Dana Goodyear, Profiles, "Zen Master," The New Yorker, October 20, 2008Gary Snyder, the Zen poet, lives on a hundred backcountry acres in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, meditates mornings, and gives thanks for his food before he eats it. He likes a boilermaker at dinnertime and, on occasion, the bullfrogs from his pond. Snyder, who is seventy-eight, has written nineteen books of poems and essays that are engaged with, among other things, watersheds, geology, logging, backpacking, Native American storytelling, sex, coyotes, and Chinese landscape painting. He is a poet of the Pacific Rim. The last book he wants to write, he says, is a “personal dharma memoir,” a chronicle of Buddhism in the late twentieth century. Snyder spent much of the late fifties and the sixties in Kyoto, training as a Zen monk. He had left the West Coast in 1956, several months after participating in the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, at which Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl.” Describes the influence of Kenneth Rexroth on Snyder and discusses Jack Kerouac’s use of Snyder as a model for the character Japhy Ryder in “The Dharma Bums.” In 1959, Snyder published “Riprap,” a group of short, tough poems composed to the rhythm of physical labor. Writer tells about a recent trip Snyder made to New York to participate in a symposium at the Asia Society. Performance is an essential part of Snyder’s poetry. Reading aloud is crucial to his process: he improvises, makes substitutions, supplies glosses on difficult words. Discusses Snyder’s impatience at being called a Beat writer. Tells about Snyder’s farmhouse, Kitkitdizze, which he and his wife built with volunteers in the summer of 1970. Many of the volunteers stayed; some pooled their resources and bought adjacent property. This community became the Snyder’s testing ground for the ideas he was beginning to explore in print. Tells about Snyder’s environmental treatise, “Four Changes,” which is informed by the Buddhist principle of ahimsa, or non-harming, and also by Native American religious thought. Visitors to Kitkitdizze over the years have included Peter Coyote, the actor, Jerry Brown, then the governor of California, and a host of uninvited hippies who expected to be edified and fed. Writer discusses Snyder’s poetry, comparing his rhythms to those of Ezra Pound. Quotes Seamus Heaney and Thom Gunn on Snyder. Snyder is sometimes categorized as a nature poet, which he calls “the kiss of death.” Snyder’s most complex and difficult work is “Mountains and Rivers Without End,” a poem cycle that absorbed him from 1956 to 1996. Tells about a reading Snyder gave at the Parsons Lodge in Yosemite this past August.
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