SOURCE: "American Zen: Gary Snyder's No Nature," in Soul Says: On Recent Poetry, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 117-29.

Gary Snyder is more widely known as an ecological activist than as a poet, and indeed the jacket copy on his No Nature: New and Selected Poems makes a heavy-handed pitch to the ecologically minded sector of his audience: "We are a people, as this century ends, desperate to recapture the feeling of being at home in the world. No Nature offers us guidance along this path. Snyder's poems invite us to observe nature carefully, and to see ecology, bioregionalism, and sustainable culture as intrinsically bound to our own human fate." This offers us Snyder as guru, and it is a role he has not avoided. "My political position," he has written, "is to be a spokesman for wild nature…. And for the people who live in dependence on that." Gurus may live by their messages alone, but poets do not. And though Snyder has earned the seriousness of his views, which he presents not only in political debates over the fate of the California landscape, for instance, but also in the example of his own frugal way of living, his moral seriousness by itself would not earn him the title of poet. But he has also changed what we consider the lyric self to be.

Modern dismantlers of the notion of selfhood have pointed out that each of us is less a "unified self" than a site traversed by the discourses to which we have been exposed. The amalgam of multiple discourses in you "is" you; consciousness is coextensive with the languages in which it is conceived. The free-will or constructivist version of this idea gives you some agency in picking and choosing your discourses, whereas the determinist version finds you helplessly passive in your absorption of the discourses of your cultural and environmental moment.

There is an element of plain common sense in all this; of course one's selfhood is bounded by the available discourses of conceptualization during one's existence—a fact that ought to prevent the sort of anachronistic blame that accuses the Bible of "sexism" or Shakespeare of "racism." But a more acute question follows: what would a self that really believed itself to be just a site of crisscrossing transient discourses (and no more than that) sound like when it opened its mouth? It would have to sound both more provisional and more self-effacing than the encapsulated "I" that has represented, successively, the Christian soul, the rationalist self, and the Freudian ego. It would know that it once did not exist, and would soon not exist again; it would be less anxious about the lifelong continuity of selfhood than was, say, Wordsworth. It would have to be self-conscious about the discourse realm in which it was moving at any given moment, and of its exits and entrances as it moved from one realm to another.

Such a self would not regard itself as distinct from other matter in the universe. It would be part of nature, but not in the pantheistic way that projected a soul into nature. Instead, the self would be situated in an unremarkable continuity with other inorganic and organic clusters of natural forms. It would not occupy a position superior to other beings but would see itself in a horizontal landscape, touching other beings left and right. It would know that it constitutes its world by means of its own limited perceptual apparatus, but it would also acknowledge that the world seems to us a solid given thing, and that it impresses itself upon us in realist guise.

What would this sort of selfhood look like in lyric? It would look like Gary Snyder. And how did a poet born in 1930, the contemporary of the confessional poets (Plath, Sexton) and the prophetic poets (Ginsberg, Rich), think up this selfless self and its distinctive style of writing? The complete answer will not appear until we know more of Snyder's life (there is as yet no biography), but the central experience from which his adult poetry derives seems to be his study of Zen Buddhism, both as a young man and then during the twelve years (1956-1968) when he lived mostly in Japan, studying with Zen masters….

A committee of which I was a member awarded the 1975 Pulitzer Prize to Snyder's Turtle Island, and I recall wondering at the time who the person was who sang these impersonal songs. Here, for example, is the now famous poem "The Real Work" (about rowing with friends by Alcatraz, as the epigraph tells us):

sea-lions and birds,
sun through fog
flaps up and lolling,
looks you dead in the eye.
sun haze;
a long tanker riding light and high.
sharp wave choppy line—
interface tide-flows—
seagulls sit on the meeting
eating;
we slide by white-stained cliffs.

the real work.
washing and sighing,
sliding by.

There's an impersonal "you" here and an amorphous "we," but no "I." Instead, the reader meets a montage of noun phrases, and along with them come verbals in -ing: the sun lolling, the tanker riding, the tideflows meeting, the seagulls eating, the "real work" of the sea washing and sighing, the "real work" of the observers sliding by. A hidden hand has taken a good deal of trouble to arrange these and other visual and aural effects, bringing about what the poet Alan Williamson has called "little defiant rescues of pure momentariness from the grid of generalized time that is built into grammar itself." But the cinematographer of this scene prefers to obscure himself, letting us follow his "camera eye" alone, just as the moralist of this poem, defining what "the real work" is, prefers to couch it in metaphorical rather than conceptual terms.

