsaw was in your bathroom. I just loved that you... It was like a holy relic. You were just taking really good care of it there, keeping it safe and warm and working on it. Yeah, it's been a great model for me to engage with people that you see as the opposition, who are the opposition, but to understand what they do and where they're coming from and how they do it.
Snyder: Well, I got into that world when I was still a teenager, and the workers in the woods up in the Pacific Northwest had their chainsaws and they fell some pretty big trees, but they also knew exactly what they were doing. They knew what was wrong about it, and they could give a very useful and precise description of what better forestry would do.
And they were on very good terms with the professional forest service people that came in who were much younger and inexperienced, but who could learn from the loggers themselves how to go about it. That was one of the first things that I learned was that it's not that you're in the woods, it's that you really are in the woods. And that's where you belong when you're doing that.
And we can translate our life with the forests into something else, which is going on right now. And why? Because most of the working loggers in the West were leftists. A lot of them were actually Marxists. They were labor union people. My father, one of them. And they could talk quite intelligently about the economies of industry, agriculture and the West. And they knew exactly what was going on, and they also knew that it would come to an end. And that is what we are witnessing and experiencing right now in terms of the forestry of the far west. What I say about the woods is you have to be in the woods, then you can do it.
Freeman: Someone in the audience has pointed out that when the US Forestry Service was planning the Tahoe National Forest, that Gary, you stood up at a public meeting in 1986 and said that they should plan for the next thousand years, not the next 15 years. I wonder, Gary, at this point, if you might want to say something about the Practice of the Wild, the other book that we've read for the book club.
Snyder: You know what? It is really a book about practice. It's hard to talk about it without going really into it. And the definitions and meanings and practices that I came to, but some of them were in the family that I grew up in. Namely be affectionate to your tools. Take good care of your car, take good care of your truck, keep your tools sharp.
And that was both my father and my mother's way of seeing it and looking at it. And I absorbed that from childhood and learned how to sharpen an ax probably when I was about 10. And to do that without cutting myself. If you are a working class person and you came up through the working class in some parts of the United States at any rate, it was a whole education, which included politics and economics as well.
Freeman: As you've been speaking, Gary, someone in the audience has been texting various lines from forestry work, including "Keep those gunning marks aimed at your fall line." And his name is Eric Brugge. He also said, "Keep that bar oil flowing, dog teeth sharp."
Snyder: Good.
Freeman: It's nice to know there are literary people with tools out there too. At this point, I think because we're running a tiny bit behind time, I am grateful to everyone's patience. I'd like to bring on the second panel to talk about The Practice of the Wild. That includes Robert Hass will be coming back to read a brief excerpt.
Will Hearst, who is the publisher of Alta magazine, you might know him on the West Coast as the former publisher of the San Francisco examiner and the one-time managing editor of Outside Magazine. He's also the chairman of Hearst Publications.
Jack Shoemaker, who will be coming back as the publisher of Counterpoint. And Kim. Sorry, sorry, I got this wrong. It's Robert Hass, Will Hearst, Jane Hirshfield and Peter Coyote. Bob, do you want to read something from the book?
Hass: Yeah, I could pick this up almost anywhere to read. But one place to start is near the middle in an essay or in a subdivision of an essay called The World is Watching, which goes on to propose that one of the ways that we're deeply interconnected is that we eat each other. And that's why everything is watching everything.
"The world is watching. One cannot walk through a meadow or force without a ripple of report spreading out from one's passage. The thrush darts back, the jay squalls, a beetle scuttles under the grasses, and the signal is passed along. Every creature knows when a hawk is cruising or human strolling, the information passed through the system is intelligence. In Hindu and Buddhist iconography an animal trace is registered on the images of the deities or Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of discriminating wisdom rides a lion. Samantabhahabra, the Bodhisattva of kindness rides an elephant. Sarasvati, the goddess of music and learning rides a peacock. Shiva relaxes in the company of a snake and a bull. Somewhere tiny animals in their crowns or hair.
In this ecumenical spirit, in this ecumenical spiritual ecology, it is suggested that the other animals occupy spiritual as well as thermodynamic niches. Whether or not their consciousness is identical with that of humans is a moot point. Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged?"
Freeman: Oh, I'm so glad that you chose that particular section because I think it gets to the heart of the way that Gary Snyder's ideas, his beliefs in Buddhism lead to connections with how we treat the wild and the other living beings that occupy that space. And as Peter Coyote was saying much earlier, what that means ethically, what that means for our engagement, what that means for how we treat people and our ideas of equality.
