Saturday 8 May 2021

Happy Birthday Gary Snyder: Poet laureate of Deep Ecology


Today is  acclaimed poet, essayist, scholar, environmentalist and Zen Buddhist Gary Snyder's (one of my favourite writers) birthday. He has been called the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology." Deep Ecology is the philosophy of environmental ethics, the spirituality of Gaia. Deep ecology leads to direct action. In his writing and his life, Snyder explores what he describes as "the mytho-poetic interface of society, ecology, and language."
Snyder’s purpose in writing  is to actively influence emotional, political, and physical change.,using images of our environment, to re-establish our connection to the world in order to promote political change that addresses the ecological problems which face our capitalistic, image-driven culture. And throughout his life has pursue a radical vision that has continued to inform his poetry, shaped the cause of Deep Ecology  and helped provide distinctive answers to the eternal question of what it is to live a human life. 
Gary Sherman Snyder was born to Harold and Lois Snyder on May 8, 1930 in San Francisco, California.at the beginning of the Great Depression  and was raised in an anarcho-syndicalist household, his grandfather soapboxed with the Industrial Workers of the World, and both his parents were labor movement radicals who grew disenchanted with the Soviet Union and Stalin's atrocities. Snyder himself was a member of the IWW. The family soon moved to the Pacific Northwest, to start a small dairy farm north of Seattle, Washington. His sister, Anthea, was born in 1932. The family moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1942. Snyder climbed Mt. St. Helens in 1945; and a year later he joined the Portland Mazamas, a mountaineering club. Throughout his life he has continued to climb mountains and take long wilderness hikes. During his high school years, he held a number of part-time jobs including working at a camp on Spirit Lake in Washington and as a copy boy for the Portland Oregonian
In 1947, Snyder graduated from Lincoln High School and enrolled at Reed College. He published his first poems in the campus literary magazine, Janus. While at Reed, he met fellow poets Philip Whalen and Lew Welch who would become his lifelong friends. Snyder graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Anthropology in 1951. His senior thesis was later published as the book, He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (1979).
Snyder spent the summer of 1951 working as a timber scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation on the east side of the Oregon Cascades. Following the summer job, he hitchhiked to Indiana University to begin graduate study in Anthropology. It was on the trip east to Indiana that Snyder had a revelation that constituted a real turning point in his life. In an interview with the Commonwealth Club on May 15, 2002, Snyder described the incident, "In the middle of Nevada, on old Interstate 40, there was a period of about five hours where nobody would give me a ride. As I stood there in the middle of the sagebrush flats, I was reading through a chapter of Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, and I hit on some phrases that turned my mind totally around. I knew that I wouldn't last at Indiana, and that I would soon be heading in the other direction back toward Asia, but I had to complete my short-term karma. So I did finish out that semester and then went back to the West Coast."
By spring 1952, Snyder was living with Philip Whalen in San Francisco and taking on odd jobs in order to support himself. During the early 1950's, Snyder returned several times to the forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest for summer employment including stints as a choker-setter for the Warm Springs Lumber Company and as a fire lookout. From 1953 to 1955, he lived in a tiny cottage near campus as he pursued graduate studies in the Department of East Asian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley. It was while he was at Berkeley that Snyder met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
In October 1955, Snyder and Ginsberg hosted a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Snyder, Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen read, and Kenneth Rexroth acted as master of ceremonies. Snyder read his poem, "A Berry Feast."inspiring an interest in Zen Budhism that has become a hallmark of Beat writing. Jack Kerouac recalled this event in The Dharma Bums (1958) and used Snyder as the basis for the book's fictional hero, Japhy Ryder, a Beat poet, Asian scholar, and mountain climber. In the early months of 1956, Snyder moved into a cabin in Mill Valley and Kerouac later joined him there. Snyder named the place, Marin-an -- Japanese for "Horse Grove Hermitage" for the adjacent meadow with its grazing mares.
In May 1956, Snyder left for Japan to study and work at a Buddhist temple, Shokoku-ji, in conjunction with the activities of the First Zen Institute of America's Kyoto facility. He took a job, in August 1957, as a wiper in the engine room of the S.S. Sappa Creek and was at sea for eight months until the ship reached the United States in April 1958. He spent the next nine months involved in the San Francisco Bay Area literary scene before returning, in early 1959, to Kyoto, where he began studying under Oda Sesso Roshi at the Daitoku-ji monastery. During this time, Snyder's first book Riprap was published, printed in Kyoto by Cid Corman and distributed through City Lights Books.
Snyder married Joanne Kyger in Kyoto in February 1960. From late 1961 to early 1962, the pair spent six months travelling in Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal. They joined Allen Ginsberg in New Delhi and visited with the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala, where they had a notable discussion on hallucinogens.
His second collection Myths and Texts  came out in , followed by two pamphlets  that gained him a wide readership. Snyder returned to San Francisco in May 1964, and that fall he taught English classes at the University of California, Berkeley. Snyder and Kyger divorced in 1965, and he returned to Japan in October of that year.
On August 6, 1967, Snyder married Masa Uehara. The ceremony took place on the rim of an active volcano on Suwa-no-se, a small island north of Okinawa. Suwa-no-se was the site of the Banyan Ashram, founded by Nanao Sakaki, a poet, World War II veteran, and Japanese cultural radical. In 1967, Snyder briefly lived at the Banyan Ashram with the group of young people who gathered around Sakaki and called themselves Buzoku or Tribe.
In April 1968, Snyder's first son, Kai, was born in Kyoto. The family left Japan in December 1968 to make their home in California. A second son, Gen, was born in 1969. In 1970, Snyder took up residence with his wife and two young sons on San Juan Ridge, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Nevada City, California. With students and friends, Snyder built his home and named it Kitkitdizze, a Native American (Wintun) word for a local plant with a unique and pungent aroma. Snyder and Uehara divorced in 1989. 
Inherent in Snyder's philosophy is the concept of place and community:

