Gary SnyderBesprekingen

I watched the DVD before reading the book. The book did help clarify some of the conversation that was a bit muffled by the distance as the actors walked the countryside, and gave me time to pause and consider what was said.
The main focus of their conversation related to Snyder's live, his involvement in Buddhism and nature Jim Harrison seemed to play a secondary role, asking questions and deferring to Gary Snyder's opinions, in such a retiring manner that one wonders why Snyder seemed to have a high opinion of him. He also was very widely read, making connections with obscure or historic writings, which surprised me since I knew his writing only from 2 popular novels. I will look for more from him.
Scenes interspersed their joint conversations, Snyder reading his poetry, comments by others who knew Snyder, and historic footage of the Beat Generation.
A book with ideas to ponder, but as much an inspiration to go to their original writings rather than be satisfied with these snippets.
The video was interesting to watch once, to get a glimpse of authors I've enjoyed but never seen in real life.
The dinner scenes with other people around were not that well done, seemed more of an opportunity for Hearst to get screen time.½

Apparently this isn't a common experience for everyone, but when I was in middle school, we studied the Beat Generation. I wouldn't be taking too much poetic license to claim that I was raised by Hippies, so to learn about the Beat Generation was like discovering a long-lost branch of my family. I still have a copy of "The Rolling Stones Book of the Beats." I wouldn't say that I am in love with the art produced by the Beat Generation, nor that I personally relate with it, but I do hold in high regard as an ancestral cultural well.

Gary Snyder is an animist, as am I. So when I learned of Snyder, I was immediately intrigued—an animist Beatnik.

Although I've been hearing about Snyder for a few years now, I haven't read much of his material. "Mountains and Rivers Without End" is Snyder's Magnum Opus, so I thought I might as well start there. Some had advised against this, but I would say—if you're willing to put in the time, you won't regret it!

The following is a book review of both "Mountains and Rivers Without End" and "A Sense of the Whole."

Gary Snyder spent forty years writing "Mountains and Rivers Without End"—from 1956 to 1996. For the '97-'98 academic year, Gonnerman hosted a seminar at Stanford on "Mountains and Rivers Without End." A broad community of intellectuals, artists, and spiritual leaders contributed to this corpus, which eventually lead to the publication of "A Sense of the Whole" in 2015 (I'm not entirely sure what led to the seventeen year delay). Snyder himself says that working with "Mountains and Rivers Without End" is a treacherous journey, and therefore recommends taking on the endeavor in community. This points to some of the ways in which Snyder's work harkens back to oral traditions. The copy I have includes an audio edition, and I appreciated being able to hear the work in Snyder's own voice (I wasn't able to track down a digital edition of the work).

If you're contemplating engaging with this work, I would encourage you to put together a reading plan. In my case, I read the poem from end to end first, then read the entirety of the companion volume, then listened to the audio edition of the poem. Throughout this time I was taking notes and having discussion with friends—both those familiar and unfamiliar with the text.

I read much less poetry than prose, so I will comment that whereas with prose, I generally read a book once, I can certainly see a work like this being something I come back to multiple or numerous times, as poems have a dynamic, ever-changing quality to them.

The poem is divided into four parts, following the structure of a Noh play.

My first reading of the piece wasn't particularly rapturous, although, as I was anticipating this, I stuck with it. Things really took off once I picked up the companion text. The corpus of the poem is a talisman. There might be a line that appears unremarkable, commonplace. But then once you place the line in context—the context of Chinese landscape art, Zen Buddhism, animism, geology, yogic mythology, or any of a numerous set of relationships—the line transports you to a web of relationship.

I also happen to be reading John McPhee's "From Annals of the Former World," a Pulitzer-winning book on the geology of the United States. I can certainly recommend this as one lens to deepen into Snyders work, although there are many others as well.

You might notice, I have yet to say really anything on the subject of what the poem is "about." Like any spiritual text, an meaning we derive from the material has as much to do with our own practice with the work as it does with some kind of objective set of takeaways. For this reason, I'll continue to marinade on the poetry, and hopefully this has given you enough reason to pick up the material for yourself.

