Snyder Critique-2

When Yaoshan Weiyan visited Shitou Xiqian and asked him about the teaching of the Southern School of Ch'an Buddhism, Shitou replied, "This way will not do, nor will any other way do. Neither this way nor any way will do. What do you do?" Contemporary Zen Master, Shin'ichi Hisamutsu, echoed this with, "Nothing will do. What do you do? Snyder replied with,
"Knowing nothing need be done / is where we begin from."

G. Snyder. From, "Song of the Tangle." In, Regarding Wave. New York, 1970.

R. Smith, “Finding a Muse in Mountains and Chestnut Trees” New York Times,
27January 2006.

J. , "The Importance of Nothing: Absence and Its Origins in the Poetry of Gary Snyder. In, P.D. Murphy, Editor, Critical Essays on Gary Snyder. Boston, MA, 1991.

C. Altieri, "Gary Snyder's Lyric Poetry: Dialectic as Ecology." In, P.D. Murphy, Critical Essays on Gary Snyder. Boston, MA., 1991.

The Practice of the Wild: Essays. San Francisco, CA, 1990;
A Place in Space: ethics, aesthetics, and watersheds :
new and selected prose. Washington, D.C. , 1995.

A.G. Grapard, “Flying Mountains and Walkers of Emptiness: Toward a Definition of Sacred Space in Japanese Religions.” History of Religions. February 1982.

Walk with Snyder's high-minded voice in the shadow of the mountain's devastation, accompanied by geologist Fred Swanson, who's been "studying Mt. St. Helens from the beginning." Snyder explains that after the 1980 eruption, "the Soil Conservation Service wanted to drop $16.5 million worth of grass seed and fertilizer over the whole thing," while "the Forest Service wanted to salvage-log and replant trees," and, of course, "the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build sediment retention dams." But local activists stopped them, and "zero restoration became the rule."(14) As a result, the natural restoration of the zone became possible. In May 2005, in a talk given by Swanson in Portland, he said that, to everyone's surprise, much of the new growth didn't come from seeds blown in from elsewhere, but from the indigenous burned-over area itself, "blighted by a fall of ash," as Snyder puts it, "but somehow alive."(16).

Straddling dichotomies as communal individualism, hospitable ownership, "the pathless path," Snyder's authoritative voice is what wooed Jack Kerouac into making him the hero of The Dharma Bums: an erudite woodsman with an "original mind," as Robert Bly called it, one whose poetry reminds us that a bond with the natural world is often an essential aspect of great art, regardless of style. Even more valuable, his achievement exhibits a "curious combination of smallness and infinity."

superheated steams and gasses
white-hot crumbling boulders lift and fly in a
burning sky-river wind of
searing lava droplet hail,
huge icebergs in the storm, exploding mud...

Discussing how Snyder juxtaposes images in some of this poems, Jody Norton pointed to the shih of T'ang Dynasty
China, which is "a poetry of image rather than idea, in which a practitioner of Esoteric Buddhism ‘enters’ a mandala through its gate, invokes the divinities which are represented, and identifies with them one after the other until reaching the center, in which there is a representation of the cosmic Buddha from which all other Buddhas and their lands emanate. The practitioner goes from the manifestation to the source, from the form to the essence, and finally reaches the realization that the images are neither fully drawn nor explicitly located, and in which the precise nature of their interrelationships is not defined." The measured, broken line, "with significant elisions and disjunctions" and "very little enjambment":

shoots out flat and rolls a swelling billowing
cloud of rock bits,
crystals, pumice, shards of grass
dead ahead blasting away— (11)

While at their best Snyder's poems limn a joyous rhythm, Danger on Peaks opens with pages of prose: the story of Mt. St. Helens' last major eruption, and reminiscences of the mountain when he was young. Lacking the "cicada singing,/swirling in the tangle," in his two major books of prose I found a tedious flat terrain to traverse. Here the writing is more lyrical, comfortably sauntering between poetry and prose, yet still tends to fall into crevasses of figures and facts.