SOURCE: "The Political and Poetic Vision of Turtle Island" in Gary Snyder's Vision, University of Missouri Press, 1983, pp. 144-56.

We can take Snyder's Turtle Island as the most complete expression of his political and poetic vision, not only because it is his most recent finished volume, but also because it contains the fullest mediations of the themes and concerns of all his work. I propose to look at the book as incorporating three mediations. First, Turtle Island serves Snyder with a chief metaphor for a physical environment and a Utopian vision. As he puts it in the "Introductory Note," Turtle Island is the "old / new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millennia." The metaphor of the continent floating on the back of a giant turtle serves as a cosmogonic emblem of archaic knowledge and future hopes: "Hark again to those roots, to see our ancient solidarity, and then to the work of being together on Turtle Island." This work, another version of the real work, extends beyond North America to "the earth, or cosmos even," because Turtle Island is another version of the "idea found world-wide" of a "serpent-of-eternity," the uroboros familiar to all students of world mythology. Turtle Island thus combines the immanent awareness of a space occupied for thousands of years with the historically transcendent space of the planet reimagined as the seat of the species.

Secondly, Snyder uses Turtle Island as a way of mediating between an ethics of responsibility and an ethics of ultimate ends. I take these terms from Max Weber's wellknown essay "Politics as a Vocation" (1918) [reprinted in From Marx to Weber: Essays in Sociology, 1946]. Weber distinguishes between these two "fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed" senses of value, since those who formulate or pursue ultimate ends are unlikely to take pragmatic consequences into consideration. But Weber is quick to add that the ethics of ultimate ends need not produce actions that deny or evade all consequences, and likewise the ethics of responsibility should not be equated with "unprincipled opportunism." Snyder includes in Turtle Island a section, called "Plain Talk," of prose essays, the most extended of which is "Four Changes." This essay contains "practical and visionary suggestions" and is the fullest statement in expository prose of Snyder's aims and beliefs. Here he advances several radical ideas: the world's population should be cut in half, alternative family structures should be explored, the world should be divided into "natural and cultural boundaries rather than arbitrary boundaries" (thereby eliminating nation-states and most existing political structures), we should seek a reliance on unobtrusive technologies and energy sources, and so forth. The arguments for each proposal mix appeals to scientific and technological fact and research with attacks on the ideology of consumption and private property. All of the proposals, however, are for a new ethics, and this new ethics stands in relation to our current ethical standards and behavior in a way that is based on both immediate responsibilities and ultimate ends.

The third major mediation in Turtle Island presents a sense of the lyric poem that has dominated literature for the last century and a half, together with a future model of the lyric poem as more committed to enhancing an awareness of cosmic scale and cosmic forces and the need of the community to heighten and preserve such awareness: "The common work of the tribe." The dominant current model of the lyric poem originated with the postromantic sense of the isolated artist and the autotelic theories of aesthetic experience. This model was made more or less canonic by such anthologies as F. T. Palgrave's Golden Treasury (1861) and by such critical studies, some generations later, as I. A. Richard's Principles of Literary Criticism (1925). Snyder is indebted to this model, as is virtually every postromantic poet, and his riprap poetics can be seen in part as an extreme development of one aspect of the art-lyric, the dictum against ornate or merely decorative imagery. But Snyder's more recent work is set against several other dicta of the artlyric, chiefly the strict avoidance of intellectual content and didactic intentions. Snyder attempts to celebrate the common work of the tribe, and so his poetry has a didactic role, as well as a concern for group consciousness and social value (although more often of a desired rather than an actual sort) that mitigates against the art-lyric's concentration of the single, exacerbated sensibility. In a poem like "Anasazi," which opens Turtle Island, there is little or no trace of an observing subject or a lyrical ego; everything is subordinated to an almost phenomenological rendition of the Anasazi's tribal existence. More like an ethnographic field report than an art-lyric, this poem relies on an understood valuation that praises any social grouping that relates harmoniously to its physical environment. The ending of the poem blocks out in stark imagery the tribe's conditions of existence, and the ambiguity of reference equates the landscape with the tribe itself:

The "streams" can be the water that nourishes the Indians' crops or metaphorically the Indians themselves; the corn-basket can contain either the cereal that is the staple of their diet or their infants; their homes are made in and of the rock lip, the "clefts in the cliffs." The poem does not directly address any inner state or dramatize any emotional tension; it records and names rather than enacts or addresses its subject matter. It applies to us only insofar as we can see ourselves as products of, and preservers of, a physical environment.