1962 India travels

We humans are part of nature. We are part of the wild. Wilderness is different, and hard to find. Snyder believes a sense of place and a feeling towards home is important.

After writing my master's thesis on deep ecology, I was fed up with all that 'eco-lala' for a while - no matter how interesting, I had had enough of all that capitalizing Nature and the true Self ans whatnot. I never had the chance to read Snyder, whose work was referenced often in the writings of Naess and Devall. Having sort of dismissed him as a oh-how-harmonious-nature-is kind of poet, I encountered him again now years later when I have picked up zen meditation again, and I realize that I have done him wrong. Snyder's poems speak to us in times of climate change, they have outlived the hippie epoch and hold up still, inspiring us to engage in the real work, with enough hands-on qualities to invite us to stay with the trouble. Good stuff.

Transcription of a radio panel from 1964, back when the Beats had hope to turn the worm. Good to read & feel regardless, these 58 years later as Snyder is published by the Library of America.

Signed, hand-numbered 13/280

Snyder at his rowdy, randiest. Home domestic married scenes.

Found a copy in Seattle after a bit of seeking. A treasure.

This book of essays is both indispensable and somehow grating . . . it is not Snyder's fault that what he has to teach comes so crossgrained into these times.
That said, read it. Snyder may be an axegrinder . . . but his axe is good and sharp by now. It's a useful tool.

This long poem is all at once complex, simple, deep, worth reading slowly, worth dipping into any part of it in any sequence.

Mountains and Rivers Without End records some of Gary Snyder's journeys, from about 1956, until publication of the whole poem in book form in 1996.

It is about travels through geography, through time, and through his spiritual experiences within Zen Buddhism and other religious traditions. The poem is full of references to Snyder’s many lifelong interests, including back country hiking, poetry itself, environmentalism, the spirit, scholarship, and others.

The Bubbs Creek Haircut section begins and ends in a San Francisco barber shop, Snyder getting shorn "close as it will go" as he prepares for a hike to Bubbs Creek. His barber tells him the way, "Well I been up there, I built the cabin / up at Cedar Grove. In nineteen five." Snyder talks of this trek and other hitchhiking, walking, and camping experiences, mixing pasts and present in fascinating ways. His journey is folded inside the barber shop preparation for it, where all moments are the present moment and all things are one.

The Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin section is about an urban civilization that is surrounded by and suffused with nature. "The calligraphy of lights on the night / freeways of Los Angeles / will long be remembered. / Owl / calls; / late-rising moon." The owl and the moon get the last word.

By the nineties, the time when Snyder is telling this story, he has mellowed but he is still searching out "—the wildness, the / foolish loving spaces / full of heart."

This collection is made up of four sections: "Far West"—poems of the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder worked as a logger and forest ranger; "Far East"—poems written between 1956 and 1964 in Japan where he studied Zen at the monastery in Kyoto; "Kali"—poems inspired by a visit to India and his reading of Indian religious texts, particularly those of Shivaism and Tibetan Buddhism; and "Back"—poems done on his return to this country in 1964 which look again at our West with the eyes of India and Japan. The book concludes with a group of translations of the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), with whose work Snyder feels a close affinity. The title, The Back Country, has three major associations; wilderness. the "backward" countries, and the “back country" of the mind with its levels of being in the unconscious.

A fascinating account and video of a true meeting of the minds. Masters at work walking, reading, eating. It feels like eavesdropping on two old friends. I have revisited and enjoyed numerous times.

Slender little handful of genius. Two fine essays follow Snyder going over his well-trod ground of hopes for what it could mean to be human.

Easily read in a single setting, I had to slow myself down to prolong the enjoyment.

The first third of this book is three interviews, Julia Martin talking with Gary Snyder, and the rest of the book is a collection of letters between these two. Julia is a professor in South Africa and has written quite a bit about Snyder, so I learned from this book.

I've been Buddhist for several decades and have read a bit of Snyder over those years. So most of the material here was pretty familiar. But I haven't studied Snyder in detail, so I don't know if this book contains any special insights. It has a lot of personal details, for example discussions about funding travel to conferences etc. So there is a lot about academic careers, the ups and downs of universities etc. Since Julia is from South Africa, there is quite a bit about South Africa.

