The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations

by Gary Snyder

Overview

Gary Snyder has been a major cultural force in America for five decades—prize–winning poet, environmental activist, Zen Buddhist, earth–householder, and reluctant counterculture guru. This monumental collection gathers the essays, travel journals, letters, poems, and translations of one of the most influential voices of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582430799
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	03/16/2000
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	640
Sales rank:	742,783
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.72(d)

About the Author

Gary Snyder is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry and prose. Since 1970 he has lived in the watershed of the South Yuba River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, Snyder has also been awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award. His 1992 collection, No Nature, was a National Book Award finalist, and in 2008 he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Snyder is a poet, environmentalist, educator and Zen Buddhist.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt

Prose Lookout's Journal A. Crater Mountain 22 June 52   Marblemount Ranger Station                Skagit District, Mt. Baker National Forest Hitchhiked here, long valley of the Skagit. Old cars parked in the weeds, little houses in fields of bracken. A few cows, in stumpland. Ate at the "parkway café" real lemon in the pie             "—why don't you get a jukebox in here"             "—the man said we weren't important enough" * * * 28 June Blackie Burns: "28 years ago you could find a good place to fish. GREEDY & SELFISH        NO RESPECT FOR THE   LAND        tin cans, beer bottles, dirty dishes        a shit within a foot of the bed one sonuvabitch out of fifty fishguts in the creek the door left open for the bear. If you're takin forestry fellas keep away from the recreation side of it: first couple months you see the women you say             'there's a cute little number' the next three months it's only another woman after that you see one coming out of the can             & wonder if she's just shit on the floor ought to use pit toilets" * * * Granite creek Guard station 9 July the boulder in the creek never moves            the water is always falling         together! A ramshackle little cabin built by Frank Beebe the miner. Two days walk to here from roadhead.             arts of the Japanese: moon-watching                                   insect-hearing Reading the sutra of Hui Nêng. one does not need universities and libraries one need be alive to what is about saying "I don't care" * * * 11 July cut fresh rhubarb by the bank the creek is going down last night caught a trout today climbed to the summit of Crater Mountain and back high and barren: flowers I don't recognize ptarmigan and chicks, feigning the broken wing. Baxter: "Men are funny, once I loved a girl so bad it hurt, but I drove her away. She was throwing herself at me—and four months later she married another fellow." A doe in the trail, unafraid. A strange man walking south A boy from Marblemount with buckteeth, learning machine shop. * * * Crater Mountain Elevation: 8049 feet 23 July Really wretched weather for three days now—wind, hail, sleet, snow; the FM transmitter is broken / rather the receiver is / what can be done?    Even here, cold foggy rocky place, there's life—4 ptarmigan by the A-frame, cony by the trail to the snowbank. hit my head on the lamp, the shutters fall, the radio quits, the kerosene stove won't stop, the wood stove won't start, my fingers are too numb to write. & this is mid-July. At least I have energy enough to read science-fiction. One has to go to bed fully clothed. * * * The stove burning wet wood—windows misted over giving the blank white light of shoji. Outside wind blows, no visibility. I'm filthy with no prospect of cleaning up. (Must learn yoga-system of Patanjali—) * * * Crater Shan 28 July     Down for a new radio, to Ross Lake, and back up. Three days walking. Strange how unmoved this place leaves one; neither articulate nor worshipful; rather the pressing need to look within and adjust the mechanism of perception. A dead sharp-shinned hawk, blown by the wind against the lookout. Fierce compact little bird with a square head. —If one wished to write poetry of nature, where an audience? Must come from the very conflict of an attempt to articulate the vision poetry & nature in our time. (reject the human; but the tension of human events, brutal and tragic, against a nonhuman background? like Jeffers?) * * * Pair of eagles soaring over Devil's Creek canyon * * * 31 July This morning:               floating face down in the water bucket         a drowned mouse. "Were it not for Kuan Chung, we should be wearing our hair unbound and our clothes buttoning on the left side" A man should stir himself with poetry Stand firm in ritual Complete himself in music                          Lun Yü * * * Comparing the panoramic Lookout View photo dated 8 August 1935: with the present view. Same snowpatches; same shapes. Year after year; snow piling up and melting. "By God" quod he, "for pleynly, at a word Thy drasty ryming is not worth a tord." * * * Crater Shan 3 August How pleasant to squat in the sun Jockstrap & zoris form—leaving things out at the right spot ellipse, is emptiness                       these ice-scoured valleys                       swarming with plants      "I am the Queen Bee!                          Follow Me!" * * * Or having a wife and baby,    living close to the ocean, with skills for    gathering food. QUEBEC DELTA 04 BLACK Higgins to Pugh (over)    "the wind comes out of the east    or northeast,    the chimney smokes all over the room.    the wind comes out of the west;    the fire burns clean." Higgins L.O. reads the news:    "flying saucer with a revolving black band    drouth in the south. Are other worlds watching us?" The rock alive, not barren.    flowers lichen pinus albicaulis chipmunks mice even grass. —first I turn on the radio —then make tea & eat breakfast —study Chinese until eleven —make lunch, go chop snow to melt for water, read Chaucer in the early afternoon. "Is this real Is this real This life I am living?"               —Tlingit or Haida song * * * "Hidden Lake to Sourdough" —"This is Sourdough" —"Whatcha doing over there?" —"Readin some old magazines             they had over here." * * * 6 August     Clouds above and below, but I can see Kulshan, Mt. Terror, Shuksan; they blow over the ridge between here and Three-Fingered Jack, fill up the valleys. The Buckner Boston Peak ridge is clear.     What happens all winter; the wind driving snow; clouds—wind, and mountains—repeating this is what always happens here, and the photograph of a young female torso hung in the lookout window, in the foreground. Natural against natural, beauty.         two butterflies a chilly clump of mountain             flowers. zazen non-life. An art: mountain-watching. leaning in the doorway whistling          a chipmunk popped out               listening * * * 9 August Sourdough: Jack, do you know if a fly is an electrical conductor? (over) Desolation: A fly? Are you still trying to electrocute flies? (over) Sourdough: Yeah I can make em twitch a little. I got five number    six batteries on it (over) Desolation: I don't know, Shubert, keep trying. Desolation clear. * * * 10 August First wrote a haiku and painted a haiga for it; then repaired the Om Mani Padme Hum prayer flag, then constructed a stone platform, then shaved down a shake and painted a zenga on it, then studied the lesson.       a butterfly             scared up from its flower caught by the wind and swept over the cliffs                                      SCREE Vaux Swifts: in great numbers, flying before the storm, arcing so close that the sharp wing-whistle is heard.                          "The sravaka disciplined in Tao, enlightened, but on the wrong path." summer,              on the west slopes creek beds are brushy              north-faces of ridges, steep and                    covered late with snow slides and old burns on dry hills. (In San Francisco: I live on the Montgomery Street drainage—at the top of a long scree slope just below a cliff.) * * * sitting in the sun in the doorway picking my teeth with a broomstraw listening to the buzz of the flies. (Continues...)