Each of these three mediations helps to center Snyder's poetry and to support the other two; the mediation of poetic ends is, however, perhaps the most important. Snyder has talked about shamanistic songs and about the use of poetry and art that extends back to the Pleistocene era. Though the anthropological evidence is slim in these matters, there is a social use for poetry that extends beyond that of the art-lyric and the privatized reader. Some of this use function was once partly fulfilled by epic poetry, and today some have suggested it is fulfilled by advertising copywriters, who are the most successful, or at least widespread, mediators of our common dreams and our social reality. But Snyder returns to some of the functions of epic poetry while preempting the role of advertising. Here, from The Old Ways, is a description, written in 1975, of the new model of poetry Snyder envisions:

We're just starting, in the last ten years here, to begin to make songs that will speak for plants, mountains, animals and children. When you see your first deer of the day you sing your salute to the deer, or your first red-wing blackbird—I saw one this morning! Such poetries will be created by us as we reinhabit this land with people who know they belong to it; for whom "primitive" is not a word that means past, but primary, and future. They will be created as we learn to see, region by region, how we live specifically (plant life!) in each place. The poems will leap out past the automobiles and TV sets of today into the vastness of the Milky Way (visible only when the electricity is turned down), to richen and humanize the scientific cosmologies. These poesies to come will help us learn to be people of knowledge in this universe in community with the other people—nonhuman included—brothers and sisters.

For me the key term here is "salute," for that is the mode of address in the Anasazi poem quoted above. Salutation involves recognition but also a well-wishing, a call to and for the forces of health and safety. Salutation, of course, also has a social dimension, and it communizes both its speaker and the person addressed. By this complex act of naming, well-wishing, and social placement, Snyder is less concerned with interior states than with environmental harmony. Learning to live "specifically … in each place" means knowing the plant life, knowing how the immediate physical environment makes available and uses its weather, soil, and other conditions to produce food, and this knowledge is necessary for the community to sustain its biological life as well as its cultural identity. Such localism and regionalism are not grounded in xenophobia or philistinism; rather they draw on and lead to a scientific understanding of the importance of place. Thus, Snyder's new poetry is as likely to include facts as it is to draw on socalled primitive or archaic knowledge and culture.

The second section of Turtle Island begins with a poem called "Facts," and in its ten numbered prose sentences it moves as far from the model of the art-lyric as would seem possible. Here are some samples:

1. 92% of Japan's three million ton import of soybeans comes from the U.S.
2. The U.S. has 6% of the world's population; consumes 1/3 the energy annually consumed in the world.

…..

• 6. General Motors is bigger than Holland.
• 7. Nuclear energy is mainly subsidized with fossil fuels and barely yields net energy.

These formulations can be further understood, beyond their self-explanatory factuality, in the larger contexts of Snyder's recurrent concerns. But such an integration into a larger vision does not make "Facts" a good poem. Certainly no argument will convince a reader who expects or desires an art-lyric to like "Facts." Thomas Parkinson [in "The Theory and Practice of Gary Snyder," Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 2, No. 3, Winter 1971] has identified two modes in Snyder, one that is "measured, dramatic, definite … in design, formal, and contemplative," and another that is "fluent, wise, witty, mediative and hortatory." For Parkinson the first mode is clearly the best, while the second produces work that is "prepoetic." Prepoetic, of course, would also describe most oral poetry, primitive chants, mantras, and other forms that, from the perspective of the art-lyric, lack the dramatic and contemplative features we associate with postromantic poetry. "Facts" can be seen as prepoetic not only because it lacks a dramatic or formal structure but because it clearly reads as prose and uses the language of mundane reality in nonstylized ways. But Snyder bids us to recall all the specificity of our world of prose; not every song can be a salutation, yet each poem can address a fact that informs the community about an essential aspect of its identity. By including the prepoetic (or the unpoetic, though this word has been largely outlawed since W. C. Williams objected to Wallace Stevens's use of it in describing Williams's poetry), Snyder at the very least implicitly acknowledges that a chant or song will not of itself alter social reality.

Another way to see "Facts" is to recognize that Snyder's ethics of responsibility does not get obscured by an ethics of ultimate ends, that the pressures and constraints of a very real social structure create an inescapable obligation to keep a vision alive with actual consequences. Another poem, from the first section of Turtle Island, is closer to the art-lyric tradition, and its dramatic, anecdotal structure might be seen by a programmatic avant-gardist as old-fashioned. This is "I Went into the Maverick Bar," which vividly captures the despairing lack of social possibility that is a minor but important theme counterpointing Snyder's Utopian vision.