We are all indigenous to this planet, this garden we are being called on by nature and history to reinhabit in good spirit. To restore the land one must live and work in a place. The place will welcome whomever approaches it with respect and attention. To work in a place is to bond to a place: people who work together in a place become a community, in time, grows a culture. To restore the wild is to restore culture.

Snyder leaped  from being a regional poet to national acclaim in 1974 with the publication of Turtle Island a political text that aimed to teach readers how to 'be ' in North America. Turtle Island, Snyder writes in the volumes introductory note, is "the new/old name for the continent based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millenia.... A Name: That we may see ourselves more accurately o this continent of watersheds and life communities."
Snyder's next bestseller was Axe Handles (1983), a less political collection of poems that espouses how to live in the world, specially as a family. Additionally, his intense submersion in envrironmental concerns, Zen Buddhism, and Native American, Chinese and Japanese cultures, permeate all of his works.
Snyder also  manages to practice what he preaches. At San Juan Ridge, he has established a lay Zen centre and an ecology centre. He has politicised the local community, helped them to understand nature and to be able to respect and defend their space.
Snyder was a founding member of the "Ring of Bone" Zendo, a country-based Mahayana Buddhist sangha, which is located on his property on San Juan Ridge. Meetings and sesshin were first held in Snyder's barn in the 1970's and later moved to the Zendo after it was constructed in 1982. The Zendo was named "Ring of Bone" after the poem by Lew Welch. Although the Zendo is an affiliate of the Diamond Sangha in Hawaii, it functions as a completely independent and self-governing church.
Using Kitkitdizze as his home base, Snyder toured extensively, giving readings and talks, doing what he termed, "hunting and gathering." In addition to his numerous appearances in the United States and Canada, his lecture tours took him to Australia in 1981, Sweden, Scotland, and England in 1982, Taiwan in 1990, Spain in 1992, Ireland in 1995, and Greece and the Czech Republic in 1998, Korea and Japan in 2000, Japan and France in 2002, and Japan again in 2003.
Snyder married Carole Koda in April 1991 in a ceremony at Kitkitdizze. She is a writer and has two daughters, Mika and Robin. Of Japanese-American heritage, Koda grew up in the South Dos Palos area of the San Joaquin Valley of California on a large rice farm that had first been planted by her father's parents. Her father researched and founded the "Kokuho Rose" line of rice and was a pioneer in using airplanes to plant rice from the air.
Snyder became a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis in 1986. He was instrumental in founding the "Nature and Culture" program (1993), an undergraduate academic major for students of society and the environment. He was also active in establishing "The Art of the Wild" (1992), an annual conference on wilderness and creative writing. The Academic Senate selected Snyder as the 2000 Faculty Research Lecturer, the University of California, Davis' highest faculty peer honor. He retired in 2002. 
Snyder has written  wrote more than twenty books of poetry and prose including: Riprap (1959), Myths & Texts (1960), Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems (1965), A Range of Poems (1966), The Back Country (1967), Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries for Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (1969), Regarding Wave (1970), Turtle Island (1974), The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work: Interviews & Talks, 1964-1979 (1980), Axe Handles (1983), Passage Through India (1983), Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947-1985 (1986), The Practice of the Wild (1990), No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992), A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, New and Selected Prose (1995), Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), The Gary Snyder Reader (1999), The High Sierra of California (2002), and Look Out: A Selection of Writings (2002).
In addition to his books, Snyder contributed his works of poetry and prose to numerous journals and anthologies. He often provided introductions and prefaces to scholarly translations, Buddhist studies, and poetry books. His writings have been translated into a number of languages, and he has been the subject of several critical books and many interviews.
