Poetry for Students

302 Poetry for Students

year, in which Snyder takes his predilection for the

metonymic list to an extreme. The next section,

“Kali,” presents images of danger and evil that pro-

voke an uncharacteristic yearning for “the safe

place in a blanket burrow.” “This Tokyo” repre-

sents Snyder at his bleakest. The meditation is

opened and, more important, closed by the refrain

“Peace war religion revolution / will not help.” But

“Back” elaborates a more positive vision, notably

in “Through the Smoke Hole,” a poem based on

Hopi Indian cosmology. The kiva, a ceremonial

structure, serves as an analogue for Snyder’s own

vision of a multiworld universe, while the kiva rit-

uals for ensuring the continuity of community

through life and death offer structures for Snyder’s

own movement beyond, if not exclusive of, the vi-

sion of “Kali” and toward the real work of build-

ing community in his native place.

Regarding Wave, written under the influence

of his Japanese anarchist-visionary friends, sets

Snyder firmly on a new communitarian course, cel-

ebrating a countercultural hero’s version of family

values. The collection begins with a poem titled

“Wave,” a meditation that associates the words

waveandwife. The poem is a self-delighted un-

folding of what it means to have a wife: the word,

the woman, the “wyfman,” the erotic, spiritual ad-

venture that is “veiled; vibrating; vague”:

Ah, trembling spreading radiating wyf

racing zebra

catch me and fling me wide

To the dancing grain of things

of my mind!

The last phrase, “dancing grain of things / of my

mind,” nicely articulates the repetitions Snyder af-

firms as generated out of wyf, the repetition that oc-

curs at once in things and in the things of the mind.

An exuberant formalism, or in Charles Olson’s

phrase, representation “by the primitive-abstract,”

dominates the book. Many poems elaborate a ba-

sic perception of formal and spiritual correspon-

dences between different ontological planes. In

“Song of the Tangle” lovers who “sit all folded”

formally “repeat” the ancient temple and landscape

at the center of which they sit: “Two thigh hills

hold us at the fork / round mount center.” Both the

overgrown archaic temple and crotches of lovers

are forms for discovery: “the tangle of the thigh //

the brush / through which we push.” “Song of the

Slip,” a poem arranged with every line centered on

the page, proposes that the male’s lovemaking com-

pletes a physical and spiritual harmony: “seedprow

// moves in and makes home in the whole.” When

a son is born the poet stays home and discovers a

new center: “From dawn til late at night / making

a new world of ourselves / around this life.”

Such formal design may seem to displace pol-

itics, as if the intuition of correspondence was also

an intuition of a sufficient world. Thus, in “Every-

body Lying on their Stomachs, Head toward the

Candle, Reading, Sleeping, Drawing,” as the poet’s

household forms a circle whose “plank shutter” is

“set / Half-open on eternity,” the social world is

bypassed. But such intuitions of formal and spiri-

tual shapeliness, as partly realized in erotic, fam-

ily, and natural experience, provide the basis for a

militant politics and poetics that envision such har-

monies realized in society. Regarding Wavelays

groundwork for the overtly political verse of later

volumes. “Revolution in the Revolution in the Rev-

olution” displays its formal repetition in a revi-

sionary statement of political ideology:

If the capitalists and imperialists

are the exploiters, the masses are the workers.

and the party

is the communist.

If civilization

is the exploiter, the masses is nature.

and the party

is the poets.

If the abstract rational intellect

is the exploiter, the masses is the unconscious.

and the party

is the yogins.

& POWER

comes out of the seed-syllables of mantras.

This is a politics based on a kind of formalist logic—

the substitution of new elements within the same

formula. Mantras themselves are forms—more than

contents—that produce a kind of elementary power

through repetition. It is the kind of power that Sny-

der believes will drive political change.

In 1966 Snyder had bought with Allen Gins-

berg one hundred acres of land on the San Juan

Ridge near Nevada City in northern California. In

1970, with the help of a crew of ten, he built a home

for his family there, naming it Kitkitdizze after

some local vegetation. In “Buddhism and the Com-

ing Revolution,” an essay first written in 1961 and

collected in Earth House Hold, Snyder states: “The

mercy of the West has been social revolution; the

mercy of the East has been individual insight into

the basic self/void. We need both.” Kitkitdizze and

its region would be Snyder’s place to develop a

grounded Buddhism. Buddhism’s essential percep-

tion of emptiness, its aim to look into the nature of

things without prejudice, would be put to the ser-

vice of a local, ecological politics informed by a

planetary perspective.

True Night

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