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Authors
Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
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Snyder’s poems have been published by several different presses, often with duplication of poems. Riprap, originally published in 1959, is most easily obtained in Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1965, 1991). Myths and Texts first appeared in 1960. The Blue Sky first appeared in 1969 and reappeared in Six Sections of Mountains and Rivers without End plus One (1970). Other volumes include The Back Country (1968), Regarding Wave (1970), Turtle Island(1974), Axe Handles (1983), Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947–1985 (1986), No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992), and Danger on Peaks (2004). In 1996 Snyder published the completion of Mountains and Rivers without End. He has also published important prose collections dealing with ecology, such as Earth House Hold (1969) and A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds (1995). A gathering of Snyder’s prose and poetry appears in The Gary Snyder Reader (1999). The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 1964–1979, edited by William Scott McLean, appeared in 1980. Helpful critical discussion of Snyder’s work can be found in Sherman Paul’s In Search of the Primitive (1986) and Patrick Murphy’s A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and Prose of Gary Snyder (2000). An interview with Snyder appears in The Paris Review (141, 1996).
Born in San Francisco, Gary Snyder was raised in the state of Washington and later moved to Portland, Oregon. Snyder has enjoyed a rich and varied academic life -- he studied Native American anthropology at Reed College, linguistics at Indiana University, classical Chinese at the University of California at Berkeley, and Zen Buddhism in Japan. With his contemporaries
Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Snyder became associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. His poetry, which is known for its balance of stillness and exuberant energy, incorporates elements of shamanism, the natural world, and living and oral traditions that challenge many western values. Snyder has written books of essays on politics and ecology, including
Earth House Hold (1969) and
The Practice of the Wild (1990). His collections of poetry include
Axe Handles (1983),
Left Out in the Rain (1986), and
No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
As contemporary poets with a special interest in the natural world, Snyder and Galway Kinnell also share connections with the open-form experimentation of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, and various "naked poetry" schools and movements from the 1960s on. They are also poets with a sense of humor. While Snyder's poems often echo strongly with theology and aesthetics drawn from Zen and classical Japanese culture, Kinnell's work recalls pastoral poets of his own New England and figures and tropes from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
1. Snyder's Riprap (1959) and Kinnell's Cemetery Angels (1985) are short poems about stone and about miraculous transformations. Compare the themes of these poems and the way that a carved angel and a collection of rocks become controlling metaphors, or conceits in something like the Renaissance sense of the word.
2. Kinnell's The Porcupine (1969) gradually evolves into a comparison of the porcupine to the self. Where and in what spirit does the comparison begin? Is the "I" at the end of the poem, the self to whom the porcupine is compared, presented as everyone, an "I" like Whitman's in Song of Myself ? Is it a confessionalist "I," something much more discrete and private? Are there moments in sections 4-6 which help you develop an answer to this question?
3. Snyder's The Blue Sky (1969) ends with a repeated, mystical-sounding phrase, like the ending of Eliot's The Waste Land. Vastness and emptiness are also invoked at the end of Straight-Creek--Great Burn (1974) and Ripples on the Surface (1993). What do words such as "empty" and "vast" and "nothing" signify to Snyder? How do these poems combine to clarify his perspective?
4. Compared to the endings of the Snyder poems listed above, the conclusions of Kinnell's St. Francis and the Sow (1980), After Making Love We Hear Footsteps (1980), and The Porcupine seem both full and focused. What do Kinnell's final images and perceptions suggest to you about his sensibility, especially in comparison with Snyder's?
