Young Gary Snyder, on one of his early book covers

Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet (originally, often associated with the Beat Generation), essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Since the 1970s, he has frequently been described as the 'laureate of Deep Ecology'. From the 1950s on, he has published travel-journals and essays from time to time. His work in his various roles reflects his immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has also translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. As a social critic, Snyder has much in common with Lewis Mumford, Aldous Huxley, Karl Hess, Aldo Leopold, and Karl Polanyi. Snyder was for many years on the faculty of the University of California, Davis, and for a time served on the California Arts Council. Image File history File links Sourced from Web (in-print book listings) - fair-use: book cover. ... May 8 is the 128th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (129th in leap years). ... Year 1930 (MCMXXX) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link is to a full 1930 calendar). ... The poor poet A poet is a person who writes poetry. ... The Beat Generation was a group of American writers who came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. ... The historic Blue Marble photograph, which helped bring environmentalism to the public eye. ... The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry has been presented since 1922 for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. ... Deep ecology is a recent branch of ecological philosophy (ecosophy) that considers humankind as an integral part of its environment. ... Travel literature is literature which records the people, events, sights and feelings of an author who is touring a foreign place for the pleasure of travel. ... Buddhism is a dharmic, non-theistic religion, which is also a philosophy and a system of psychology. ... Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian of technology and science. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Karl Hess Karl Hess (May 25, 1923–April 22, 1994), was a speechwriter, editor, political philosopher, hippie, welder, motorcycle racer, tax resister and libertarian. ... Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 - April 21, 1948) was a United States ecologist, forester, and environmentalist. ... Karl Paul Polanyi (October 21, 1886 - Pickering, Ontario April 23, 1964) was a Hungarian intellectual known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and his influential book The Great Transformation. ... The University of California, Davis, commonly known as UC Davis, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, and was established as the University Farm in 1905. ...

Early life

Jared Alexander Brooks was born in San Francisco, California to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder. Snyder is of German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestry. His family, impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to Kitsap County, Washington, when he was two years old. There they tended a small dairy and made cedar-wood shingles, until moving to Portland, Oregon ten years later. Nickname: The City by the Bay; Fog City; The City Location of the City and County of San Francisco, California Coordinates: Country United States of America State California City-County San Francisco  - Mayor Gavin Newsom Area    - City  47 sq mi (122 km²)  - Land  46. ... The Great Depression was a worldwide economic downturn which started in October of 1929 and lasted through most of the 1930s. ... Kitsap County is a county located in the state of Washington. ... Official language(s) None Capital Olympia Largest city Seattle Area  Ranked 18th  - Total 71,342 sq mi (184,827 km²)  - Width 240 miles (385 km)  - Length 360 miles (580 km)  - % water 6. ... Nickname: City of Roses, Stumptown, Bridgetown, PDX Location in Multnomah County and the state of Oregon Coordinates: Country United States State Oregon County Multnomah County Incorporated February 8, 1851  - Mayor Tom Potter Area    - City 376. ...

At the age of seven, Snyder was laid up for four months by an accident. “So my folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle public library,” he recalled in interview, “and it was then I really learned to read and from that time on was voracious — I figure that accident changed my life. At the end of four months, I had read more than most kids do by the time they're 18. And I didn't stop.”

Also during his ten childhood-years in Washington, Snyder became aware of the presence of the Coast Salish people and developed an interest in the Native American peoples in general and their traditional relationship with nature. A Hupa man. ...

Snyder's parents separated and, in adolescence, Gary and his sister were raised by their mother, who worked during this period as a newspaper journalist. One of Gary's boyhood jobs was as a newspaper copy-boy. Also, during his teen years, he worked as a camp counselor, and went mountain-climbing with the Mazamas youth-group. Climbing remained an interest of his, especially during his twenties and thirties. The Mazamas are a mountaineering club based in Portland, Oregon, United States. ...