This method of composition was named metaphorically by Snyder himself in his first volume as "riprap"—the stone cobble laid on a mountain trail to prevent erosion: "Lay down these words / Before your mind like rocks." It is painstaking and heavy work. The poetics of riprap owes something to Pound's notion of the poem as sculpture, and to Pound's phrasal organization, but Snyder, more than Pound, is attached to syntactic effects as well as phrasal ones. In "The Real Work" there are real sentences: the sun looks you in the eye, the seagulls sit, and the rowers slide by cliffs. That is, there is statement and closure as well as timeless phrasal presentation of visual effects. The morality of the end echoes Keats's "moving waters at their priestlike task / Of pure ablution round earth's human shores," but Keats would not have written in terms of the easygoing "sliding by."

Back in 1975, I preferred the elegantly arranged cinematographic poems in Turtle Island to the heavy-handed protest poems, and I still do. Here is an example of the latter:

How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist
Government two-world Capitalist-Imperialist
Third-world Communist paper-shuffling male non-farmer jet-set bureaucrats
Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?
(Ah Margaret Mead … do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)

There was more of this sort of political-tract boilerplate in the eight volumes from which No Nature has been selected. And there were failed attempts to speak with a tribal voice, as in "Praise for Sick Women," a poem not collected here that was printed in the influential 1960 Donald Allen anthology The New American Poetry. "Praise for Sick Women" begins with an unfortunate reminiscence of Pound ("The female is fertile, and discipline / (contra naturam) only / confuses her") it continues with an attempt to represent early tribal views which considered menstruation unclean:

Where's hell then?
In the moon.
In the change of the moon:
In a bark shack
Crouched from sun, five days,
Blood dripping through crusted thighs.

Inept though this is, it is suggestive of the sort of experiment Snyder wanted to make.

A list of poetic imperatives in the mature Snyder would go something like this: to reenter the archaic, but not in such a way as to sound foolish; to utter protests, but not in such a way as to become solely a propagandist; to efface "personality" in favor of a mostly perceptual being-in-the-world; to arrange words like cobble ("granite; ingrained / with torment of fire and weight"; to use restraint in tone and form alike. Snyder does wonderful things with and within these imperatives. He often registers the passage of time with an impersonality full of wonder: the vividly appreciative evolutionary poem "What Happened Here Before" traces the geological and ecological changes in the California landscape from three hundred million years ago till 1825, retelling each epoch, sometimes in the present tense, sometimes in the past. Three hundred million years ago: "soft sands, muds, and marls." Eighty million years ago: "warm quiet centuries of rains … / volcanic ash … piles up the gold and gravel." Three million years ago: "ground squirrel, fox, blacktail hare, ringtail, bobcat, bear, / all came to live here." Forty thousand years ago: "And human people came with basket hats and nets." This part of the poem closes with the nineteenth-century gold rush:

For the duration of such a poem, we are given, on loan, a time-sense that we ourselves may live in rarely, but that Snyder lives in always—the opulent time-sense of a luxuriously unfolding evolutionary dynamic in which we are very late comers. When reproached for the "impracticality" of his ideas on how to live, Snyder is fond of pointing out that he is in synchrony with the large evolutionary picture, whereas his critics live too narrowly in the present: "It's only a temporary turbulence I'm setting myself against. I'm in line with the big flow … 'Right now' is an illusion too." In poems like "What Happened Here Before," Snyder takes on the archaic tribal role of storyteller, but instead of telling cosmological tribal myths of sky gods and earth women, he relates our commonly accepted narrative of geological and evolutionary change in successive phases ("I was there to see it") of exquisitely chosen detail, musically modulated into what are, it is not too much to say, lovable stanzas.

The later Snyder can allow himself a relaxed political diction, as in a poem dedicated to Jerry Brown, "Talking Late with the Governor about the Budget," where, "tired of the effort / Of thinking about 'the People,'" he leaves the building and sees overhead the moon, a planet, and a star, "And east, over the Sierra, / Far flashes of lightning— / Is it raining tonight at home?" The glimpses of personal feeling here—of weary Arts Council efforts in unpromising directions, and of momentary homesickness—are nevertheless chastened by the presence of the regal and imperturbable processes of the cosmos. Politics cannot be everything to Snyder. His Buddhism has always existed in sharp and productive tension with his inherited socialist utopianism and its negative consequence, bitter political protest. Insofar as Buddhism proclaims such engagement a form of illusion, Snyder knows that he should not let it disturb his inner quiet: "To take the struggle on without the least hope of doing any good." Asked whether poetry makes anything happen, Snyder once replied, "Well in that sense poetry does no more than woodchopping, or automobile repair, or anything else does because they're all equally real." And so he drives himself resolutely back from protest to his poetic function: to be a link in the transmission of what there is to be seen and known in the world. (He remarks, suggestively, in one interview, "My father … was a smart man, a very handy man, but he only knew about fifteen different trees and after that he was lost. I wanted more precision; I wanted to look deeper into the underbrush.") He wants to be a channel for what he calls, in the early poem of that name, "High Quality Information." It is the earnest and eager poem of a young man, and in it Snyder makes clear that much must be repressed in order for the new imperatives to arise:

A life spent seeking it
Like a worm in the earth,
Like a hawk. Catching threads
Sketching bones
Assessing where the road goes.
Lao-tzu says
To forget what you knew is best.
That's what I want;
To get these sights down,
Clear, right to the place
Where they face
Back into the mind of my times.
The same old circuitry
But some paths color-coded
Empty
And we're free to go.

