Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder | |
---|---|
Born | San Francisco, California, U.S. | May 8, 1930
Occupation |
|
Education | Indiana University, Bloomington |
Period | 1950–present |
Literary movement | San Francisco Renaissance, Beat Generation |
Notable works | Turtle Island, 1974; The Real Work, 1980; A Place in Space, 1995; Mountains and Rivers Without End, 1996 |
Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for poetry, 1975; American Book Award, 1984; Bollingen Prize for Poetry, 1997; John Hay Award for Nature Writing, 1997; Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, 2008[1] |
Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology".[2] Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis, and for a time served as a member of the California Arts Council.
Life and career
Early life
Snyder was born in
In 1942, following his parents' divorce, Snyder moved to
While attending Reed, Snyder conducted folklore research on the
The Beats
Back in San Francisco, Snyder lived with Whalen, who shared his growing interest in
Snyder met Allen Ginsberg when the latter sought Snyder out on the recommendation of Kenneth Rexroth.[21] Then, through Ginsberg, Snyder and Kerouac came to know each other. This period provided the materials for Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, and Snyder was the inspiration for the novel's main character, Japhy Ryder, in the same way Neal Cassady had inspired Dean Moriarty in On the Road. As the large majority of people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds, writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac found Snyder, with his backcountry and manual-labor experience and interest in things rural, a refreshing and almost exotic individual. Lawrence Ferlinghetti later referred to Snyder as 'the Thoreau of the Beat Generation'.
Snyder read his poem "A Berry Feast" at the poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco (October 7, 1955) that heard the first reading of Ginsberg's poem "Howl" and marked the emergence into mainstream publicity of the Beats. This also marked Snyder's first involvement with the Beats, although he was not a member of the original New York circle, having entered the scene through his association with Whalen and Welch. As recounted in Kerouac's Dharma Bums, even at age 25 Snyder felt he could have a role in the fateful future meeting of West and East. Snyder's first book, Riprap, which drew on his experiences as a forest lookout and on the trail crew in Yosemite, was published in 1959.
Japan and India
Independently, some of the Beats, including Whalen, had become interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the more serious scholars of the subject among them, preparing in every way he could think of for eventual study in Japan. In 1955, the
In 1958, he returned to California via the Persian Gulf, Turkey, Sri Lanka and various Pacific Islands, voyaging as a crewman in the
During the period between 1956 and 1969, Snyder went back and forth between California and Japan,
In the early 1960s he traveled for six months through India with Kyger, Ginsberg, and Ginsberg's partner, the poet and actor Peter Orlovsky.[27] Their sojourn took them to Sri Lanka, then to south India, and eventually travelling up into the north. They observed the folkways of the various peoples, went on hikes, stopped at landmarks, temples, burning ghats, monastic caves, and ashrams. As they went, they learned in part through conversations with many Indians and Europeans who could speak English. They visited numerous cities, including Madras, Calcutta, Mumbai, Banaras, Old Delhi and New Delhi, as well as Rishikesh and Hardwar, and Bodh Gaya (where Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, attained enlightenment). Especially important to Snyder and Ginsberg, in Dharamashala the Dalai Lama met with them and they discussed Buddhist principles and practices.[35]
Snyder and Kyger separated soon after their trip to India, and divorced in 1965.
Dharma Bums
In the 1950s, Snyder took part in the rise of a strand of Buddhist anarchism emerging from the
Kitkitdizze
In 1966, Snyder joined Allen Ginsberg,
Later life and writings
Regarding Wave appeared in January 1970, a stylistic departure offering poems that were more emotional, metaphoric, and lyrical. From the late 1960s, the content of Snyder's poetry increasingly had to do with family, friends, and community. He continued to publish poetry throughout the 1970s, much of it reflecting his re-immersion in life on the American continent and his involvement in the
In 1986, Snyder became a professor in the writing program at the University of California, Davis. Snyder is now professor emeritus of English.[39]
Snyder was married to Uehara for twenty-two years; the couple divorced in 1989. Snyder married Carole Lynn Koda (October 3, 1947 – June 29, 2006),[40] who would write Homegrown: Thirteen brothers and sisters, a century in America, in 1991,[12][41] and remained married to her until her death of cancer. She had been born in the third generation of a successful Japanese-American farming family, noted for its excellent rice. She shared Buddhism, extensive travels, and work with Snyder, and performed independent work as a naturalist.[42]
As Snyder's involvement in environmental issues and his teaching grew, he seemed to move away from poetry for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, in 1996 he published the complete Mountains and Rivers Without End, a mixture of the lyrical and epic modes celebrating the act of inhabitation on a specific place on the planet. This work was written over a 40-year period. It has been translated into Japanese, French and Russian. In 2004 Snyder published Danger on Peaks, his first collection of new poems in twenty years.
