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.
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." 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.
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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