Gary Snyder: High peak haikus

In October 1955, hand-written posters appeared in the bars and cafésof San Francisco's bohemian North Beach district: "Invitation to aReading. 6 Poets at 6 Gallery. Remarkable collection of angels on stagereading their poetry. No charge. Charming event." The poets thatevening half a century ago were Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, PhilipWhalen, Philip Lamantia, Kenneth Rexroth as MC, and Gary Snyder,described by Ginsberg at the time as "a bearded youth of 26, formerly alumberjack and seaman, who had lived with the American Indians".Ginsberg added graciously that Snyder was "perhaps more remarkable thanany of the others".

The Six Gallery reading has gone down in history for the firstpublic performance of Ginsberg's poem "Howl". The task of following itsapocalyptic declarations ("I saw the best minds of my generationdestroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked") fell to Snyder, whoadmits to having doubted whether he could hold the suddenly stunnedaudience. He read parts of a long poem rooted in Native Americanfolklore, "Myths & Texts", about as far from "Howl" as it ispossible to get, swinging between the Buddha and a black bear "married/ To a woman whose breasts bleed / From nursing the half-human cubs".Snyder remembers the evening for "the feeling people had, by the timeit was over, that it had been a historical moment. No question aboutit. From that time on, there was a poetry reading every night somewherein the Bay area. It launched the poetry reading as a cultural event inAmerican life."

Jack Kerouac, who was also present, drunkenly winding up theaudience, later recalled Snyder as "the only one who didn't look like apoet". While the others were "either too dainty in their aestheticism,or too hysterically cynical", Snyder made Kerouac think of "the oldtimeAmerican heroes". Three years later, Kerouac capped his homage bypublishing The Dharma Bums, a novel featuring Snyder as themountain-climbing, haiku-hatching hero, Japhy Ryder.

Snyder might still be taken for a lumberjack rather than a poet. Hewears boots and a cap, keeps a multi-purpose knife looped on to hisbelt (nowadays next to a mobile phone), and spends a large part of eachday outdoors, working with his hands. In the 1960s, he was part of thealternative literary movement that spread across the US and Europe.Seamus Heaney recalls first reading Snyder's early poems "in a littleanthology of Beat poets published in London. By the time I met him inperson, at a party in Berkeley in 1971, I had caught up with the workhe had published since. He was togged out in jeans and a rough cottonshirt. You could easily imagine him hunkering under a stone wall on theAran Islands."

Snyder and his wife Carole live with their frisky poodle pup in asingle-storey house he built, with professional help, in the foothillsof the Sierra Nevada, four hours' drive north-east from San Francisco.Deer peep through the foliage at the visitor on the three-mile unpavedroad to Snyder's ranch. On a walk in the surrounding pine and black-oakforest, he points out claw marks on a tree-trunk made by a bear - thesame bear, perhaps, that features in a recent poem eating all the pearsfrom a fenced-off tree by the house. A wildcat dispatched his chickens.Until recently, the family had only an outside lavatory some 50 yardsaway, which, he says wryly, "could be dangerous in the mornings" -pumas also lurk among the pines, though seldom seen - but the Snydersnow have the luxury of an inside bathroom with a polished wooden tub.He called the place Kitkitdizze, a local Wintun Indian word for thesurrounding low ground-cover bush, also known as mountain misery. "Wehad our hands full the first 10 years getting up walls and roofs,bathhouse, barn, the woodshed. I set up my library and wrote poems andessays by lantern light." Kai, Snyder's eldest son, was a child whenwork on the house began in 1969. He has memories "of heat and dust anda lot of people working, and me getting underfoot". In the beginning,says Kai, now in his late 30s, "all our water had to be pumped by hand,which my dad did every day for about 40 minutes. It was good exercise,I guess. All the cooking was done on a wood stove, and our heating wasproduced by the same method. It was like a 19th-century lifestyle inlots of ways."

A new wing was added when Snyder received a Bollin-gen prize($50,000), for "lifetime achievement in poetry", in 1997. He now has atelephone line, though no TV aerial, and is hooked up to email, wherebyhe communicates with a worldwide literary and ecological network offriends. "We are off the electrical grid," he says, not without pride,"but have a stand-alone power system, involving solar panels andgenerators. We cut our own firewood from the down and dead trees. Andof course we keep things in stock, a pantry full of food, half a year'sworth of rice." He serves tea in the Chinese manner, and for lunchKorean noodles, with local wine freely to hand.