It's an enjoyable book but I can't see it being in the first rank of Snyder scholarship or anything.

Snyder's Best of Collection

An excellent selection of the prose and poetry of Gary Snyder, this collection reveals the development of his spritual, ecological and poetical thinking. Throughout is a faith in the unity of all being. Some of the journal entries drag a bit and may be skipped; but if you are a student of Snyder, read the whole volume.

A few years ago, I met Gary Snyder at an event at Baylor. I had read some of his poetry, and I was in awe of all those I read. A friend passed along a copy of his volume of essays, Back on the Fire. He has authored numerous collections of poetry and prose. He won the Pulitzer prize in 1975 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992 and 2005. He has also won the prestigious Bollingen Poetry Prize among other prizes. He has lived in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada since 1970. Many of the essays in this collection from 2007 are quite relevant today.

The first deals with “Migration/Immigration.” He writes, “There are those who argue that since the majority of the North American population is descended from immigrants it would be somehow wrong to change past policies and try to slow immigration down or even bring it to a halt. This backward-looking position fails to see that, although people do move to new places, they can be expected in time to become members of that place and to think in terms of the welfare of the place itself. People who have moved do no remain immigrants, with ‘Old Country’ nostalgia, forever—when our loyalties are to the land we live on, the debate changes” (17). If only we could have a real, honest, humanitarian debate.

Preserving the environment is important to Snyder. He writes, “We may speak of ‘public land’ or ‘private land,’ but the truth is we are in the presence of an ancient mystery—life itself—and the great life-communities within which all beings thrive and die. The pines were contemporary with the dinosaurs; the sequoias were a dominant forest that swept across the north Pacific rim and into much of Asia, long ago. Oakes are in several genus found on every continent except Antarctica. Indeed, ‘distinguished strangers from another world.’ They are all amazing. We live in a lovely and mysterious realm” (37).

Of course, Snyder must weigh in on poetry. He writes, “People are always asking ‘what’s the use of poetry?’ The mystery of language, the poetic imagination, and the mind of compassion are roughly one and the same, and through poetry perhaps they can keep guiding the world toward occasional moments of peace, gratitude, and delight. One hesitates to ask for more” (60). What a lovely way to explain poetry!

During an interview, Snyder explained poetry this way, “The act of making something, bringing elements together and creating a new thing with craft and wit hidden in it, is a great pleasure. It’s not the only sort of pleasure, but it is challenging and satisfying, and not unlike other sorts of creating and building. In Greek ‘poema’ means ‘makings.’ It doesn’t change with the years, or with the centuries.” (99). My large collection of poetry—dating back almost 8,000 years—can attest to the truth of Gary Snyder’s words.

Gary Snyder is an interesting, gentle, soft-spoken lover of nature and all its wonders. He advocates for the environment and mourns the loss of species, habitats, flowers, and trees. His slim volume of essays, Back on Fire, is an interesting look at the world we inhabit. He is not pedantic, but he rather gently gathers words and phrases to support the importance of this tiny blue dot. 5 Stars.

--Jim, 2/20/18

This book, as the preview declares, is a collection of essays, each essay occupying a chapter. Here are my comments on a selection of those essays.

Chapter: energy is eternal delight

Written in 1974, Snyder suggests that the Judeo-Christian worldview with its exploitation of the world’s resources and uncontrollable growth may lead to our destruction. He proposes an alternative for our salvation, namely a respect for all life as adopted by Buddhism and many Red-Indian societies. He proposes “scaled-down, balanced technology” and “steady-state economy”.
My thoughts are that corporations need to change as they have developed a global reach since 1974. Governments are unlikely to help as growth and immigration is wanted.