The allusion to Lenin's revolutionary tract in the last line of the poem, along with the use of what is one of Snyder's key phrases, "the real work," poses this anecdote on an edge of ambiguity that in many ways resembles that prized in the art-lyric. Yet the ambiguity here—the unspecified commitment, the feelings of rejection and fear mingled with nostalgia and fondness—actually dissolves with the phrase "I came back to myself." Here Snyder realizes how far his values are from those of many of his ordinary fellow citizens, but he also realizes he must and will maintain those values. Unlike the art-lyric, which traditionally strives for an image of closure that focuses and yet height ens ambiguity, this poem closes with an opening vista of resolution to pursue an ethically formed, intellectually shaped goal.

The most important supposition of the art-lyric, namely that momentary emotion, heedless of larger consequences, has a self-justifying truth grounded in its very intensity, is here embodied in the flow of the verse. The dancing couple breaks in on the song celebrating repression, and this triggers the memories of work and class-affiliation, which are then shattered by an image impacted with contradictory emotional values ("short-haired joy and roughness"); this causes the speaker's consciousness to crest with a large abstract image, followed by the unconcealment of his emotional conflict. As a phrase, "I could almost love you again" refuses to indulge its lyric impulses, and instead the poem turns away from the immediately present community to a larger, less present, but more "real" commitment. So the verse, with its dashes and line breaks, not only enacts the process of discovery but also registers the speaker's self-denial and self-correction. The poem is about promise-within-failure, and it must take its recognition of the "common work of the tribe" away from the immediate source of its song.

Much of the tension present in "I Went into the Maverick Bar" pervades the whole of Turtle Island. The book is divided into four sections, three of poetry and one of prose. The sections of poetry—"Manzanita," "Magpie's Song," and "For the Children"—could respectively be considered a poetry of prayer and ritual, a poetry of instruction, and a poetry of hope. But this sort of classification will not hold firmly, and it is better to see each section as containing some poems from each of the three modes, though dominated by a specific set of concerns. Perhaps we can best see this organization, loose as it is, by looking closely at the shape and subjects of one section, nothing some exceptions, and then glancing at the other two sections. In the section called "Manzanita," for example, the first two poems, "Anasazi" and "The Way West, Underground," are clearly salutations, the second being a poem about bears that recalls the Coyote poem that opened The Back Country. Then there is a poem that reads very like a doxology from a religious ritual: "Without," which argues that singing is "the proof of the power within." This poem announces one of the volume's chief themes, that all energy must be internally graceful in order to be truly powerful. Harmony relies on the path having "no / end in itself but rather recircling in both inner and outer realms. The poem is written in simple language, virtually without imagery, and draws on the philosophical bent we saw in Regarding Wave (for which it could serve as a fitting epigraph). Other poems in this section, namely "The Great Mother," "No Matter, Never Mind," and "Prayer for the Great Family," resemble "Without," and together they can be read as Snyder's creation hymn and doxology. As a group they strongly influence the feeling of this section as one preoccupied with prayer and ritual. There is even an exorcism poem, "Spel against Demons," which contributes to this feeling. In turn this feeling pervades a poem like "The Bath," with its refrain of "This is our body" and its description of an ideal erotic and familial union among Snyder, his wife, and his sons, Kai and Gen. The exceptions to this dominant mood are poems such as "I Went into the Maverick Bar," "Front Lines," and "The Call of the Wild." With a little ingenuity we could see these three poems as broken rituals, places where the "common work of the tribe" breaks down into alienation and mistrust. "Front Lines" recalls the poems in the "Logging" section of Myths & Texts, and here we see a

bulldozer grinding and slobbering
Sideslipping and belching on top of
The skinned-up bodies of still-live bushes
In the pay of a man
From town.

Since Snyder has written this poem before, and generally better, the best reading of its inclusion here would argue that the problem of alienated labor has not gone away, and recognition of the problem is demanded even in a group of primarily celebratory poems.