Last year, Snyder published his first collection of new poems in 20years. Readers of Danger on Peaks soon find themselves in familiarterritory: poems about work and nature, frequently with ecological andoriental overtones. A lifelong student of Buddhism, he lived in Japanfor 10 years during the 1950s and 60s, where he took the vows of a Zenmonk. While serious about his Buddhism, he is undogmatic. The subjectis sometimes treated with humour in his work. A poem that begins "TheDharma is like an avocado! / Some parts so ripe", moves on to "thegreat big round seed",

Hard and slippery,
It looks like
You should plant it - but then
It shoots out through your fingers -
gets away.

Even when it goes unmentioned in the verse itself, themeditative tendency sits behind his work and nature poems. He writesabout repairing a car with the same attentiveness he gives to Zenritual. A Snyder poem about sweeping a path, or fiddling with theengine of a pick-up, is about what it says it's about. "If somebodywants to find some moral interpretation, that's all right with me. Butbasically yes, it's about repairing the car. Who needs more than that?"Some poems, such as "Getting in the Wood", are made up of the names oftools and accessories: "Wedge and sledge, peavey and maul, / littleaxe, canteen, piggyback can . . . / All to gather the dead and thedown." The voice emerges from a clear gaze and a clear mind, qualitiesthat have characterised Snyder's poetry since the opening poem of hisfirst book, Riprap (1959):

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.

Heaney, to whom one of the poems in Danger on Peaks isdedicated, says: "From the start I trusted the unleavened quality ofthe poems, the materiality of what they started from, and liked thembetter the closer they hewed to sensation and the vernacular. Andhearing him read strengthened my admiration. He wasn't in a hurry, notout to suck up to the audience or harangue them. The voice gave spaceand weight to the words, so that they back-echoed a bit." A poet of ayounger generation, Glyn Maxwell, praises what he calls Snyder's "wide,gladdening openness". He believes the "laid-back, jotted-down tone ofSnyder's verse masks an acute sensitivity to rhythm and assonance. Hehas a wonderful ability to convey the physical nature of a moment:'Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup / Looking down for miles /Through high still air.'" Heaney adds: "If a bricklayer's hand couldspeak, it might sound like early Snyder. If a buddha backpacked innorthern California, he too might sound like Snyder."

Recently turned 75, Snyder is wiry, his face weathered, with eyesthat reminded Kerouac of "an old Chinese sage". Sleepy some of thetime, they widen with curiosity and frequently crease with mirth. Theremoteness of the 100-acre ranch is such that Carole, who is Japanese,is excited at the prospect of "meeting someone new", but the Snyderslive in a widespread community of about 40 families, "each place prettyself-sufficient, though we all cooperate and lend each other things".Kai recalls that he and his brother "walked to school, about 45 minutesthrough the woods to a one-room schoolhouse. The kids were a mix oforiginal redneck population and the new wave of people who were comingback to the woods to try to live more in touch with nature and in amore sustainable way. My best friend at school was the son of a loggingfamily, very conservative. His family kind of avoided my family. Butthey were good people."

Snyder is at pains to distinguish his way of life from "aback-to-the-land, counter-cultural, utopian image of living outside ofsociety. That's all right if you're going to just go like Thoreau didfor a year, and you can walk over to Emerson's for dinner. But this ismore like what the farm and the ranch in the west is, where people liveat a distance, with a certain amount of genuine sustainable skill,though for the time being our life depends on machinery - chainsaws,generators, grass-cutters and so forth. Now, when I first came up hereI didn't have any of that, and there may come a time again when I don'thave it. And so there are other strategies, too." Kai emphasises hisfather's attachment to "doing things in the old ways, using tools thatare made locally, things that are made with an intimate understandingof the place where you live. It's about being rooted in a place, andalso understanding that the world is changing very fast and thattechnologies may only be a transitory crutch, a substitute for a deeperunderstanding of how to live in a place."

The nearest shops are 30 miles away, in leafy Nevada City, acreation of the 1849 gold rush, now no larger than a sizeable Englishvillage. Greeted on all sides as he makes his way along the mainstreet, reminiscent of Wild West filmsets, Snyder has time for everyonewhile giving the impression he'd be unhappy anywhere but on his ownpatch. In a local bar, a large, hearty man recognises him from a poetryreading at a farm almost 40 years ago. His recollection of the event isperfect, while the poet's is hazy.

"Don't you remember, you signed the book to me and Ann?"
"I think I do remember," Snyder says.
"Anddon't you remember, the cow took a bite out of the book? And you signedit to the cow as well? And then the cow crapped on the book?"
"I must remember," Snyder says, unfalteringly polite.

Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930 and raised ona farmstead north of Seattle. His parents, Harold and Lois, were"semi-educated, proud, western-American-style working-class. Myfather's brothers all went to sea or worked in logging camps. My motherwas from a railroad town in Texas, very much a feminist rebel." TheSnyders owned a small dairy farm, but required outside work to keepticking over. When Snyder was a child, "there was no work for sevenyears". Family entertainment consisted of reading aloud in theevenings: "Robert Burns, Edgar Allan Poe - very musical poetry whichcaught my ear." Even as a small boy he was known for his love ofnature. "I would go and cook and stay alone for a night or two, when Iwas just eight or nine years old, quite far from the house. At the ageof 15, I became a mountaineer and began to climb all the peaks of thePacific north west. The kind that require ropes and ice axes. Snowpeaks. Volcanoes. Big ones." He read widely throughout childhood andadolescence but "my first interest in writing poetry came from theexperience of mountaineering. I couldn't find any other way to talkabout it." The adventure of scaling summits blended with the aestheticthrill of viewing oriental landscape paintings at the Seattle ArtMuseum, to inspire an approach to poetry that, while it has developedover the decades, has not altered fundamentally. In 1996, he finallypublished Mountains and Rivers Without End, a long poem begun 40 yearsearlier.

After studying anthropology and literature at Reed College, Oregon,Snyder enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1953, tostudy oriental languages. He went on to translate poetry from Chineseand Japanese. His interest in east Asian culture and thought wasspurred, he says, by "an ethical realisation that the Judeo-Christiantradition gives moral value only to the human being. I discovered thatthere were other traditions, including Hindu and Buddhist and NativeAmerican, in which all biological life is considered part of the samedrama, that the world is not simply a theatre for the human being, inwhich everything else is just a stage prop. That became a very clearimage to me." In the summer holidays, he worked as a fire-lookout inthe Washington Cascade Mountains. "All through July and August. Youtake just the food you need for that time, and a radio." There he foundthe opportunity to practise meditation, study Chinese, and write hisfirst surviving poems. Many years later, on Mount Sourdough, hediscovered that a scribbled verse was still pinned to the lookout'scabin wall: "I, the poet Gary Snyder / Stayed six weeks in fifty-three/ On this ridge and on this rock / & saw what every Lookout sees."

He plays down his work as a translator; the best-known works are theCold Mountain Poems of the eighth-century hermit Han-Shan, a T'angdynasty dharma bum. The 24 versions, made in the mid-1950s, read asthough straight from the pen of the young Snyder, already planning alife of wood-chopping and water-pumping, off the electrical grid:

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
... there's no through trail
In summer, ice doesn't melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?

Most translations from Chinese and Japanese are "too wordy", hesays. "The early translators would not believe what was in front oftheir eyes, which was very short lines. Arthur Waley's translations areoutmoded now, though in their time they were helpful. Ezra Pound was abrilliant amateur, who by luck came up with a few good lines, but notmany." The economy of classical Chinese poetry has influenced his own."So much occidental poetry is full of religious imagery or mythologicalreference, both of which are absent from the Chinese. Chinese poetry issecular, logical and unsymbolic."

An interest in Asian life and culture was "in the air" in SanFrancisco in the 1950s. "When I got into that scene I realised therewere people thinking along similar lines, and also doing similar thingsin poetry. Of course, there was a big Asian population in the city. Thepresence was palpable."

Snyder points out that the San Francisco poetry renaissance wasalready advanced, in the work of Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicerand others, before the subversive Ginsberg gang arrived from the eastcoast: "They just publicised it." Ginsberg died eight years ago. Whilenot averse to being classified as one of the survivors of the BeatGeneration, Snyder stresses "that it's a historical term. Indulging anostalgia for it is not interesting. People say: 'Are you a Beatwriter?' - I get called a Beat writer all the time - and I say: 'I wasat one time, briefly, but going by what I have done in the past 30years, no'." His writing, he says, "belongs in the non-academic wing ofcontemporary American poetry. Beat is too limiting a word." The criticMarjorie Perloff, who has written widely on American poetry, says shenever thinks of Snyder as a Beat poet. "His poetry has a directness andimmediacy that appeals to young people. He started out as a follower ofWilliam Carlos Williams, using short, free-verse lines and colloquialdiction, but as time has gone on he has shown himself to be first andforemost a nature poet in the Emerson-Thoreau tradition. The Beats wereessentially urban, engaged in oppositional social activity, whereasSnyder's forte is an account of the relationship of man - and I do meanman, because Snyder is rather patriarchal - to his environment." Heaneyfeels that "he's right to resist the Beat label. He loves barehandedencounters with the here and now, but cares deeply for tradition. Youmight say he knows equally the workings of tanka and tanker. He keepshis ear to the ground, and listens more than he howls."

Ginsberg remained a lifelong friend -in a late poem, he depictshimself reading Snyder's Selected Poems unselfconsciously while sittingon the loo - and was a partner in purchasing the land on which theSnyders live. Through the pines, Snyder points out a small house builtby Ginsberg, now occupied by Snyder's younger son Gen, a manuallabourer. Kai is an environmental scientist; Carole, whom he married in1991, has two daughters, Mika, who has recently graduated from lawschool, and Robin, a student, both in their 20s.

