Gary Snyder portrait (web photo courtesy of seapoetry.wordpress)
One of my early poetry heroes was Gary Snyder, who turned 83 this month. Not only was I drawn to Snyder’s concise and precise back-country poems of the 1960s and ’70s, but I was also in tune to his thoughts about repairing nature where it was torn by humans and building tight-knit communities of open-minded people. He had a way of connecting democracy and poetry in the best sense. My friend John Suiter is writing a biography of Snyder, a follow up to John’s book “Poets on the Peaks,” about the fire-lookout days of Snyder and his writer-friends Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the American Northwest. Snyder is the model for the character Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s popular novel “The Dharma Bums” (1958), which became a kind of user’s manual for hippies in the 1960s. John and I had a long conversation the other night from his base camp in Chicago. Afterwards, I was reminded of this sketch I wrote in 1990 when Snyder made a stop at Harvard University to read his poems. This would have been a blog post if blogging had been the thing back then.—PM
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Poetry Reading by Gary Sndyer at Boylston Hall, Harvard University
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Rain-whipped night outside nondescript auditorium — school hall plain to hold wild ideas, maybe. Slow-gathering crowd reaches some 100: student-looking, Cantabrigian, academic scruff, a few small kids, casual country-style dressers shaking off the wet. Someone tells me Snyder asked to make an appearance, saying “He used to be a hanger-on here years ago,” but I can’t make sense of that since he’s a Westie. This fall he’s teaching a quick course just south at Trinity College. Grolier Bookshop and poetry chapel has a book table out back. Microphone test next, and then a video-disc player is wheeled in. Huge man in plaid shirt overfills a front seat. Two croissant-eating youngsters with blonde mom reading a college paper take seats to my right. Young woman behind describes a film about the Berlin Wall. Many Snyderish-looking men with beards, ponytails, work-clothes. Woman reading Ovid. Someone with stack of books must be expecting GS to sign. A few veteran professors in the youngish crowd. Coats bejewelled with rain-dots. A host of earth-colored sweaters. Cups of yogurt and steamy coffee. Umbrellas and ponchos get shaken. Two black wooden chairs at a fold-up table on stage. Tech director in booth drinks from a quart of juice. This event celebrates publication of essay collection, The Practice of the Wild, and re-issue of Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems by North Point Press of San Francisco, lovely, flinty old poems that made such a difference so long ago. He starts reading “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” — ends “Looking down for miles/Through high still air.” Then tells on himself: “There’s something not true in this poem — ‘I cannot remember things I once read’” — admits, “I could remember Chinese poems. Maybe the truth is I can’t forget anything I’ve ever read.” Then comes “Piute Creek” with “All the junk that goes with being human” — “I was working for the National Park Service at the time,” he explains. He then picks up the essays, ten years of work. “How do we resolve the dichotomy of civilization and the wild?,” he wonders. “What we call wild is very orderly.” He reads calmly, with witty intonations. Happy audience quick to chuckle. “ ‘We have made a lot of this place, but the fishing is no good anymore,’ says a car dealer out west,” he reports. On stage Gary is a small-framed man with gray-brown hair and a short gray beard, wearing blue cotton shirt open at the neck and a charcoal-gray sport coat. He says, “Very bold people from the ‘60’s are still in play. Everybody’s heart was in the right place.” To the guaranteed-to-be-asked question about Jack Kerouac, he replies, “Part of his problem was alcohol … He looked to the past but was not necessarily reactionary. He was charming in his way.” And on being a model for Japhy Ryder, he reminds us: The Dharma Bums is a novel. “I like The Subterraneans better than The Dharma Bums, and Doctor Sax is my favorite Kerouac novel.” He recalls climbing the Sierra Matterhorn again — “Range after range of mountains/Year after year,/I am still in love.” “Why do you write?”, he’s asked. “It helps me organize my own thoughts. It’s a way to participate in your community. I never thought of writing as a solitary activity. I always considered it a dialogue.” To another questioner he responds, “You have to be a working class person to read a lot.” He talks about community work, political work, cultural work. He says his plan for the next seven years is to finish many writing projects. “Everyone is busy,” he says. “Why? They’re trying to keep up with things.” And near the end says lightheartedly, “My daily life is like everyone else’s.”
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—Paul Marion, November 10, 1990 (c) 1990, revised 2007
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