The last two poems in the section contribute to the salutational atmosphere. The poem that lends the section its title, "Manzanita" is clearly a song of plant life that mediates between Coyote as a mythical figure and the plant itself, with its transformative power and its connections to the net of what Snyder calls "ethnobotany," the use of vegetative life in human culture. "The longer you look / The bigger they seem," says the last stanza of the poem, describing the manzanita bushes. This poem then concludes by citing the etymology of the plant's name, "little apples." The final poem, "Charms," looks back to the mode of "The Song of the Taste" in Regarding Wave, but its subject is the "dreamlike perfection / of name-and-form" incorporated in female beauty. Snyder says that such beauty evokes "the Delight / at the heart of creation" and even avers that he could be "devastated and athirst with longing / for a lovely mare or lioness, or lady mouse." To the vegetable kingdom of "Manzanita" this poem exuberantly adds the animal kingdom, and where "Manzanita" is local and specific, "Charms" is universal; where the one celebrates the immediate physical environment, the other makes a hymn to a Utopian sense of "another world," the Deva Realm as Snyder calls it. Read together the two lyrics not only help to complete our sense of Snyder's new poetry but they also show how the reinhabitation of the land will be aided by songs of knowledge and community. In a sense both of these poems are post-political, since they speak to a consciousness built of a total harmonization of man with nature and man with man.

As a section, then, "Manzanita" is heavily weighted with poems that salute principles of harmony and growth, though there are also poems, such as "Front Lines," that try to face up to the "Rot at the heart / In the sick fat veins of Amerika." The book's next section, "Magpie's Song," has several longer poems that seem concerned with conveying information, somewhat in the manner of Thoreau's natural historian who is content to let a fact flower into a truth. "Mother Earth: Her Whales," "Straight-Creek—Great Burn," and "The Hudsonian Curlew" take delight in descriptions of natural processes and rhythms and seek little metaphoric resonance beyond the awareness of immanent order and shapeliness. Again, this feeling is determined in part by the section's opening poem, "Facts," but it is also counterpointed by an ethical longing or predilection that arises in some of the shorter poems. I am thinking here of the conclusions to poems like "Ethnobotany" ("Taste all, and hand the knowledge down") and "Up Branches of Duck River" ("hold it close / give it all away"). These ethical principles are, as I have suggested, sometimes versions of a Buddhist-like wisdom and sometimes a practical field-knowledge. This particular mediation, between ultimate ends and local responses, has been a goal of Snyder's poetry all along, of course, though it seems to be more self-conscious and more aesthetically successful in Turtle Island than in, say, Riprap. In this section's closing poem, "Magpie's Song," Snyder begins with a specific place and time and then alludes glancingly to the tutelary or totemic figure of Coyote, but here the creature is seen naturalistically. One might expect the following figure of the magpie to also operate in a naturalistic manner, but instead the poem ends with a message of hope and the poet's integration of and with natural forces and his own disciplined mind.

The magpie's instruction recalls the Rinzai sense of the mantras that are to be found in the patterns that result from natural forces: the blowing snow, the sounding wind. The poet has been fraternalized by this initiation or instruction scene, and the jeweled mind corresponds once more with the jeweled net of interconnected systems. The Amerindian West and the Buddhist East are brought together as the local and the cosmic open to one another.

The third and final section of poetry in Turtle Island is called "For the Children" and obviously deals with that new sense of the primitive that Snyder strives to establish, the primitive as both "primary" and "future." But the section also contains one of Snyder's boldest historical poems, "What Happened Here Before," which moves, in a little over three pages, from 300 million years ago to the present. The here refers to the area around Snyder's homestead in the Sierra Nevadas, and the poem ends with the challenge: "WE SHALL SEE / WHO KNOWS / HOW TO BE." This challenge refers to the ethos of Snyder and the reinhabitants of Turtle Island, with their specific knowledge of county tax rates and local history as well as of their cosmic and prehistoric vistas, as opposed to the people who pilot the "military jets [that] head northwest, roaring, every dawn." Preceding this poem in the section is "Tomorrow's Song," which begins with the radical notion that because America "never gave the mountains and rivers, / trees and animals, / a vote," it has "slowly lost its mandate." This is Snyder's most challenging, most "untraditional" notion, that animals and trees should be represented by government and accorded rights. Part of his hope for the preservation of the wilderness and natural resources, this notion may also be seen as Snyder's final mediation between his reverence for nature and his socialist-humanist political vision. Snyder says that "We look to the future with pleasure" since we can "get power within / grow strong on less," and in this new political-natural order he imagines a people living on Turtle Island who will be "gentle and innocent as wolves / as tricky as a prince." By inverting the Hobbesian sense of man as predatory and by playfully invoking Machiavelli's The Prince, Snyder redraws two of the Western political tradition's main metaphors and uses them to redefine what he means by being "At work and in our place." The real work is knowing what is to be done, but knowing also the ground—in all the senses of the word—on which it can be done. "Tomorrow's Song" is Snyder's salute to the future and contains one of his fullest descriptions of the ethos of Turtle Island.