Snyder was awarded the Levinson Prize from the journal Poetry, the American Poetry Society Shelley Memorial Award (1986), was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1987), and won the 1997 Bollingen Prize for Poetry and, that same year, the John Hay Award for Nature Writing.[43] Snyder also has the distinction of being the first American to receive the Buddhism Transmission Award (for 1998) from the Japan-based Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation. For his ecological and social activism, Snyder was named as one of the 100 visionaries selected in 1995 by Utne Reader.
Snyder's life and work was celebrated in John J. Healy's 2010 documentary The Practice of the Wild. The film, which debuted at the 53rd
Work
Poetics
Snyder uses mainly common speech-patterns as the basis for his lines, though his style has been noted for its "flexibility" and the variety of different forms his poems have taken. He typically uses neither conventional meters nor intentional rhyme. "Love and respect for the primitive tribe, honour accorded the Earth, the escape from city and industry into both the past and the possible, contemplation, the communal", such, according to Glyn Maxwell, is the awareness and commitment behind the specific poems.
The author and editor Stewart Brand once wrote: "Gary Snyder's poetry addresses the life-planet identification with unusual simplicity of style and complexity of effect."[45] According to Jody Norton, this simplicity and complexity derives from Snyder's use of natural imagery (geographical formations, flora, and fauna) in his poems. Such imagery can be both sensual at a personal level yet universal and generic in nature.[46] In the 1968 poem "Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills, Your Body," the author compares the intimate experience of a lover's caress with the mountains, hills, cinder cones, and craters of the Uintah Mountains. Readers become explorers on both a very private level as well as a very public and grand level. A simplistic touch becoming a very complex interaction occurring at multiple levels. This is the effect Snyder intended. In an interview with Faas, he states, "There is a direction which is very beautiful, and that's the direction of the organism being less and less locked into itself, less and less locked into its own body structure and its relatively inadequate sense organs, towards a state where the organism can actually go out from itself and share itself with others."[47]
Snyder has always maintained that his personal sensibility arose from his interest in Native Americans and their involvement with nature and knowledge of it; indeed, their ways seemed to resonate with his own. And he has sought something akin to this through Buddhist practices, Yamabushi initiation, and other experiences and involvements. However, since his youth he has been quite literate, and he has written about his appreciation of writers of similar sensibilities, like
In 2004, receiving the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Awards Grand Prize, Snyder highlighted traditional ballads and folk songs, Native American songs and poems, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Noh drama, Zen aphorisms, Federico García Lorca, and Robert Duncan as significant influences on his poetry, but added, "the influence from haiku and from the Chinese is, I think, the deepest."[50]
Romanticism
Snyder is among those writers who have sought to dis-entrench conventional thinking about primitive peoples that has viewed them as simple-minded, ignorantly superstitious, brutish, and prone to violent emotionalism. In the 1960s Snyder developed a "
Beat
Snyder is widely regarded as a member of the Beat Generation circle of writers: he was one of the poets that read at the famous Six Gallery event, and was written about in one of Kerouac's most popular novels, The Dharma Bums. Some critics argue that Snyder's connection with the Beats is exaggerated and that he might better be regarded as a part of the San Francisco Renaissance, which developed independently. Snyder himself has some reservations about the label "Beat", but does not appear to have any strong objection to being included in the group. He often talks about the Beats in the first person plural, referring to the group as "we" and "us".