Recognition of Snyder's achievements includes the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book Turtle Island, his appointment to the California Arts Council (1975-1979), and his induction into both the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1987) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993). After his long poem cycle and forty-year work, Mountains and Rivers Without End, was published, he was presented with the 1997 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. In conferring the award, the judges observed, "Gary Snyder through a long and distinguished career, has been doing what he refers to in one poem as 'the real work.' 'The real work' refers to writing poetry, an unprecedented kind of poetry, in which the most adventurous technique is put at the service of the great themes of nature and love. He has brought together the physical life and the inward life of the spirit to write poetry as solid and yet as constantly changing as the mountains and rivers of his American -- and -- universal landscape.
This quotation is striking in that it hints at the inherent relationship between Snyder's writing and his environmental activism – that one does not exist without the other. Snyder's poetry, religious beliefs, and his activism are then all related. By reading his poems to find ecological significance, one also finds religious meaning.
Snyder received the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Grant in 1998. Also in 1998, he was honored with the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (Society for the Propagation of Buddhism) award for his outstanding contributions in linking Zen thought and respect for the natural world across a lifelong body of poetry and prose. In 2001, he was awarded the California State Library Gold Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Science. 
 The pursuit of “relentless clarity” in everything characterizes Snyder’s life and art, but the pressures of the search are alleviated by his congenial nature and sense of humor. While emphasizing the importance of Zen “mindfulness,” Snyder has also stressed that “a big part of life is just being playful.” In accordance with this approach, Snyder has kept dogmatic or simplistic solutions out of his work and has cherished the wild and free nature of humankind. In “Off the Trail,” which he wrote for his wife, Koda, he envisions a life in which “all paths are possible” and maintains that “the trial’s not the way” to find wisdom or happiness. “We’re off the trail,/ You and I,” he declares, “and we chose it!” That choice—the decision to go against the grain “to be in line with the big flow”—has led to a poetry of “deeply human richness,” as Charles Molesworth puts it in his perceptive study of Snyder’s work, in which “a vision of plenitude” leads to a “liminal utopia, poised between fullness and yet more growth.
 Snyder’s poem "For All" puts a new spin on the takes the American Pledge of Allegiance. Instead of pledging allegiance to a flag, Snyder pledges allegiance to the land. Creating a new pledge of allegiance is a revolutionary act. Snyder takes the focus off national identity and instead put it on nature. While God is mentioned in the original Pledge of Allegiance, Snyder replaces him with the sun. By doing so, he is shifting the focus from an outside deity onto a natural object. Just as God is seen as an important, life-giving power, the sun can also be seen that way – the lives of plants, animals and humans would be impossible without the light the sun provides. By replacing God with the sun, Snyder says that the ecosystem is a complete and sacred entity unto itself.
It is also noteworthy that Snyder's new pledge of allegiance makes no specific mention of humans. Humans are implicitly referred to in the line, "and to the beings who thereon dwell," but the poem never raises humans above the other forms of life on Turtle Island. Again,this demonstrates Snyder's belief   that humans are only a part of the world, and not necessarily the most important one.
Happy birthday to this trailblazing Beat icon, and wise and witty charming poet who has made such an indelible mark on late twentieth and twenty-first century thought, who is still writing, his words still pushing the edge of contemporary thought, continuing to speak for all.

For All - Gary Snyder

Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.

Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small hard as toes
cold nose dripping 
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.

I pledge alleigance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpretation for all. 

and some more from the master



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