In 1947, he started attending Reed College as a scholarship-student. Here he met, and for a time roomed with, Carl Proujan, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. At Reed, Snyder published his first poems in a student journal. He also spent a summer working as a seaman (an experience he was to repeat in the mid 1950s). As much as a way to earn money and experience other cultures in port-cities, this work served to put him in more touch with the oceans and other aspects of the hydrosphere. In 1951, he graduated with a BA in anthropology and literature and spent the summer working as a timber-scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, experiences which formed the basis for some of his earliest published poems (including "A Berry Feast"), later collected in the book The Back Country. Snyder worked the next year as a fire-lookout in a national-park (Desolation Peak). He also encountered the basic ideas of Buddhism and, through its arts, some of the Far East's traditional attitudes toward nature. Going on to Indiana University to study anthropology (where Snyder also practiced self-taught Zen meditation), he left after a single semester to return to San Francisco and to 'sink or swim as a poet'. Reed College is a liberal arts college located in Portland, Oregon in the Eastmoreland neighborhood. ... Philip Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002) was a poet and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat generation. ... Lewis Barrett Welch, Jr. ... The movement of water around, over, and through the Earth is called the water cycle, a key process of the hydrosphere. ... A bachelors degree (Artium Baccalaureus, A.B. or B.A.) is usually an undergraduate academic degree awarded for a course or major that generally lasts for three, four, or in some cases and countries, five or six years. ... Anthropolology (from the Greek word , man or person+knowledge) consists of the study of humanity (see genus Homo). ... Buddhism is a dharmic, non-theistic religion, which is also a philosophy and a system of psychology. ... The far east as a cultural block includes East Asia, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia and South Asia. ... Indiana University is the principal campus of the Indiana University system. ... This article is about the religion Zen. ...

The Beats

Back in San Francisco, Snyder lived with Whalen, who shared his growing interest in Zen Buddhism. Snyder's reading of the writings of D.T. Suzuki had in fact been a factor in his decision not to continue as a graduate-student in anthropology, and in 1953 he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley to study Oriental culture and languages. Snyder continued to spend summers working in the forests, including one summer as a trail-builder in Yosemite. He spent some months in 1955 living in a cabin in Mill Valley with Jack Kerouac. It was also at this time that Snyder was an occasional student at the American Academy of Asian Studies, where Saburo Hasegawa and Alan Watts, among others, were teaching. During these years, Snyder was writing and collecting his own work, as well as embarking on the translation of the "Cold Mountain" poems by the 8th-century Chinese recluse Han Shan; this work appeared in chapbook-form in 1969, under the title Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems. A woodblock print by Yoshitoshi, (Japan, 1887) depicting Bodhidharma the founder of Chinese Zen. ... Dr. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870, Kanazawa, Japan - 1966; standard transliteration: Suzuki Daisetsu, 鈴木大拙) was a famous author of books and essays on Buddhism and Zen that were instrumental in spreading interest in Zen to the West. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, and by other names, see below) is the oldest and flagship campus of the ten-campus University of California system. ... Jack Kerouac (pronounced ) (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist, writer, poet, artist, and part of the Beat Generation. ... From The Essential Alan Watts Alan Wilson Watts (January 6, 1915 – November 16, 1973) was a philosopher, writer, speaker, and expert in comparative religion. ... Han-Shan (寒山，translated into English as Cold Mountain) was a Chinese Tang era poet in the Taoist/Zen tradition, honored as a Bodhisattva. ...

Snyder met Allen Ginsberg when the latter sought Snyder out on the recommendation of Kenneth Rexroth. Then, through Ginsberg, Snyder and Kerouac came to know each other. This period provided the materials for Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, and Snyder was the inspiration for the novel's main character Japhy Ryder in the same way Neal Cassady had inspired Dean Moriarty in On The Road. It is sometimes said, with good reason, that Kerouac portrayed the main characters in his early novels as loving a dionysian life with more chaos in it than the norm of the era. As the large majority of people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds, writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac found Snyder, with his backcountry and manual-labor experience and interest in things rural, a refreshing and almost exotic individual. Lawrence Ferlinghetti later referred to Snyder as 'the Thoreau of the Beat Generation'. Irwin Allen Ginsberg (IPA: ) (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American Beat poet. ... Kenneth Rexroth (December 22, 1905 – June 6, 1982) was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. ... The Dharma Bums cover This is an article about the novel by Jack Kerouac. ... Neal Cassady, left, with Jack Kerouac, photograph by Carolyn Cassady. ... On the Road book cover On the Road is a novel by Jack Kerouac, published by Viking Press in 1957. ... Lawrence Ferlinghetti Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born Lawrence Ferling[1] on March 24, 1919) is an American poet who is known as the co-owner of the City Lights Bookstore and publishing house, which published early literary works of the Beats, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. ...