A quotation from a 1974 interview at the University of North Dakota Writers Conference (published in The Beat Vision):
I never did know exactly what was meant by the term 'The Beats', but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen [Ginsberg], myself, Michael [McClure], Lawrence [Ferlinghetti], Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory [Corso], for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years. Where we began to come really close together again, in the late '60s, and gradually working toward this point, it seems to me, was when Allen began to take a deep interest in Oriental thought and then in Buddhism which added another dimension to our levels of agreement; and later through Allen's influence, Lawrence began to draw toward that; and from another angle, Michael and I after the lapse of some years of contact, found our heads very much in the same place, and it's very curious and interesting now; and Lawrence went off in a very political direction for a while, which none of us had any objection with, except that wasn't my main focus. It's very interesting that we find ourselves so much on the same ground again, after having explored divergent paths; and find ourselves united on this position of powerful environmental concern, critique of the future of the individual state, and an essentially shared poetics, and only half-stated but in the background very powerfully there, a basic agreement on some Buddhist type psychological views of human nature and human possibilities.[54]
Snyder has also commented "The term Beat is better used for a smaller group of writers ... the immediate group around Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, plus Gregory Corso and a few others. Many of us ... belong together in the category of the San Francisco Renaissance. ... Still, beat can also be defined as a particular state of mind ... and I was in that mind for a while".[55]
Bibliography
- Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1959)
- Myths & Texts (1960)
- Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965)
- The Back Country (Fulcrum, 1967)
- Regarding Wave (1969)
- Earth House Hold (1969)
- Smokey the Bear Sutra (1969)
- Turtle Island (1974)
- The Old Ways (1977)
- He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (1979)
- The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979 (1980)
- Axe Handles (1983)
- Passage Through India (1983)
- Left Out in the Rain (1988)
- The Practice of the Wild (1990)
- No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992)
- A Place in Space (1995)
- narrator of the audio book version of Kazuaki Tanahashi's Moon in a Dewdrop from Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō
- Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996)
- The Geography Of Home (Poetry book)(1999)
- The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations (1999)
- The High Sierra of California, with Tom Killion (2002)
- Look Out: a Selection of Writings (November 2002)
- Danger on Peaks (2005)
- Back on the Fire: Essays (2007)
- The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, 1956-1991 (2009)
- Tamalpais Walking, with Tom Killion (2009)
- The Etiquette of Freedom, with Jim Harrison (2010): film by Will Hearst with book edited by Paul Ebenkamp
- Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places, with Julia Martin, Trinity University Press (2014)
- This Present Moment (April 2015)
- Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder (May 2015)
- The Great Clod: Notes and Memories on Nature and History in East Asia (March 2016)
- Dooby Lane: Also Known as Guru Road, A Testament Inscribed in Stone Tablets by DeWayne Williams, with Peter Goin (October 2016)
- Collected Poems (The Library of America, 2022) ISBN 9781598537215
Citations
- ^ "Poetry Foundation: Gary Snyder Wins 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize". 2008-04-29. Archived from the original on 2008-05-11. Retrieved 2008-05-26.
- ISSN 0832-6193. Retrieved 8 December 2022.
[George] Sessions' numerous references to Snyder have not passed unnoticed by other scholars. In his influential study The Idea of Wilderness (1991), Max Oelschlaeger titled the section on Snyder 'Poet Laureate of Deep Ecology.' What is even more striking is that in the footnote, Oelschlaeger confesses that 'Sessions in particular has influenced me to see and read Snyder as the poet laureate of deep ecology.'
- ^ a b c d e f g "Chapter 14: The Dharma Bum". Archived from the original on 2016-04-10. Retrieved 2019-04-18.
- ^ Seattle Times, 5-28-2009
- ^ Snyder, Gary (Sept/Oct 1984) "Choosing Your Place-and Taking a Stand" interview with G.S., The Mother Earth News, p.89.
- ^ Snyder (2007) p. 61
- ^ a b c Suiter (2002) p 54
- ^ Snyder (2007) p. 149
- ISBN 0-87156-616-8
- ^ Suiter (2002) p. 87
- ^ Alison Murie
- ^ a b c Suiter (2002) p. 325
- ^ a b Moore, Robert E. (Winter 2008). "Listening to Indians/Snyder goes logging". Reed magazine. p. 14.
- ^ Smith (1999) p. 10
- ^ Snyder, Gary (1951). The Dimensions of a Myth. Reed College Library, Portland, Oregon, US: Reed College. pp. 1–4.
- ^ Suiter (2002) p. 7
- ^ Suiter (2002) pp. 83–94
- ^ Suiter (2002) p. 104
- ^ Suiter (2002) pp. 82–83
- ^ Suiter (2002) pp. 188–189
- ^ Fields, Rick (1981) How the Swans Came to the Lake, p. 212. Boulder, CO: Shamballa.