To forget what you knew; to color-code some of your mental paths "Empty" and never go down them again: this resolve accounts for some of what is missing in Snyder's work.

Snyder is not unaware of the dangers in taking too remote and geological a view of human affairs. He voices that danger in the poem "Word Basket Woman," commenting on the American poet nearest him in ecological vision, Robinson Jeffers:

Robinson Jeffers, his tall cold view
quite true in a way, but why did he say it
as though he alone
stood above our delusions, he also
feared death, insignificance,
and was not quite up to the inhuman beauty
of parsnips or diapers, the deathless
nobility at the core of all ordinary things.

Because Snyder fears the tonal extremes of prophetic denunciation and an indifferent Olympianism, because he wants to include parsnips and diapers, the tonal range he allows himself in his best poetry is rather narrow: it runs from curious observation to cheerful enjoyment to genial hospitality. Because he is so steady in his self-control, the more denunciatory and chaotic moments in the poetry strike the reader as off key. Yet one suspects that chaos may be more "natural" to Snyder than order, the mid-range tonality more "controlled" than spontaneous. This control can be seen in the tightness of his poetic structures.

There is an obsessive concern with arrangement in Snyder's best work—a concern one wants to call "Japanese"—as all the cobbles in the riprap begin to take on mutual relations like those between the famous stones in the Ryoan-ji garden. The stones that we repair to, in a visual zigzag, as we traverse "Surrounded by Wild Turkeys," a beautiful late meditation on parental and filial generations, are the words "call," "pass," "through," and "like":

Little calls as they pass
through dry forbs and grasses
Under blue oak and gray digger pine
In the warm afternoon of the forest-fire haze;

Twenty or more, long-legged birds all alike.

So are we, in our soft calling,

passing on through.

Our young, which trail after,

Look just like us.

The other "stones" successively placed in the poem are its gentle adjectives: "little," "blue," "gray," "warm," "longlegged," "soft." They make up the tonal climate. In many poems, Snyder represents himself and his family as leading what one must call a mammalian life, really not much different in its needs and instincts from the herd life of bears or sheep; but here he extends the comparison even to birds. Of course, even Snyder's organic sympathies have limits; he is not likely to compare himself and his family to a hive of termites. But a poem like "Surrounded by Wild Turkeys" (in which the baby turkeys "trailing" after their parents confer their verb on Snyder's mental image of his own children) suggests a way of being in the world—unassuming, honest, untranscen-dent, selfdeprecating, tender, and open to delight—which is quietly exemplary, without aggressively urging itself on others.

Formally, Snyder has stuck pretty conclusively to his main tools—noun phrases, present participles, an emphasis on the visual, and a care for musical phrasing. Every so often, he'll do something deliberately striking, as in a Zen poem of earthly revelation. This poem bears an enormous title, and is dated from an origin over forty thousand years ago, when human life first appeared on earth:

This is a densely constructed poem of both vertical and horizontal orientation. Mother Gaia, the earth, is found on the highest hierarchic level; sky, snow, and summit on the next level down; wind and discourse below that, while the humble disciple on the humble pebbles defines the lowest level. So much for the "vertical plot." The "horizontal plot" of landscape does not, and cannot, exist at the highest level, that of conceptuality: there, Mother Gaia lives alone. Below her, we see the broad horizontal revelation described in the title: a gate opens in the milky clouded sky, and one glimpses a snowy summit. (Naturally, the gate opens in the middle of the scene, framed by cloud-milk in the proximate position, by sky and snow in the remote position.) The horizontal plot at the next level, expressed in words linked by hyphens, tells us that the natural "word" of the universe (the wind) and the real word of human discourse, cannot be separated from the Buddhist void, the gap in meaning, occupying the same place in the "discursive plot" on this level as the glimpsed gate in the "higher" visual plot preceding it. Finally, the last horizontal plot presents the human figure "I" on the left, balanced by the humbling gravel on the right. This is a poem that takes up the challenge of the pagan and Christian shaped lyric and renews the form, while renewing as well the classical apostrophe to the genius loci in the theophany, or manifestation of the god or goddess.