Snyder read his poem "A Berry Feast" at the famous poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco (October 7, 1955) that heralded what was to become known as the San Francisco Renaissance. This also marked Snyder's first involvement with the Beats, although he was not a member of the original New York circle, but rather entered the scene through his association with Kenneth Rexroth. The Six Gallery reading (also known as Gallery Six reading or Six Angels on the Same Performance) was a poetry jamming, which occured in the Six Gallery of San Francisco on October 13, 1955. ... October 7 is the 280th day of the year (281st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1955 (MCMLV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centred around that city and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. ...

As recounted in Kerouac's Dharma Bums, even at age 25 Snyder felt he could have a role in the fateful future meeting of West and East. Snyder's first book, Riprap, which drew on his experiences as a forest lookout and on the trail-crew in Yosemite, was published in 1959.

Japan

Independently, a number of the Beats, such as Philip Whalen, had become interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the more serious scholars of the subject among them. He, in fact, became a practitioner, spending most of the period between 1956 and 1968 in Japan, studying Zen first at Shokoku-ji and later in the Daitoku-ji monastery in Kyoto, working on translations with Ruth Fuller Sasaki, then finally living for a while with a group of other people on a small, volcanic island. His previous study of written Chinese assisted his immersion in the Zen tradition (with its roots in Tang Dynasty China) and enabled him to take on certain professional projects while he was living in Japan. Philip Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002) was a poet and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat generation. ... Daitokuji redirects here. ... Kyoto )   is a city in the central part of the island of HonshÅ«, Japan. ... The Tang Dynasty (Chinese: ; pinyin: ) (18 June 618 – 4 June 907), lasting about three centuries, preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Song Dynasty and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period in China. ...

Snyder decided not to become a monk and planned eventually to return to the United States to 'turn the wheel of the dharma'. He was married from 1960 to 1965 to another American poet, Joanne Kyger, who lived with him in Japan. Joanne Kyger (born November 19, 1934) is an American poet associated with the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats. ...

During this time, he published a collection of his poems from the early to mid '50s, Myths & Texts (1960), and Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965). (This last was the beginning of a project that he was to continue working on until the late 1990s.) Much of Snyder’s poetry expresses experiences, environments, and insights involved with the work he has done for a living: logger, fire-lookout, steam-freighter crew, translator, carpenter, and itinerant poet, among other things.

Ever the participant observer, during his years in Japan Snyder not only immersed himself in Zen practice in monasteries but also was initiated into Shugendo, a form of ancient Japanese animism, (see also Yamabushi). In the early 1960s he travelled for some months through India with his wife Joanne, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky. Snyder and Joanne Kyger separated soon after their trip to India, and were later divorced. Shugendo (修験道) is an old Japanese way of studying the relationship between Man and Nature. ... Animism is a belief system that does not accept the separation of body and soul, of spirit from matter. ... Modern-day yamabushi blowing a horagai Yamabushi ) (Literally: Those who hide in the mountains) were Japanese mountain ascetics and warriors, mostly of the Shingon sect of Buddhism. ... Irwin Allen Ginsberg (IPA: ) (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American Beat poet. ...

Continuing on in the path of the naturalist while in Japan, Snyder educated himself on subjects like geomorphology and forestry. These interests have probably surfaced as much or more in his essays and interviews as in his poetry. Table of natural history, 1728 Cyclopaedia Natural history is an umbrella term for what are now usually viewed as several distinct scientific disciplines. ... Surface of the Earth Geomorphology is the study of landforms, including their origin and evolution, and the processes that shape them. ... A decidous beech forest in Slovenia. ...

Snyder lived for a time with a group of Japanese back-to-the-land drop-outs on Suwanose (a small Japanese island in the East China Sea), where they beachcombed, gathered edible plants, and fished. On the Island, he married Masa Uehara, the mother of Snyder's two sons Kai and Gen, in 1967. Snyder was married to Uehara until 1989.

In 1968 his book The Back Country appeared, again mainly a collection of poems stretching back over about 15 years. Snyder devoted a section at the end of the book to his translations of 18 poems by Miyazawa Kenji (died 1933). Toward the end of the 1960s, Snyder and his wife moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where their second son, Gen, was born. In 1971 they moved onto rural land on San Juan Ridge (39°24′0″N, 120°52′0″W), Nevada County in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California, where they and friends built a house that drew on rural-Japanese and Native-American architectural ideas. USGS satellite photo of the San Francisco Bay Area. ... Nevada County is a county located in Californias Sierra Nevada, in the Mother Lode country. ... The Sierra Nevada is a mountain range that is almost entirely in the eastern portion of the U.S. state of California. ...