The poem that lends its title to this last section of poetry, "For the Children," concludes with a simple testament of faith, a gesture that catches up elements of salutation and instruction to form a final set of ethical principles.

In the next century
or the one beyond that
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
We can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
Stay together
learn the flowers
go light

Political community, reverence for nature, and an ascetic gracefulness—all of Snyder's values are reflected in these three injunctions. The simplicity of the diction and the images recalls Blake, and the whole tradition of the literary ballad, in which a sophisticated poet adopts a simple framework to say something that is at once primitive and essential. Snyder's "one word" is the equivalent of what Kerouac called the "final lesson," and in each case the sublime is domesticated, brought home by bodily knowledge and mental harmony.

Taken together, and with the remarkable prose essays as well, the three sections of poetry in Turtle Island form a whole that advances Snyder's work well beyond the objectivist poetics of the early books and the political suppositions of Earth House Hold. Supplemented with the essays of The Old Ways, some of which are contemporary with Turtle Island, Snyder's vision is as full and distinctive as that of any of his contemporaries, including the slightly earlier generation of Lowell, Berryman, and Jarrell. Only Olson, I believe, compares with him in terms of a mythic imagination, and only Levertov has as broad and deep a political consciousness. But can Snyder claim for his art (or can his readers claim on his behalf) any authority other than that of the aesthetic realm? Take his notion that trees and animals should be represented in Congress. While this neatly ties together his ecological awareness and his political concerns, can the average reader see it as anything but an amusing conceit? Perhaps we can glimpse through this "literary" notion, this play with metaphors and contexts, a twitting of the serious tradition of representative democracy. Or can we better see it as a serious critique of representational government if we realize that banks and corporations command a share of representative power in our legislatures, and they are no more capable of speaking for themselves, without human mediation, than are trees and animals? If humans can find a way to define the rights of a corporation, why can they not do the same for the forest?

As for Turtle Island as a literary work, its language goes against the grain of several canonic tenets of modernism, and it flies in the face of once fashionable styles such as confessionalism. Like much genuinely innovative work, Snyder's poetry resorts to some quite ancient strategies and rhetorical gestures. Without the resplendent imagery of neo-surrealism, or the tight dramatic irony of academic poetry, or the display of an exacerbated sensibility, Snyder has reduced and yet enlarged the range of the lyric poem. But only a reader with at least a political awareness, if not a like-minded political will, can extensively respond to that range. Snyder has not solved the problem (how could he?) that animated so much of the theory of the autotelic art-lyric in the first place, namely, should not the extra-literary considerations of political or ethical belief be separated from the judgment of a poem on purely literary grounds? Snyder's work implicitly rejects the autotelic, formalist solution which said that only strictly structural and technical criteria should determine the worth of a poem, "as poem." This rejection is etched in the apparent lack of formal expertise in much of his poetry (though in fact his prosody can be quite sophisticated if judged from a nontraditional vantage point). Whether his language use can bring about a broad revival of, or even limited respect for, such forms as a poetry of salutation or instruction is an intriguing possibility. As early as the 1952 "Lookout's Journal" in Earth House Hold, Snyder asked:

—If one wished to write poetry of nature, where an audience?
Must come from the very conflict of an attempt to articulate
the vision poetry and nature in our time.
(reject the human; but the tension of
human events, brutal and tragic, against
a non-human background? like Jeffers?)

It is to the credit of Turtle Island, and the whole of Snyder's work, that he has not rejected the human, and indeed has avoided Jeffer's solution by refusing to subordinate the human to the nonhuman. On the other hand, what separates Snyder from many traditional poets is his refusal to appropriate the nonhuman (or natural) realm as no more than a dramatic or illustrative backdrop to the "tension of human events." This is what gives Snyder a legitimate claim to be operating as much outside or beyond the contexts of traditional literary values as any other contemporary poet. What Turtle Island finally mediates is the tension in mythical speculation that sees the world as supported and yet free-floating. Literature in such a mediation can try to be both self-grounded and ethically normative. But no modern poet would ever think such a dual burden could be easily lightened. Snyder says in the closing poem of Turtle Island that

A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
At once.

We have to realize the "house" is both the cosmos and the imagination, and that a poem whose perspective is panoptic and omnipresent can be understood both as an art-lyric poised on the vanishing point of self-reflective irony and as a cosmic hymn of all-embracing belief. Here Snyder's vision, or at least his desire for a healing vision, is as full as possible.