I want to ask a question now of Will Hearst. Will, you've known Gary for a very long time. You were at Outside Magazine in the '70s. Bob has talked a little bit about how the poems landed in the 1950s with Gary seeming to be this kind of wild man. When these sorts of essays were first being published, were they revolutionizing the way that people wrote about the outside in the 1970s? And what did that feel like as a reader when you were reading it the first time?
Will Hearst: Yeah, I think I first met Gary because we had an op-ed idea at the newspaper to try and diversify something beyond letters to the editor and the editorial page. And I called up Gary cold, and I said, "Could you write something about the environment?" And he wrote an essay that became part of his book, but I thought there was something very different in his voice. Because he was talking about the planet and the environment, but 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, you should know your immediate environment." That was a very original point of view.
Then I met Gary a second time, as a legendary figure in the Jack Kerouac novel, the Dharma Bums. And I was trying to reconcile these two Garys in my mind, this very down-to-Earth original writer that you could just talk to, and then this other legendary figure. I was talking to Jim Harrison and I said, "Maybe we should do a profile of Gary. We should make a movie about Gary, a New Yorker profile, but in the form of a movie." And I had this idea, and I kept pitching Jim about it. He said, "Are you going to keep talking about this thing or are you going to do something?" And I said, "Well, I don't know if Gary wants to." He said, "I'll call him and I'll be the John Freeman of the movie."
We made this movie a couple of years ago, and it was another chance to meet Gary as a human being, as an individual. And the movie, I put it on Vimeo so anyone can watch it. There's no charge to watch it. But one of the things that, I re-watched the movie a couple of nights ago, and there's two things that when you make a movie, you're just trying to think, am I going to engage the audience? People are going to watch it? And you're very busy making it.
And then for the last couple of days, I started watching it and I realized there were several components of this movie that really hit me. One of them was a dinner table conversation where Gary was trying to define the terms that he was using. And he said, "When I use the word nature, I mean everything in the world that exists. That's nature. And when I use the word wild, I mean the parts of the world where human beings are not in charge. That's wild. That's the way I use these words and that set of definitions has invaded my brain. I cloned Gary's vocabulary for that.
There was another section in the movie where Jim Harrison was talking about writing poetry and building trails, and Gary said, "Well, I looked at writing a poem like building a trail. I'm putting these rocks down, that are these very simple objects, but I'm building a trail out of rocks. And when I'm building a poem, I want to use very simple words. I don't want to use highfalutin language, but I'm just going to use this sequence of words and I'm going to make a trail. I'm going to make a thought trail." And so those were two things in the movie that really, I just can't get them out of my brain. It's the Gary in my brain.
I'll tell you one other thing that I hope Gary will forgive me for telling this story, but in the movie, Jim Harrison asked... Gary's wife had died relatively recently from the time we made the movie, and Jim asked him about it, and Gary said, "I don't really want to talk about that. There's just parts of life that are so intense experiences that I'm just going to decline to amplify it. But I needed time. What happened to me..." Gary was saying, "What happened to me was, I needed time in my life to just absorb the meaning of life and death and what this meant to me." And so that's what the movie says. But then a couple of months later, I went to visit Gary at Kitkitdizzi, and he said to me, "I want to show you where I lived and where my wife... This is the room that we were in," and I just thought, "Oh, this is an amazingly..." I don't know. It's not in the movie.
The movie, he talks about the sensitivity of it, but I realized, as a human being, he had tried to process this. And maybe that's Buddhism, maybe that's something else, but it made me think of him as an extraordinarily rounded person that was not the legendary Jack Kerouac figure, was not just the professional writer. He was a real human being, and that's the Gary I know. And it's been summarized by so many of you this evening, other fractions, what Peter said, and what Robert said, and what his friends have said. But yeah, I'm very glad to be here. I feel like he's just one of the most interesting people I've ever met.
Freeman: Oh, thank you so much, Will. I want to ask Peter a question on the back of some of the things you just said, and it amplifies something that Jane Hirshfield said much earlier, which is that Gary is often bearing down upon words, or maybe it was Brenda, finding their old etymologies. He especially does that in the essays and Practice of the Wild, and he's leading us to reconsider what the actual meaning of cultivate is, what the meaning of wild is, what the meaning of nature is. And by redefining these terms with enlarged meanings, it makes it possible to think of ourselves in a much wider frame, in a much longer timeframe.
It occurs to me, from your description, Peter, that this is an inherently Buddhist practice of... But he's applying it towards language itself. Is there anything you could say about that, in the context of these essays, that the way that he's looking at words, and breaking them down, and opening up spaces, is that similar to the thought practices that one enters in meditation?