Later life and writings

Regarding Wave — a stylistic departure offering poems that were more emotional, metaphoric, and lyrical — appeared in 1969. In the late 1960s and after, the content of Snyder's poetry increasingly had to do with family, friends, and community. He continued to publish poetry throughout the 1970s, much of it reflecting his re-immersion in life on the American continent and his involvement in the re-inhabitation (or back to the land) movement in the Sierra foothills. His 1974 book Turtle Island, titled after the aboriginal name for the North American continent, won a Pulitzer Prize. Today, the phrase back to the land movement usually refers to a North American social phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s (which is discussed further, below in this article). ...

Snyder also wrote numerous essays setting forth his views on poetry, culture, social experimentation, and the environment. Many of these were collected in Earth House Hold (1969), The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work (1980), The Practice of the Wild (1990), A Place in Space (1995), and The Gary Snyder Reader (1999). In 1979, Snyder published He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth, based on his Reed thesis. Snyder's journals from his travel in India in the mid 1960s appeared in 1983 under the title Passage Through India.

In interviews and in articles about him, Snyder provided much food for thought, starting back in the mid 1960s. In these, his wide-ranging interests in cultures, natural history, religions, social critique, contemporary America, and hands-on aspects of rural life, as well as his ideas on literature, were given full-blown articulation. In 1967, for instance (in a taped round-table discussion in the San Francisco Oracle), Snyder's friend Alan Watts brought up the world problem posed by the population-explosion. Snyder's comment was the "change or bend of mind that seems to be taking place in the West, today especially, is going to result — can result ultimately — in a vast leisure society in which people will voluntarily reduce their number." It was a prediction that would prove partly true. The Oracle of the City of San Francisco, also known as the San Francisco Oracle, was an underground newspaper published in the late 1960s. ...

Snyder had readily accepted the far-reaching implications of the Hubbert "peak oil" prediction emerging into public policy discussion in the 1970s. Snyder often spoke of the "fossil-fuel subsidy," in the form of fairly cheap petroleum and coal, that had distorted many aspects of human activity and relationships (e.g., farming, suburban life, wealth and poverty). The Hubbert peak theory, also known as peak oil, is an influential theory concerning the long-term rate of conventional oil production and depletion. ...

In the 1980s and ’90s, Snyder expressed a lot of his insights and ideas in public lectures and in essays, including ones published in major outdoor and environmental magazines (and later collected in books).

In 1985, Snyder became a professor in the writing-program at the University of California, Davis. Here he began to influence a new generation of authors interested in writing about the Far East. Snyder is now professor emeritus of English. The University of California, Davis, commonly known as UC Davis, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, and was established as the University Farm in 1905. ...

Snyder married Carole Koda in 1991 and remained married to her until her death in 2006.

As Snyder's involvement in environmental issues and his teaching grew, he seemed to move away from poetry for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, in 1996 he published the complete Mountains and Rivers Without End, which, in its mixture of the lyrical and epic modes celebrating the act of inhabitation on a specific place on the planet, is both his finest work and a summation of what a re-inhabitory poetics stands for. This work was written over a 40-year period. It has been translated into Japanese and French. In 2004 Snyder published Danger on Peaks, his first collection of new poems in twenty years.

Along the way, Gary Snyder was awarded the Levinson Prize from the journal Poetry, the American Poetry Society Shelley Memorial Award (1986), was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1987), and won the 1997 Bollingen Prize for Poetry and, that same year, the John Hay Award for Nature Writing. Snyder also has the distinction of being the first American to receive the Buddhism Transmission Award (for 1998) from the Japan-based Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation. For his ecological and social activism, Snyder was named as one of the 100 visionaries selected in 1995 by Utne Reader. American Academy of Arts and Letters is an organization whose goal is to foster, assist, and sustain an interest in American literature, music, and art. ... The Utne Reader is a periodical founded in 1984 by Eric Utne. ...

Snyder's poetics

Gary Snyder uses mainly common speech-patterns as the basis for his lines, though his style has been noted for its "flexibility" and the variety of different forms his poems have taken. He does not typically use conventional meters nor intentional rhyme. "Love and respect for the primitive tribe, honour accorded the Earth, the escape from city and industry into both the past and the possible, contemplation, the communal" – such, according to Glyn Maxwell, is the awareness and commitment behind the specific poems (Maxwell in "The Online Companion to the Anthology of Modern American Poetry").

