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Gary Snyder... of Nature and the “Beat Generation” and Life On the Road

Snyder’s work blends physical reality and precise observations of nature with inner insight received primarily through the practice of Zen Buddhism. While Snyder has gained attention as a spokesman for the preservation of the natural world and its earth-conscious cultures, he is not simply a “back-to-nature” poet with a facile message. In American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, Kenneth Rexroth observed that although Snyder proposes “a new ethic, a new esthetic, [and] a new life style,” he is also “an accomplished technician who has learned from the poetry of several languages and who has developed a sure and flexible style capable of handling any material he wishes.” According to Charles Altieri in Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s, Snyder’s achievement “is a considerable one. Judged simply in aesthetic terms, according to norms of precision, intelligence, imaginative play, and moments of deep resonance, he easily ranks among the best poets of his generation. Moreover, he manages to provide a fresh perspective on metaphysical themes, which he makes relevant and compelling.” ...

Kerouac modeled his character Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums on Snyder, and the poet encouraged his friends to take an interest in Eastern philosophy as an antidote to the ills of the West. Just as the Beats were gaining nation-wide notoriety, Snyder moved to Japan in 1956 on a scholarship from the First Zen Institute of America. He remained abroad almost continuously for the next twelve years. Part of that time he lived in an ashram and devoted himself to strenuous Zen study and meditation. He also travelled extensively, visiting India and Indonesia, and even venturing as far as Istanbul on an oil tanker, the Sappa Creek. His first two poetry collections, Riprap (1959) and Myths & Texts (1960), are miniature narratives capturing Snyder’s travels and life working in the natural world; they also represent a vigorous attempt to achieve freedom from the “establishment” mores of urban America. After returning to the United States, Snyder built his own house—along the Yuba River in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains—where he has lived since.

-- the Poetry Foundation

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A Tribute to Gary Snyder

• https://youtu.be/34vDHhFrc2c

(2022)

• https://www.loa.org/books/711-collected-poems/

• https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691747/gary-snyder-collected-poems-loa-357-by-gary-snyder--jack-shoemaker-and-anthony-hunt-eds/

• https://www.amazon.com/Gary-Snyder-Collected-Library-America/dp/1598537210/

Gary Snyder is one of America’s indispensable poets. Winner of the Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes, among many others, he is also the unofficial “poet laureate of deep ecology,” an influential seeker of alternatives to Western modes of living and thinking, and for many, a kind of personal sage, his poetry a species of wisdom literature. With this Library of America edition, Snyder’s poetry has been collected for the first time in a single, authoritative volume, prepared in close collaboration with the author. Here are all eleven books of poetry in their original order of publication, spanning the entire arc of his long career from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1959/1965) to This Present Moment (2016), along with many uncollected poems, drafts, fragments, and translations in newly authoritative texts reflecting Snyder’s corrections and revisions.

Early works like Myths & Texts (1960), The Back Country (1968), and Regarding Wave (1970) reflect Snyder’s hardscrabble upbringing in the Pacific Northwest and his experience as a logger, fire-lookout, freighter crewman, and Buddhist initiate. They reveal an idiosyncratic and extraordinarily cosmopolitan imagination, one that found inspiration not only in the writings of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg—contemporaries and friends with whom he is often linked—but also in East Asian literature and philosophy, indigenous North American myths and legends, and in the Western poetic tradition from Sappho and Ovid to Whitman and Pound.

Snyder’s work at mid-career, most notably his Pulitzer Prize–winning Turtle Island (1974), reveals the impact of the Vietnam War and the burgeoning environmental movement, as he takes on a public, even hortatory voice, becoming a kind of elder statesman of the counterculture and spokesman for the natural world. Axe Handles (1983), Left Out in the Rain (1986), and new poems from No Nature (1992) present his spare and lyric reflections on mindfulness, family and community life, natural and karmic cycles, and mortality. Over forty years in the making and considered by many to be his masterpiece, his long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) brilliantly distills and concentrates a lifetime’s themes; the autobiographical haibun of Danger on Peaks (2004) recall his youthful ascent of Mount St. Helens, seedbed for a series of reflections on disasters from Hiroshima to 9/11.

Rounding out the volume is a selection of more than fifty rarities — from little magazines, chapbooks, broadsides, and rediscovered manuscripts — including nine poems published for the first time.

See a PDF of the table of contents for Gary Snyder: Collected Poems

• https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Snyder_TOC.pdf

Library of America

A unique undertaking: To celebrate the words that have shaped America

• https://www.loa.org/about/

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