Poetry FROM Riprap 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. Piute Creek One granite ridge A tree, would be enough Or even a rock, a small creek, A bark shred in a pool. Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted Tough trees crammed In thin stone fractures A huge moon on it all, is too much. The mind wanders. A million Summers, night air still and the rocks Warm. Sky over endless mountains. All the junk that goes with being human Drops away, hard rock wavers Even the heavy present seems to fail This bubble of a heart. Words and books Like a small creek off a high ledge Gone in the dry air. A clear, attentive mind Has no meaning but that Which sees is truly seen. No one loves rock, yet we are here. Night chills. A flick In the moonlight Slips into Juniper shadow: Back there unseen Cold proud eyes Of Cougar or Coyote Watch me rise and go. Milton by Firelight Piute Creek, August 1955 "O hell, what do mine eyes            with grief behold?" Working with an old Singlejack 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, 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 Han River slantwise by morning. Jays squall Coffee boils In ten thousand years the Sierras 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, 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 Above Pate Valley We finished clearing the last Section of trail by noon, High on the ridge-side Two thousand feet above the creek Reached the pass, went on Beyond the white pine groves, Granite shoulders, to a small Green meadow watered by the snow, Edged with Aspen—sun Straight high and blazing But the air was cool. Ate a cold fried trout in the Trembling shadows. I spied A glitter, and found a flake Black volcanic glass—obsidian— By a flower. Hands and knees Pushing the Bear grass, thousands Of arrowhead leavings over a Hundred yards. Not one good Head, just razor flakes On a hill snowed all but summer, A land of fat summer deer, They came to camp. On their Own trails. I followed my own Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill, Pick, singlejack, and sack Of dynamite. Ten thousand years. Hay for the Horses He had driven half the night From far down San Joaquin Through Mariposa, up the Dangerous mountain roads, And pulled in at eight a.m. With his big truckload of hay         behind the barn. With winch and ropes and hooks We stacked the bales up clean To splintery redwood rafters High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa Whirling through shingle-cracks of light, Itch of haydust in the         sweaty shirt and shoes. At lunchtime under Black oak Out in the hot corral, —The old mare nosing lunchpails, Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds— "I'm sixty-eight" he said, "I first bucked hay when I was seventeen. I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life. And dammit, that's just what I've gone and done." 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.