The author and editor Stewart Brand once wrote: "Gary Snyder's poetry addresses the life-planet identification with unusual simplicity of style and complexity of effect." (CoEvolution Quarterly, issue #4, 1974) Stewart Brand speaking September 5, 2004 Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford, Illinois) is an author, editor, and creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly. ... CoEvolution Quarterly (later re-named Whole Earth Review) was one of the publishing ventures of the same visionary biologist (with interests in cultures and in art) who launched the Whole Earth Catalog and an early Internet community, still functioning, called the WELL. Stewart Brand is the name of this editor...

Snyder has always maintained that his personal sensibility arose from his interest in Native Americans (“Indians”) and their involvement with nature and knowledge of it; indeed, their “ways” seemed to resonate with his own. And he has sought something kindred to this through Buddhist practices, Yamabushi initiation, and other experiences and involvements. However, since his youth he has been quite literate, and he has written about his appreciation of writers of similar sensibilities, like D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, and some of the great ancient Chinese poets. William Carlos Williams was another influence, especially on Snyder’s earliest published work. D. H. Lawrence David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was one of the most important, certainly one of the most controversial, English writers of the 20th century, who wrote novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. ... A 1907 engraving of Yeats. ... William Carlos Williams Dr. William Carlos Williams (sometimes known as WCW) (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. ...

"I have some concerns that I'm continually investigating that tie together biology, mysticism, prehistory, general systems theory," Snyder once said in interview (New York Quarterly "Craft Interview," 1973). Besides 'non-human nature', sexuality is something often expressed or contemplated in Gary Snyder's poetry. A self-admitted and somewhat famed ladies' man through most of his life, Snyder has also been married four times. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Mysticism from the Greek μυστικός (mystikos) an initiate (of the Eleusinian Mysteries, μυστήρια (mysteria) meaning initiation[1]) is the pursuit of achieving communion or identity with, or conscious awareness of, ultimate reality, the divine, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, or insight; and the belief that such experience is an... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Prehistoric man. ... Systems theory is a transdisciplinary/multiperspectual scientific domain that studies structure and properties of systems in terms of relationships from which new properties of wholes emerge. ...

Aside from content and style, Snyder's interests in anthropology and Native cultures, along with his Buddhism and environmentalism, have formed his attitude to poetry. He has often spoken of the poem as work-place, and, for him, the work to be done there is learning to be in the world. Buddhism is a dharmic, non-theistic religion, which is also a philosophy and a system of psychology. ... The historic Blue Marble photograph, which helped bring environmentalism to the public eye. ... The Chinese poem Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain by Emperor Gaozong (Song Dynasty) Poetry (from the Greek , poiesis, making or creating) is a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its ostensible meaning. ...

Snyder argues that poets, and humans in general, need to adjust to very long timescales, especially when judging the consequences of their actions. His poetry examines the gap between nature and culture so as to point to ways in which the two can be more closely integrated.

Is Snyder “a Romantic”?

Many people would say that poetry, inherently, is ”romantic.” Certainly there are many aspects of Gary Snyder’s work that smack of romanticism, apart from the mere fact that he writes poetry: his love of the untamed wilds of the Earth and the play of natural forces; his interest in, and often enthusiasm for, foreign cultures, and his devotion to ancient things; his belief in the importance of intuition in his life-path; his openness to the validity of magic and “the unexplained.” Romanticism is an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. ...

Snyder is among those writers who have sought to dis-entrench conventional thinking about primitive peoples that has viewed them as simple-minded, ignorantly superstitious, brutish, and prone to violent emotionalism. In the 1960s Snyder developed a "neo-tribalist" view akin to the "post-modernist" theory of French Sociologist Michel Maffesoli. Deeply interested in traditional primitive or tribal peoples, Snyder seemed so sympathetic to them in his writings of the 1970s that he seemed scarcely able to imagine bullies, selfish individuals, or spiteful miscreants as ever having lived among them. He seemed ever inclined to let belongingness within the tribe outweigh (as a value) the xenophobia, frequent raids, and generations-long strife that have been established as so often prevailing between one tribe and another. Neo-Tribalism is the ideology that human beings have evolved to live in a tribal, as opposed to a modern, society, and thus cannot achieve genuine happiness until some semblance of archaic lifestyles has been re-created or re-embraced. ... http://www. ...