Chapter: Earth Day and the war against the imagination

Snyder gave a talk at the 1st Earth Day in 1970 and 20 years later at the 1990 event. That 1st event in 1970 put conservationism and ecology on the map. Since then there have been some changes in forestry management on public lands but largely the world scale issues of 1970 persist:
1. deforestation
2. soil erosion
3. biological diversity erosion
4. water and air pollution
5. overpopulation
6. unequal wealth distribution
7. unequal environmental cost distribution
Snyder espouses the philosophy of the Native American who lives with nature and sees his home as a place for future generations up to the 7th generation in contrast to the socially and politically entrenched attitudes and institutions that reinforce our misuse of nature and our cruelty toward each other” (page 61). Corporations do not pay a fair share for the pollution they cause. People and corporations are making themselves rich through the pursuit of profit while their consumption of natural resources threatens future generations. More emphasis should be given to communities looking to sustain a quality of life. One community may be successful in preventing an environmental issue in their area but it is a hollow victory if in so doing it displaces that problem to another community not so well equipped to oppose that threat. Better to say “not in anyone’s backyard” and get nationwide changes in policy.
This chapter ends with a call to keep politically active at the local level in order to shape a better future that is closer to nature.

chapter: re-inhabitation

This chapter is about people who inhabit land. Inhabitants are people who never move more than 30 miles from their home - people who know the land and know how to crop its produce in a sustainable way. Inhabitants are people who expect their grandchildren to be living the same kind of life as them.
Modern society is against inhabitants. Modern economics are in favour of exploitation for a quick buck rather than investment in the future.
Of course people have moved to get to where we are now.
Also agricultural knowledge is pre-civilisation, probably from the Neolithic age. That would be the time that animals were domesticated. Re-inhabitation is to do with the small number of people who choose to go back to being inhabitants.

Chapter: Nets of beads, webs of cells

On page 65 the author conducts an appealing study of the interpretation of ‘ahimsa’ - the philosophy of causing no unnecessary harm, which can be done by anyone, even a soldier. He illustrates by the Zen story of a single chopstick that has been harmed when its partner is lost - the idea is that a single chopstick is useless for its intended purpose. As an aside, Snyder points out the toll on the rainforest to source disposable wooden chopsticks. But the forest station is not new. It was extensive in Buddhist China in 500 to 1500 and also in pre-modern India.
On page 68, he argues against, surprisingly, an absolute ban on eating meat, something possible in the west, but not so in the Third World, pointing out that eating meat is practised by some Buddhist monks.
On page 71, he derides Europeans for fondly quoting “nature, red in tooth and claw” and suggests popular Darwinism implies human beings have “moral superiority over the rest of nature.”

I do not see this in Darwinism. I see survival of the fittest and natural selection as teaching our interdependence.

Ultimately, Snyder says, if human beings do not pull back, then nature will do it for us - most likely by thirst or starvation. He also says that ecology has brought an understanding of the “inter-relationship and interdependence” of species.

I would say that this is implicit in natural selection.

He concludes with the call to work tirelessly to maintain ecosystems in the face of our aggressive economic structures.

Chapter entitled "Language goes Two ways"

Language has evolved out of wildness. It gives us a way of understanding the world, but also shapes, by virtue of syntax and vocabulary, how we see that world.
"Good language usage is associated with the speech of people of power and position". Another standard is the technical sort of writing. Technical writing must be mastered in order to do the boring stuff.

Having an interest in bird watching, the following piece of mysticism appealed to me: "to see a wren in the bush, Call it a wren, and go on walking is to have seen nothing. To see a bird and stop, watch, feel, forget yourself for a moment, be in the bushes shadows, maybe then feel wren that is to have joined in a larger moment of the world".

"we are made free by the training that enables us to master necessity, and we are made disciplined by a free choice to undertake mastery"

Chapter: the porous world

Crawling
this short chapter is about the practice of literally crawling on the forest floor in the Sierra forests of California. You might be wondering why would you be crawling? why not walk? well the answer is a lot of the Sierra forests are under process of regeneration following logging or fires and as a result the vegetation is dense but of a low height, so the only way to navigate it is to crawl on the forest floor. Snyder sees this as the only way to explore such forests.

Living in the open
In this short piece, Snyder describes his family’s way of life in the Sierra Nevada.
His idea is not to fight against the environment but to live in it. So part of the philosophy involves not attempting to keep out the mice and the insects, but to take some precautions for looking after food in proper containers and also bedding containers which are non-accessible to insects. Other than that the environment is left to encroach. This is his Buddhist philosophy in practice.
He’s not worried about rattlesnakes or bears or poison oak as he sees the risk from these as low.