Coyote: I'm simply not sure. So what I wanted to talk about, which I'll do since I have the microphone, I wanted to talk-
Freeman: Talk about whatever you want.
Coyote: I want to tell one quick story which bore on Gary's talking about the woods, and the ethics of people who have to work in the woods and cut down trees that they revere and love. And we had a mutual friend named Peter Blue Cloud who was a Mohawk poet, and high iron worker, and a painter. And when I'd go see Gary, I'd go to see Peter and we'd sing cowboy songs together. And one day we'd had a few beers and he said to me, "Are you pissed at me because I work in the woods and I cut down trees?" And I said, "No, I guess you have to." And he said, "Yes, I have to." He said, "I have a mortgage, I have bills to pay, I have a family and this is my skillset. But let me tell you what I do." He said, "The mill owners push me to drop these big trees too fast and when you drop them, they explode. And I just slow down, and I make a bed of the branches. I make a cushion for those trees to fall on so they don't blow up."
I was impressed by that. I thought, "Okay, here's a guy who's caught in the jaws of the world, caught in the pressures of capitalism. He has a job to do. He has a family to take care of, but he would take the time to express his reverence for these trees by cutting limbs and making a padded place for the trees to fall." And that seems like the divided life that we all have to lead, to some degree. We're using electricity, we're using cars, we're using all this stuff. There's no pure place outside of all of it to stand. But in the midst of all this high-minded speech, I wanted to read one little quote.
It's about my favorite quote of Gary's. It's from Etiquette of Freedom, and it's true Gary is high-minded. Gary introduced me to Buddhism. Gary's taught me, given me most of the tools for everything I've done since we met, but I haven't heard a lot of talk about how much fun he is. Just plain, foolish fun. And so from the Etiquette of Freedom, here's this quote, "And when the children are safe in bed at one of the great holidays like the 4th of July, New Year's or Halloween, we can bring out some spirits and turn on the music, and the men and the women who are still among the living can get loose and really wild. So that's the final meaning of wild, the esoteric meaning, the deepest and most scary. Those who are ready for it will come to it. Please do not repeat this to the uninitiated."
Freeman: Oh, I love that. There is a lot in his work about sex, about love, about dancing.
Coyote: Yeah. Yeah. He is an old mountain goat.
Freeman: Jane, do you want to say anything about his sense of fun, play, tricksterism, in his work?
Hirshfield: Well, I'll say one brief thing about that and then I'll be like Peter and say something else that I was thinking about. So for the fun, I mentioned earlier when I was talking about the poems in Riprap, the comedy of some of them, the Thin Ice poem. He has the sense of the comic from the beginning, the sense of trickster from the beginning, and this is a sign of basic humility. If you can see the humor of the world and you can see the humor of your life, you cannot be arrogant. You cannot be ego-centered because to be able to laugh, and to sing, and dance, and love to drink, and love to all those other things, that is the sign of somebody who is not only interested in power. Gary, one of his fundamental qualities is curiosity. To this day, I saw him a couple of weeks ago at Kitkitdizzi and he remains investigatory of the world. He's still asking questions. And if you ask questions rather than only make declarations, then you are a human being because that is so close to our nature.
The other thing that I wanted to bring in was, well, there were many things I wanted to bring in. A couple of the quotes that have come to mind is Gary saying, and I'm not sure it's in this book, it's from somewhere, "Poetry is very high-quality information." And I think that is both funny and profoundly true. The definition of the wild that I remember him saying when I was invited to teach with him during the Art of the Wild conferences, was he said, "Well, human beings, we're still a wild species because we mate freely."
That's a great definition of the wild, rather than the domesticated. And in the section in Practice of the Wild on culture, he says, "Don't think of culture as being a word that means elite. A cultured person, it doesn't mean elite. Think of it in the terms of cultivation and agriculture in the natural world, she is well fertilized." That's pretty funny. But this non-distinction between our human activities, of logging, of mining and the rest of existence, this is the continuity between the mole and the miner. We are a wild being, doing what we do and recognizing that, I think, is so close to the deep ethos and ethics of what Gary has brought us all to.
I wanted to give you a couple more of his words because there's something distinctive, which also hasn't been named, along with the other, sometimes under-recognized things, the craftsmanship of the poems, the alliteration, the sound, the music, the distinctiveness of his music, the comedy, the love of life, the joy. I wanted to bring in how he always looks at things from unexpected directions and this is part of what makes him such a good teacher. So the very last section of The Practice of the Wild is the section called Grace, which is talking both about literally saying grace when you eat, recognizing the sacredness of our participation in the world where one being eats another.