Editorial Reviews

Beat poet, world traveler, forest-fire lookout, student of Chinese and Japanese, of Zen and Tao, ecological thinker and activist, renderer of folklore and myth, and (most recently) author of the celebrated book-length poem Mountains and Rivers Without End, Snyder has done and written more in one lifetime than most poets would in 10. This enormous volume gives admirers of any of Snyder's talents a chance to discover all the rest. Its 400-odd pages of prose include critical, speculative and political essays (a few previously uncollected). Arguments like "Poetry and the Primitive" share space with travel journals, letters to friends (most notably Philip Whalen) and with two long interviews. Suffused with commitments to ecology, and to Buddhist modes of life, Snyder's prose also reveals a knack for moment-by-moment description, as he spends weeks mountaineering, or in the outback, or in a Zen temple. Snyder's poetics emerged from his knowledge of East Asian work, and from the ferment of '50s California. His poems can be as spare and abstract as a pair of brushstrokes, or as detail-packed as his diaries. Here "Huckleberries scatter through pine woods,/ Crowd along gullies, climb dusty cliffs"; there "Deer trails slide under freeways... And deer bound through my hair"; and everywhere clarity and immediacy link thought to fact, treeline to verse-line. Forty pages present Snyder's poetic translations, which include Bai Juyi's famous (in China) "Long Bitter Song." Snyder calls human beings to a responsible life as creatures among creatures, part of interwoven, vulnerable systems. His poems and prose together hope "to see what could be restored to the life today. A lot of it is/ simply in being aware of clouds and wind." (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Snyder, winner of the 1975 Pulitzer prize for poetry for Turtle Island, has gathered 46 years of writing into one massive volume, drawing on previously published as well as unpublished material. He includes poetry, essays, letters, journals from his travels, meditations, and notes that reflect the philosophical and cultural evolution of his thoughts--producing a collection that entertains, educates, and provokes. Snyder shares his interest in Eastern literature and culture, his love for the environment, and his views on humanity and society. A chronology of Snyder's life is helpful in placing his cycle of literary events within the context of his life. This comprehensive body of work has captured his spirit and intent. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries.--Cynde Bloom Lahey, New Canaan Lib., CT Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A compendium of writing by the contemporary American poet, environmental activist, and Zen Buddhist. The poems represent all his stages from the Beat movement to recent achievements, including translations from Japanese and Chinese not published before. Among the prose selections are letters, travel journals, meditations on Buddhism, commentary on communal living, and notes from the lookout tower on Sourdough Mountain. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

The Gary Snyder Reader offers the opportunity to review the career of one of the most enduring poets of the Beat Generation—a career which, though it has produced much good poetry, seems retrospectively to have been kept on a short leash.
—From The Times Literary Supplement.

James Campbell