Snyder is one of the many modernist poets to have brought English lyric into conjunction with Chinese and Japanese poetry. The long history of Western fascination with "the Chinese written character as a medium for poetry" (Pound out of Fenollosa) has reached its apogee with Snyder, if only because Snyder (unlike Amy Lowell, Pound, Stevens, Williams, Rexroth, and others) really knows Japanese and Chinese. His economy and fastidiousness in poetry would please, I should think, not only the ghosts of American Imagism and Objectivism but also those Zen masters with whom he studied; they would recognize the metaphorical weight borne by his apparently artless visual lists, and the historical passion distilled into the words retelling his evolutionary chronicles.

In this way, Snyder offers a worthy counter-possibility to the American passion for explanatory confession. His poems convey remarkably little about his own views of his psyche. Perhaps he doesn't believe he has one—or, at least, one available to reliable inspection. He compels his reader into a rather shocking redefinition of what makes an interesting poem—a definition that goes not only against the confessional norm prevalent in Western lyric since the Vita Nuova, and the witty metaphysical poetry that has been the chief lyric rival to the confessional strain, but also against the third major stream of lyric, the "nature poetry" where one might think to locate him. What would the providential Emerson of "The Rhodora," the yearning Frost of "Birches," or the stern Jeffers of Big Sur make of the unembarrassed opening of Snyder's "Right in the Trail," a humorous but admiring poem about bear droppings:

Here it is, near the house,
A big pile, fat scats,
Studded with those deep red
Smooth-skinned manzanita berries,
Such a pile! Such droppings,
Awesome.

Snyder's attempt to see as a Native American might, his de-Christianized gaze, his Buddhist reverence for all life, are the efforts authenticating the stanzas of his nature poems, good and bad alike, and make for his indubitable originality. Especially in the nature poems, we see the suppression of a confessional and introspective self, and the adoption of a self that is perceptually alive, one which allows the discourses appropriate to successive phenomena to appear through him, as through a medium, on the page.

The losses in adopting such an attitude, with its allied formal techniques, are real. The volatility, anguish, and self-questioning of the passionate self, together with certain of its appropriate vocabularies and tropes, vanish. The stories of Snyder's four marriages (and the three divorces) go untold, as does his loss, by divorce, of his father (the cause, perhaps, of his attachment first to Rexroth and next to a succession of Zen masters). The quite fantastic confection that is Snyder's life (measured against the American male norm) makes him a genuine American eccentric, living naked with his naked family (as a visitor reports in the Sierra Club book), and building not only a house but also a Zen meditation hall for himself and his neighbors. His life may be his greatest work of art. Its raggednesses (such as every life must possess) have been pruned and espaliered; the beautiful and chastely decorated Japanese-style timber house, the fine plain utensils, the orderly division of the days and months into travel time and work time, the neatness of all his visual arrangements—these are the outward signs of an inner discipline that may work to hold some disorder at bay. One must respect Snyder for keeping the constraint equal to the disorder. His discretion about personal suffering suggests that the chaos and violence he attacks in the industrial world outside his careful precincts of pastoral retirement may be in part a projection from within, causing that occasional disequilibrium in tone that mars some of his poems.

Snyder remarked in an interview that he could sing approximately two hundred folk songs by heart. The simplicity of oral poetry is what he aims to preserve in his far more tersely organized written poetry. "The poem or the song," he says revealingly, "manifests itself as a special concentration of the capacities of the language and rises up into its own shape." Such a poem rebukes, by its authenticity, poems of no compactness, of no individual shape: "There is an intuitive aesthetic judgment that you can make that in part spots phoniness, spots excess, spots the overblown, or the undersaid, the unripe, or the overripe." Snyder usually walks the tightrope between these extremes with a clearly judged balance; the true poem, he has said, walks "that edge between what can be said and that which cannot be said." It is just that fine edge that is missing in his prose: "If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, naturalcredit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks." Yes, no doubt, but who will remember this paragraph in fifty years? It is a good thing we have poetry to protect us from expository prose at its most bien pensant. And although No Nature is annoyingly arranged (with some early poems stuck in the latter part, interrupting what is otherwise a chronological order) it is good to have most of Gary Snyder's poems available in one volume. He has been claimed by virtuous ecology, but let us claim him for virtuous poetry, too; by getting rid of "too much ego interference, too much abstract intellect, too much striving for effect," he has constructed in verse a remarkable self resolutely different from the perennial lyric "I," a self in which archaic and modern discourses alike can meet. Of course, it then takes Snyder's genius to make riprap of them, until they make a trail for us into his myths and texts.