So I'm going to read you a little tiny section of that, "There's a verse chanted by Zen Buddhists called the Four Great Vows. The first line goes, 'Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.' It's a bit daunting to announce this intention aloud to the universe daily. Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them. This vow stalked me for several years and finally pounced. I realized that I had vowed to let the sentient beings save me. In a similar way, the precept against taking life, against causing harm, doesn't stop in the negative. It is urging us to give life, to undo harm." And then skipping ahead a little bit, "Eating is a sacrament. The grace we say clears our hearts, and guides the children, and welcomes the guest all at the same time. We look at eggs, apples, and stew, they are evidence of plenitude excess, a great reproductive exuberance." There's the joy, Peter was talking about, "Millions of grains," and on and on it goes.
I wanted to comment again because books are structured things, they are not accidental. And that this book ends by speaking about grace feels to me attuned to my own understanding of what reply can we make to the world's suffering, in which we are participants, which we see all around us ever increasingly. The destruction of the planet's biosphere that Gary wrote about in a book that comes out in 1990, Rachel Carson wrote about in 1949, we have always known what we need to know now. It's almost 35 years later and here we are immersed in... At least now more people are noticing the suffering. But there are two answers to suffering. One, as Gary says, the undoing of harm, and the other as this book enacts and demonstrates, the recognition of grace, the praise of the great beauty, and plenitude, and joy of the world. And that is part of the antidote to despair that I find in Gary's work, and that he taught us all so long ago, and continuing now.
Freeman: Oh, thank you, Jane. Since you mentioned grace, I feel like we're nearing the end of this very beautiful meal of time together, and I want to invite Wang Ping, and Kim, and Rick Bass, and Jack Shoemaker, and Brenda back, and Gary too, if you're still there, just so that we can all be on the same screen together. And I've been guiding the chat up until this point.
But there was, I don't want to turn you, Gary, into a human jukebox where poems are called out. That was for many years ago, but there wasn't a question from the audience about what is everybody's favorite Gary Snyder poem? And I think maybe I should ask you first, Gary. Is there a poem of yours, that you wrote, that feels as close to what you wanted to do as it ever got?
Snyder: Not really because eight or 10 of those poems each have their own place. And so it's a matter of the right place, the right poem for the right place. But I don't think that I have one single poem that I would say covers it all.
Freeman: Someone has just called out Changing Diapers, and because you use the simile of baby toes like peas.
Snyder: Well those are very nice.
Freeman: The Bath.
Snyder: Nothing wrong with that.
Freeman: And someone else is calling out Axe Handles. Wang Ping, you've known Gary a very long time. Is there anything you would like to ask of him before we close out tonight?
Ping: So Gary, I'm ready to make a film out of your Riprap. And so I've been thinking really hard about poetics, the entanglement, the riprap, all those rocks and the words you use, and then our brain. How our brain runs so similar to all the stars and the constellation. Yeah, so if you have any advice on how to make this film on your Riprap successful, I would love to start from there. Sorry, it's been taking... I promised you to make this film last year, but I've been really busy racing around the world, but I'm ready.
Snyder: Well, I'm happy to hear that and I am not entirely sure I can be really helpful to you because I think in different situations, I think different situations and different tools. But I would be quite happy to work with you if you want to try and make it all match.
Ping: Yes.
Snyder: Yeah.
Ping: Okay. Yeah.
Snyder: And it's for Chinese, right?
Ping: Yeah. No, this will be both English and Chinese. By the way, the Chinese anthology is almost done, and I'm going to print it out and send it to you.
Snyder: Okay.
Ping: Yeah. So we'll talk.
Snyder: Yeah, I like your Chinese.
Ping: Okay.
Snyder: Yeah.
Ping: I like your English, and Chinese too. You still remember those Chinese, right?
Snyder: Yeah.
Ping: By the way, I really, really enjoy translating your Han Shan poem, your translation of Han Shan poem. Translating them back into Chinese is quite a. And the Mongolia Poets editor, she loved them.
Snyder: Oh, gosh.
Ping: I know, she really enjoyed reading those translation of translation. So it's quite a circling, coming round and round, coming back, homecoming.
Snyder: Okay.
Ping: Yeah. So...
Freeman: There's a lot of circles here. Someone in the audience began reading your poems 50 years ago at Reed College. Since we're talking about films, Will, is there anything that you would like to ask Gary while we're all together?
Hearst: Sure. What are you working on next?