Chapter: the forest in the library

Prepared as a dedication of the new West Wing of Shields library University of California at Davis, Snyder begins by making connections evoked by the libraries location and construction. He connects to the native Californians who lived on the site for thousands of years and to the old oaks which potentially have a longer heritage and include an existing oak within the courtyard. He evokes Swainson’s Hawks, which are often seen soaring in the sky, the burrowing owls and the local creek which is now dry but which runs close to the site. The structure itself has a large proportion of concrete which consists of water washed gravels from the Stanislaus River drainage, so he suggests that the structure is “a riverbed stood on end”.
He also invokes the connections with Europe, Africa, Polynesia and Asia and highlights the diversity of the student body and studies.
He lauds libraries from Aristotle’s own words proclaiming “our Occidental humanistic and scientific intellectual tradition”.
Anecdotally he tells how, while in his grandparents time, stories were told around the campfire and passed on from generation to generation orally, nowadays stories are passed on via reading books.
He points out that our habit of collecting, and in this case collecting books and libraries, is not original or not exclusively human. He tells of the wood rat nests found in the Mojave Desert containing wood rat treasures that are 12,000 years old.
For fun Snyder makes an ecological analogy. He starts with the graduate students and young scholars who he says are basic photo synthesisers “grazing brand-new material”. Others are in the detritus cycle tunnelling through huge amounts of boring literature and converting them into something fresh. The library itself is a place where the nutrients of this degradation of literature are stored. He goes on to suggest that dissertations and technical reports of primary workers are digested by senior researchers and condensed into conclusions and theories. “The studies in turn are passed up the information chain to the thinkers at the top who will digest them and come out with some unified theory .“ Though the final texts are seen as the pinnacle of assembled information these themselves are destined to become, in years to come, the detritus on the forest floor.
He praises language, which is the source of all literature, in a rather mystical way and finally he returns to laud the library for its organisation of literature.

Chapter: Walt Whitman's old New World

Snyder examines Whitman's essay "Democratic vistas" in which Whitman envisages an America of the future, ideal and human centric. Snyder regrets that Whitman missed out reference to the biodiversity of the United States. Giving as an example the 50,000,000 bison and approximately 20,000,000 pronghorn which were on the great Plains as late as the mid 19th century. "This was the largest single population of big animals anywhere on earth".
He points out that at the same time "15 to 20,000 buffalo hunters were killing and wasting literally millions of bison every season." Central to Snyder's vision of the future are the native Americans who have suffered a poor lot in the face of European expansion. It seems that in 1992 Inuit Indians of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia were looking to setting something on Turtle Island. He hopes that Whitman would have given his optimism to this venture.

I'm not sure, but I think Turtle Island may be a pseudonym for North America.

Interesting - but didn't capture my imagination.

The self-selected cream of the crop by Snyder from his New Directions books. So much to savor.

The Old Master empties his notebooks. These brief chapters are snippets of a long-rumored work encompassing the natural history of China, its peoples, and the paintings they inspired. Too short to be anything but a merest appetizer of Snyder's life-long feast.

Series of interviews and letters between a South African scholar and Gary Snyder. The correspondence started when the scholar, as a MA student, sent Snyder a series of questions about his work. This is a great dialogue that helps fill the gaps in Snyder's works.

Snyder is a great poet and this is a wonderful compendium of his work. I am currently re-reading the portions of his work I've read before and enjoying the portions that are new to me. From one of his essays: "Monogamy and patrilineal descent may well be great obstructions to the inner changes required for a people to truly live by 'communism.'" His ideas make us think and consider alternative paths for ourselves and humanity.

Provides a good background for understanding Snyder and the milieu from which he emerged. Includes essays on is journey through the East, his work, and his encounters with Zen.

Snyder's poetry is transformational and yet deceptively easy to read. A great introduction to him, this book is a great one to delve into randomly.

More good advice. Unfortunately things have not improved since 1990. Needed more than ever. Inscribed copy, purchased used at Powell's.