Volume 19 305climb and the ground we walk on have given us five
fingers and toes. The ‘place’... gave us far-seeing
eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile
tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride,
and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind
of mind.
Snyder reverses the priority given to human sub-
jectivity in Western philosophy; subjectivity is a de-
rivative of natural processes. As Davidson suggests,
the presentation of the natural ground of subjectiv-
ity would seem to be the appropriate mode for the
poetry. Snyder observes in his contribution to the
anthologyNaked Poetry(1969) that “Each poem
grows from an energy-mine-field-dance, and has its
own inner grain. To let it grow, to let it speak for
itself, is a large part of the work of the poet.” A
problem arises in Turtle Islandbecause political ac-
tivism in a modern nation-state is not given by na-
ture. Nature lacks rhetorical skills, and this is why
Snyder is compelled to assume a “legislative role”
with the wild as his constituency. If the poets are
the party of nature in a defensive war against civi-
lization, they must marshal their rhetorical powers.
Underlying the rhetoric, however, is a percep-
tion both “primitive” and Buddhist that, as he says
in “It Pleases,” “The world does as it pleases.”
“Knowing that nothing need be done,” he writes in
“Plain Talk,” “is where we begin to move from.”
As he suggests in “As for Poets,” there is an earth
poet, air poet, fire poet, water poet, and space poet,
all with their peculiar gifts, but the ultimate place
to be what Buddhists call “original mind,” which
encompasses matter and spirit, is the house with-
out walls on Cold Mountain:
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.
Such freedom from anxiety—knowing that nothing
needbe done—permits one of Snyder’s achieve-
ments, a lyric poetry outside the Romantic tradi-
tion. Snyder produces lyric speakers who, rather
than exercise a lyric crisis of subjectivity in isola-
tion, participate, with good humor and compassion,
in collective and political endeavors.
In the nine years that passed between Turtle
Islandand his next major volume of poems, Axe
Handles(1983), Snyder was building a life on the
San Juan Ridge with his wife and sons, an activity
honored in the new collection’s dedication: “This
book is for San Juan Ridge.” The didacticism ofthe previous collection is tempered even as it be-
comes a central theme of Axe Handles“From/For
Lew,” a poem dedicated to his Reed College friend
Lew Welch, exemplifies the content of instruction.
Snyder, surprised Welch has not killed himself af-
ter all, sees his friend in a dream; but Welch actu-
ally is dead and has appeared only to ask Snyder
to teach him the wisdom of cycles. Welch’s ap-
pearance is itself one turn in the cycling of life,
death, and knowledge.
In “Axe Handles” Snyder recalls teaching his
son Kai how to shape a handle for his hatchet from
a broken-off axe handle. The poem becomes a re-
flection on the transmission of both practical
knowledge and the knowledge of knowledge, or
culture. Snyder recalls Pound and quotes to his son:
“When making an axe handle / the pattern is not
far off”: “And he sees.” Now he recalls also Lu Ji
of the fourth century A.D.:—“in making the handle
/ Of an axe / By cutting wood with an axe / The
model is indeed near at hand”—and his Chinese
teacher, Shihsiang, who translated it years ago:
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.
Two poems in the collection especially speak
to the poles of Snyder’s career, wandering and
dwelling. “True Night,” Robert Schultz and David
Wyatt suggest in “Gary Snyder and the Curve of
Return” from Critical Essays on Gary Snyder, ar-
ticulates “the tension between the urge to be out
and away and the need to settle and stay.” Awak-
ened from sleep to chase away raccoons from the
kitchen, Snyder is arrested by the moment of still-
ness and emptiness: “I am all alive to the night. /
Bare foot shaping on gravel / Stick in the hand for-
ever.” “Fifty years old,” he reflects sardonically, “I
still spend my time / Screwing nuts down on bolts.”
But he is pulled back, in Wyatt’s words, by “a con-
trary motion,” realizing that “One cannot stay too
long awake / In this dark.” Life is back with his
family, “the waking that comes / Every day // With
the dawn.” The final poem, “For All,” elaborates
that insight as a statement of faith and purpose.
Snyder is not primarily an ironic writer, but the
light irony in this version of the pledge of alle-
giance to the American flag provides enough ten-
sion to make the poem more than a political
program. It moves from exclamation, “ah to be
alive”—the mind’s amazement—to illustration
through metonymic description of fording a stream.True Night67082 _PFS_V19truen 283 - 310 .qxd 9/16/2003 10:00 M Page 305