Snyder: Oh, my goodness. I'm working on a project that's really a little bit too big, but maybe I can do something with it. We talk about spirit, about all of the life and spirit of nature, on all sides in every parts of the planet, and we never quite get them all together. And I'm trying to imagine a way to talk about the spiritual powers and complexities of the entire natural system that we are surrounded by. And if I can find a way to do that, it will be very, very nice to make.
Coyote: Nothing too ambitious, Gary. Nothing too ambitious.
Snyder: That's what I think, too.
Ping: Yes.
Freeman: I want to ask Jack Shoemaker if he has any advice here, as a longtime editor/publisher?
Shoemaker: Advice, I think Gary probably needs a nap. Not much advice at this stage, but I would sure love to have him or somebody read Axe Handles. That seems to me a poem to summarizes a lot of what we've talked about this evening. Do you feel like-
Freeman: Does anybody have the Axe Handles handy in front of them? Gary, do you have it nearby?
Snyder: Oh, you mean just that one poem?
Shoemaker: Just that one.
Freeman: Yeah.
Snyder: Maybe, which book is it in?
Hass: Axe Handles.
Shoemaker: It's called Axe Handles.
Coyote: I have it.
Hillman: It's on the internet.
Coyote: You want me to read it or, Gary, you going to read it?
Snyder: What book is it in?
Coyote: I don't know that. I just called it up online.
Ping: I have it.
Hillman: It's on the internet.
Ping: I have it.
Shoemaker: The Collected, it's in, 383.
Snyder: Okay, we got it here.
Axe Handles. One afternoon the last week in April, showing Kai how to throw a hatchet, one half-turn and it sticks in a stump. He recalls the hatchet-head without a handle in the shop and go gets it and wants it for his own. A broken-off ax handle behind the door is long enough for a hatchet. We cut it to length and take it with the hatchet head and the working hatchet to the wood block. There I begin to shape the old handle with the hatchet, and the phrase first learned from Ezra Pound rings in my ears, when making an ax handle the pattern is not far off. And I can say this to Kai, "Look, we'll shape the handle by checking the handle of the ax we cut with." And he sees, and I hear it again, it's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century AD essay on literature, in the preface. In making the handle of an ax by cutting wood with an ax, the model is indeed near at hand. My teacher, Shih-hsiang Chen, translated that and taught it years ago. And I see, Pound was an ax, Chen was an ax, I am an ax, and my son a handle soon to be shaping again, model and tool, craft of culture, how we go on.
Shoemaker: Brilliant, brilliant.
Snyder: Obvious.
Freeman: Maybe the second thing you should work on is being a stand-up comedian, Gary Snyder. It's been a pleasure to share this time with you. All of us want to thank you for coming onto the California Book Club.
Snyder: Well, thanks to everyone for showing up and being here, and we could go on.
Freeman: Well, thank you Will Hearst, Robert Hass, Kim Shuck, Jack Shoemaker, Jane Hirshfield, Rick Bass, Wang Ping, Brenda Hillman, Peter Coyote, the folks at Alta magazine, and mostly, especially Gary Snyder for making this incredibly special night. I hope you go out there, enjoy your lives, get up to some fun, read some more Gary Snyder, and have a wonderful night everyone. I think Blaise will come on now to walk us out.
Zerega: Well, gosh, thank you, thank you, thank you. That was just such an honor, such a great evening. I'll never forget it. And tonight's program was recorded. It will be up on our website, later tonight or first thing in the morning. So please come back and watch it. And everyone who registered, you'll get an email with links to all the things that were discussed tonight and a recap. Please be sure to join us next month for Javier Zamora's Solito. That will be on June 20th. And in the meantime, please don't forget our special offer of joining Alta as a member. For $50 a year, you get four issues, unlimited access to the website, a fantastic hat, and the Best Bookstores guide. And please support our partners, because without them evenings like this would not be possible. And we also have different price points too. If $50 is too much, $3 a month gets you a digital membership as well.
So please visit altaonline.com. And finally, we'd be grateful if you were to participate in a one-minute survey that will pop up on your screens as soon as the event ends. So again, thank you everyone for tuning in tonight. We have people from Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Wales, the UK, Scotland, Hawaii, China, Japan, Canada, everywhere. It's all for you, Gary. And just thank you so much, and belated happy birthday to you.
Ping:
Happy birthday.
Coyote:
Happy birthday, Gary.
Zerega: All right, good night everyone, and thank you so much. We'll see you next month. Take good care. Bye-bye.
Ping: Thank you.
Hirshfield: Thank you.
Coyote: Bye-bye.
Ping: Bye.
Hirshfield: Bye, thank you.
Ping: Beautiful.
Snyder: Bye.
