Snyder Critique-3

H. Broch, "The Style of the Mythological Age." Introduction to R. Bespaloff, On the Iliad. Washington, D.C., 1947.

E. Rothstein, “Twilight of his Idols.” Review of Edward W. Said's, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain.
The New York Times, 16 July 2006.

M. Prechtel. “Saving the Indigenous Soul: An Interview With Martin Prechtel by Derrick Jensen.” The Sun, April 2001.

Astrobiology Magazine, 7, November 2002. http://www.astrobio.net/news/print.php?sid=308

R. Peters, review of Axe Handles. San Francisco, CA, 1983. Sulfur #10 1984.

See, R.B.Pilgrim, "Intervals (Ma) in Space and Time: Foundations for a Religio-Aesthetic Paradigm in Japan." History of Religions #3, February 1986.
Snyder also wrote poem titled Mā (In, Mountains and Rivers without End. Washington, D.C., 1996."Snyder has said that 'Mā' is an actual letter he discovered in an abandoned shack in the mountains not far from his home on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. " A. Hunt, Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End. Reno NV, 2004.

A. Knighton, “An Accident Waiting to Happen.” Review of, Sylvère Lotringer and Paul Virilio, “The Accident of Art.” Semiotext(e). New York. (date?) In, Rain Taxi, Spring 2006.

For the past fifty-five years, Gary Snyder has tendered the myth of himself like a plant growing in a wild, though accessible, place. He "re-inhabitated" territory, and recombined aspects of Chinese and Japanese spirituality, knotting it all together with thrums of Amerindian shamanism and lore. His 1969 book, Earth House Hold, the contemporary world, ‘closing in on itself through speed,’ eviscerates any real experience of the local, thereby rendering impossible any stable ground from which to gain perspective. Deprived of that perspective, ‘machines and businessmen’ have introduced to a literary audience the basic concepts of ecology. Coined by German biologist Ernst Haeckel exactly a century before, thanks in part to Snyder "ecology" is now a household word. Its central thesis is the mutual dependency of all living systems and sentient beings, which is also the core teaching of Buddhism, as well as Snyder's poetics.

"Lookout's Journal" was begun in 1952 when Snyder spent the summer as a fire lookout in the North Cascades of Washington State. It makes up Earth House Hold's first section. Here he was already experimenting with haibun, a combination of prose and haiku which Matsuo Bashō had used to remap the cultural landscape of 17th Century northern Japan. Witty: ("Ate at the 'parkway café' real lemon in the pie/'—why don't you get a jukebox in here'/'—the man said we weren't important enough'"); profound: ("When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own."), Snyder scatted and quoted with humor, and insights befitting an older man.

Edward Rothstein rhetorically asks, "What artist does not yearn, some day, to possess a 'late style'? A late style would reflect a life of learning, the wisdom that comes from experience, the sadness that comes from wisdom and a mastery of craft that has nothing left to prove. It might recapitulate a life's themes, reflect on questions answered and allude to others beyond understanding." Hermann Broch called this 'the style of old age,' and suggested that it "is not always the product of the years; it is a gift implanted along with his other gifts in the artist, ripening, it may be, with time, often blossoming before its season under the foreshadow of death, or unfolding itself even before the approach of age or death: it is the reaching of a new level of expression..." In particular, the style of old age is "the impoverishment of vocabulary and the enrichment of the syntactical relations of expression."

All this leads us to "Yet Older Matters," the series of short poems that make up the second section of Danger on Peaks—

A rain of black rocks         out of space
onto deep blue ice        in Antarctica
nine thousand feet high         scattered for miles.

Crunched inside         yet older matter
from times before our very sun

At Elephant Moraine in eastern Antarctica, 160 miles northwest of the United States base at McMurdo Station, nearly 2000 specimens of meteorites have been recovered, including one "as definitely being from Mars;" although, most of the rock fragments, called "chondrites," originated from asteroids. It struck me how, relative to the planet we call Earth, we are all infinitesimally young. Spaced for Snyder's breath/voice, a new culture will have to develop, in which neither humans and their inventions nor God is at the center of the universe. What should be at the center is a hollow place, an empty place where both God and humans can sing and weep together. Maybe, together, the diverse and combined excellence of all cultures could court the tree of life back from where this new level of expression was the ma, a gap, "a way of seeing" the interval found between temporal things or events, the poem exemplifies he who "is always a mere breath away from universals."

The balance of this section I find insightfully slight, the poet's personality stronger than the poems. Until the end, at "Sand Ridge," it is as if he suddenly realized that, if our species is to survive, to some extent the path he's traveled we must too, and draws a map:

             Walk that backbone path
     ghosts of the pleistocene icefields
stretching                down and away,
                 both sides