The "re-tribalization" of the modern, mass-society world envisioned by Marshall McLuhan, with all of the ominous, dystopian possibilities that McLuhan warned of — subsequently accepted by many modern intellectuals — is not the future that Snyder expects or works toward. Snyder's is a positive interpretation of the tribe and of the possible future. McLuhan redirects here. ...

Be these things as they may, in Snyder’s work what some of his critics may deem romanticism is balanced by an evident devotion to facts, appreciation of human practicality and capability, expressions of joy found in physical work, interest in science, and continual rumination on responsibility.

Is Snyder "a Beat"?

Gary Snyder is widely regarded as a member of the Beat Generation circle of writers: he was one of the poets that read at the famous Six Gallery event mentioned above, and was written about in one of Kerouac's most popular novels, The Dharma Bums. Some critics argue that Snyder's connection with the Beats is exaggerated and that he might better be regarded as a member of the West-Coast group the San Francisco Renaissance, which developed independently. Snyder himself has some reservations about the label "Beat," but does not appear to have any strong objection to being included in the group. He often talks about the Beats in the first person plural, referring to the group as "we" and "us". The Beat Generation was a group of American writers who came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. ... The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centred around that city and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. ...

A quotation from a 1974 interview at the University of North Dakota Writers Conference (published in The Beat Vision):

"... I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen [Ginsberg], myself, Michael [McClure], Lawrence [Ferlinghetti], Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory [Corso], for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years. ...

"Where we began to come really close together again, in the late '60s, and gradually working toward this point, it seems to me, was when Allen began to take a deep interest in Oriental thought and then in Buddhism which added another dimension to our levels of agreement; and later through Allen's influence, Lawrence began to draw toward that; and from another angle, Michael and I after the lapse of some years of contact, found our heads very much in the same place, and it's very curious and interesting now; and Lawrence went off in a very political direction for awhile, which none of us had any objection with, except that wasn't my main focus. It's very interesting that we find ourselves so much on the same ground again, after having explored divergent paths; and find ourselves united on this position of powerful environmental concern, critique of the future of the individual state, and an essentially shared poetics, and only half-stated but in the background very powerfully there, a basic agreement on some Buddhist type psychological views of human nature and human possibilities."

Yet it might be remembered that while the Beats' major influence is often regarded as having been greatest during the 1950s, Snyder's influence has been greatest since the 1970s (or possibly since the very late 1960s).

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)

Dōgen Zenji Dōgen Zenji (道元禅師; also Kigen Dōgen 希玄道元) (19 January 1200–22 September 1253) was a Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher born in Kyōto, and the founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. ... The Shōbōgenzō (正法眼蔵), lit. ...

References

Wikisource has original works written by or about:

Gary Snyder

• Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life, edited by Jon Halper, 1991
• Snyder, Gary. 1980. The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979. New Directions, New York. ISBN 0-8112-0761-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-8112-0760-9 (pbk)
• Autobiographical notes in Mountains and Rivers Without End, by Gary Snyder, 1996
• “Chronology” (c.v. for Gary Snyder) in The Gary Snyder Reader, 1999
• “The East-West Interview” by Peter Barry Chowka in The Real Work, by Gary Snyder, 1980
• Gary Snyder at the UC Davis English Department
• Gary Snyder at Modern American Poetry
• Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)
• Anthony Hunt, "Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder's 'Mountains and Rivers Without End'." Detailed, book length commentary on Gary Snyder's "Mountains & Rivers Without End"
• Aronowitz, Al "The Dharma Bum," Chapter 14, The Beat Papers of Al Aronowitz
• Knight, Arthur Winfield. Ed. The Beat Vision (1987) Paragon House. ISBN 0-913729-40-X; ISBN 0-913729-41-8 (pbk) This includes an interview with Gary Snyder conducted by James McKenzie on March 19, 1974 at the University of North Dakota Writers Conference.

Image File history File links Wikisource-logo. ... The original Wikisource logo. ... March 19 is the 78th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (79th in leap years). ... 1974 (MCMLXXIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ...

External links

• Lannan Foundation, Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder 2001 (see Wendell Berry entry for link)
• 1991 audio interview with Gary Snyder by Don Swaim of CBS Radio - RealAudio
• Blue Neon Alley - Selected Poems, Quotes and Directory
• Shambala Sun article "The Wild Mind Of Gary Snyder" by Trevor Carolan
• Modern American Poetry Collection - Ball State University Archives and Special Collections Research Center - External link