- ^ Suiter (2002) pp. 124–125
- ^ a b Stirling (2006) p. 83
- ^ Suiter (2002) pp. 192–193
- ^ Suiter (2002) p. 208
- ^ Suiter (2002) p. 235
- ^ a b Smith (2000) p. 12
- ^ Suiter (2002) p. 238
- ^ Suiter (2002) p. 241
- ^ Suiter (2002) p. 245
- ^ Suiter (2002) p. 246
- ^ Stirling (2006) p. 110
- ^ a b c Suiter (2002) p. 250
- ^ Kyger (2000) p. 103
- ^ Snyder, Gary 2009 Passage Through India. Counterpoint, New York. ISBN 1593761783
- ISBN 9781551643106.
- ^ a b c Suiter (2002) p. 251
- ^ Halper (1991) p. 94
- ^ "Gary Snyder-Department of English". Retrieved 2009-04-13.
- ^ Snyder (2007) p. 161
- ^ Western Literature Association (1997) p. 316
- ^ "Sponsored Obituary: Carole Koda". 2006-07-07. Archived from the original on 2011-05-24. Retrieved 2008-05-26.
- ^ A Brief Biography Archived 2008-05-13 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ '"The Practice of the Wild ". Slant Magazine 8 November 2010
- ^ CoEvolution Quarterly, issue #4, 1974
- JSTOR 1208572.
- ^ Robert Frank, Henry Sayre. "On 'Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills, Your Body'". "Introduction" to The Line in Postmodern Poetry. University of Illinois. Retrieved 11 November 2012.
- ^ Suiter (2002) pp. 38–41
- ^ New York Quarterly "Craft Interview", 1973
- ^ Snyder (2007) p 59
- ^ a b Snyder (1969) "Why Tribe?," in Earth House Hold. New York: New Directions.
- ^ Charters, Samuel (1971) "Gary Snyder," pp 57–64, in Some Poems/Poets: studies in Underground American Poetry Since 1945. Berkeley: Oyez.
- ^ Ensign, Todd. "Gary Snyder: A Postmodern Perspective". Retrieved 8 December 2022.
- ^ Knight 1987.
- ISBN 0-231-07836-6
General sources
- Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-14-015102-8(pbk)
- Hunt, Anthony. "Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End" Univ. of Nevada Press. 2004. ISBN 0-87417-545-3
- Knight, Arthur Winfield. Ed. The Beat Vision (1987) Paragon House. ISBN 0-913729-41-8(pbk)
- Kyger, Joanne. Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals: 1960–1964 (2000) North Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-55643-337-5
- Smith, Eric Todd. Reading Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End (1999) Boise State University. ISBN 978-0-88430-141-7
- Snyder, Gary. The Politics of Ethnopoetics (1975) Snyder essay A Place in Space
- Snyder, Gary. 1980. The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964–1979. New Directions, New York. ISBN 0-8112-0760-9(pbk)
- Stirling, Isabel. Zen Pioneer: The Life & Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki (2006) Shoemaker & Hoard. ISBN 978-1-59376-110-3
- Suiter, John. Poets on the Peaks (2002) Counterpoint. ISBN 1-58243-294-5(pbk)
- Western Literature Association. Updating the Literary West (1997) Texas Christian University Press. ISBN 978-0-87565-175-0
Further reading
- Sherlock, John. (2010). Gary Snyder: a bibliography of works by and about Gary Snyder Archived 2020-03-19 at the UC DavisLibrary.
External links
- Eliot Weinberger (Winter 1996). "Gary Snyder, The Art of Poetry No. 74". The Paris Review. Winter 1996 (141).
- Profile at Poetry Foundation
- Profile at Poets.org
- Snyder talk "Mountains and Rivers without End" at the Smithsonian Museums of Asian art (Audio 1 hr) at 12 July 2008. Talk programme
- "The Wild Mind Of Gary Snyder" Archived 2014-03-12 at the Wayback Machine by Trevor Carolan and "Writers and the War Against Nature" Archived 2014-03-13 at the Wayback Machine by Gary Snyder in Shambhala Sun magazine
- 2007 Public Access TV interview (Nevada County TeleVision), 61 minutes Archived 2011-12-22 at the Wayback Machine
- "Gary Snyder" by Bert Almon from the Western Writers Series Digital Editions at Boise State University
- New York Times profile "A Poem, 40 Years Long" 6 October 1996
- Gary Snyder on Art, Anarchy and the Environment (2010 San Francisco Film Society interview)
- Gary Snyder Papers at Special Collections Dept., University Library, University of California, Davis
- Gary Snyder. Letters to Shandel Parks MSS 719. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library.
- Records of Gary Snyder are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books
- Western American Literature Journal: Gary Snyder