The last letters Snyder received from Kerouac, who died in abroken-down state in 1969, were ranting and insulting, but Snyderremains affectionate towards the man who mythologised him in a cultnovel before he reached the age of 30. "Jack was a dedicated person. Asa Buddhist he had some very good insights. It was all mixed up with hisFrench-Canadian Roman Catholicism, but so what? It's hard to know whypeople self-destruct. They do so for reasons of deep and ancient karma,qualities of their character they were born with." As for the unwantedburden of being Japhy Ryder, "the only problem I have is that I have tokeep reminding people it's a novel. There's a lot of fiction woven intoThe Dharma Bums. And I am not Japhy Ryder."

As the publicity surrounding the Beat Generation spread, Snydertypically did his own thing and left for Japan. Settled in a bare room- "just a few books and a table" - in the Shokoku-ji Temple in northernKyoto, one of several temple systems of the Rinzai sect of Zen, heacted as personal assistant to a Roshi, or Zen master. "I spent myfirst year cooking breakfast and lunch for him, and teaching himEnglish. At the same time, I was studying Japanese and meditating forfour or five hours a day." One week out of each month, he attended thelocal Zen monastery for intensive meditation, or sesshin, which means"concentrating the mind". In an essay, Snyder described the typicalday: rising at 3am, dashing "icy water on the face from a stone bowl",then sitting crosslegged for lengthy periods. "One's legs may hurtduring long sitting, but there is no relief until the Jikijitsu ringshis bell." After a 20-minute walking interval, the young monks resumetheir sitting. "Anyone not seated when the Jikijitsu whips around thehall is knocked off his cushion." Writing to a friend, Snyder quipped,"I wear me Buddhist robes & look just like a blooming oriental."

After a brief visit to the US in 1959, he returned to Japan, thistime with the poet Joanne Kyger. The pair were soon married (Snyder hadpreviously been married briefly to Alison Gass). Judging by Kyger'sJapan and India Journals (1981), conflicting expectations of life inAsia surfaced immediately. Kyger writes: "Shortly after arriving inJapan, Gary asked me, 'Don't you want to study Zen and lose your ego?'I was utterly shocked: 'What! After all this struggle to attain one?'"The Journals end with Kyger returning home alone. "He wouldn't let mekeep a wooden spoon," she writes. In Snyder's new book there is acomplimentary reference to Kyger's poetry. "I think we can say we aregood friends now," he says.

It is a curiosity of Snyder's career that while his first fullcollections - A Range of Poems and The Back Country - were issued by aLondon publisher, Fulcrum Press, in 1966 and 1967, he has barely beenpublished in Britain since. His early work was welcomed by, amongothers, Thom Gunn, who wrote appreciatively on Snyder in more than oneLondon journal. Snyder's British readership has had to depend mostly onAmerican imports (readily available), which puzzles him. "There is moreinterest in my work in Germany, France, the Czech Republic." In the US,some of his collections, such as Riprap and The Back Country, havenever been out print. Turtle Island, which won a Pulitzer prize in1975, is reprinted roughly once a year. Heaney and Maxwell lament theabsence of British editions of Snyder's work. Maxwell says: "Perhaps hedoesn't fit, as he's not seductively obscure or ringingly accessible.And his is a foreign landscape, a faraway country, really: Americabefore us, without us, after us."

As a writer who, from the beginning, has yoked ecological concernsto literary values, Snyder is often asked about the high-consuming,short-attention-span hazards of modern existence. In short, what'swrong with the way we live, and what can be done? "I don't feelinclined to make the first humanistic, easy answer, which is: We mustchange our values. It would be foolish to put forward simple solutions.However, for those who can, one of the things to do is not to move. Tostay put. That doesn't mean don't travel; it means have a place and getinvolved in what can be done in that place. That's the only way we'regoing to have a representative democracy in America. Nobody staysanywhere long enough to take responsibility for a local community." Thepresent US government is "demonstrably bad" for the environment. "Underthe Clinton administration, the Environmental Protection Agency wasactually called on to defend and monitor the environment. The Bushadministration made it clear it wanted the EPA to be on the side ofindustry. The fox is in the chicken run, and in this case the fox isthe oil industry." With oil prices rising, he foresees an era of"turmoil and turbulence and probably dictatorships. People andsubcultures who have the flexibility and know-how to slip through thatwill do so. So here is a Thoreauvian answer to the question, What is tobe done? Learn to be more self-reliant, reduce your desires, and takecare of yourself and your family."

The Observer, James Campbell, Saturday 16 July 2005