Featuring Gary Snyder
Kenneth Rexroth called him “…the leading ideologist and critic of the counter-culture… a poet whose values are exposed in the factual experience of the poem with the presentational immediacy of concrete happenings.”
Gary Snyder is a quiet contemplative who walks through the modern history of the United States. A distinctive poet, orientalist, lover of ecology and follower of Eastern thought, he was born in 1930 in San Francisco, California. Although he spent his entire childhood in the woods, he often later found himself in the centre of things. He was, for example, an eye witness to the famous poetry reading in San Francisco‘s Gallery Six, where Ginsberg’s Howl was read for the first time. Jack Kerouac was also there, drinking wine from his paper cup. He wrote about Snyder in his Dharma Bums: „Japhy Ryder was a kid from eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the woods with his father and mother and sister, from the beginning a woods boy, an axman, farmer, interested in animals and Indian lore so that when he finally got to college by hook or crook he was already well equipped for his early studies in anthropology and later in Indian myth and in the actual texts of Indian mythology. Finally he learned Chinese and Japanese and became an Oriental scholar and discovered the greatest Dharma Bums of them all, the Zen Lunatics of China and Japan.“
Indeed, Snyder was soon lost to Asian culture. He became a proponent of Zen Buddhism in the United States and even spent years in a Zen monastery. This experience seriously influenced him during his work on Turtle Island, which he titled after the Native American name for North America, and for which he won a Pulitzer Priz in 1975.
Almost eighty years old, Gary Snyder now lives in a mountain
farmstead in the Yuba River watershed of the northern Sierra Nevada,
where he and his friends built a house that drew on rural-Japanese and
Native-American architectural ideas.
Bibliography:
Myths & Texts (1960)
Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965)
The Back Country (1967)
Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1969)
Regarding Wave (1969)
Earth House Hold (1969)
Turtle Island (1974)
The Old Ways (1977)
He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (1979)
The Real Work (1980)
Axe Handles (1983)
Passage Through India (1983)
Left Out in the Rain (1988)
The Practice of the Wild (1990)
No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992)
A Place in Space (1995)
narrator of the audio book version of Kazuaki Tanahashi's Moon in a Dewdrop from Dogen's Shobogenzo
Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996)
The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations (1999)
Danger on Peaks (2005)
Back on the Fire: Essays (2007)
Related websites:
http://www.enotes.com/poetry-criticism/snyder-gary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Snyder
http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/snyder.html
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/167
