Poetry for Students

298 Poetry for Students

Although his literary education reflected the

formalist criticism of the time, anthropology ex-

posed him to other traditions and conceptions of

the cultural role of literature. Already at this time

he was recognized for his independence, uncon-

ventionality, industry, and learning. The 159 page

honors thesis he wrote in 1951, He Who Hunted

Birds in His Father’s Village: The Dimensions of

a Haida Myth(1979), examined the West Coast

tribe’s mythology from different methodological

points of view and set him on the cross-cultural

path he has followed in his work ever since. From

1950 to 1952 he was married to Alison Gass. In

1951 Snyder hitchhiked east to attend graduate

school at Indiana University but dropped out after

one semester, heading west again to enroll in Japan-

ese and Chinese courses at the University of Cali-

fornia at Berkeley in order to prepare himself for

a trip to Japan to study Zen. He worked summers

as a U.S. Forest Service lookout (1952–1953), a

logging crewman in Oregon (1954), and a trail

crewman in Yosemite National Park (1955), expe-

riences that would inform his first published books.

In November 1955 Snyder participated in the

famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco,

where his friend Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” pub-

licly for the first time, a scene replayed in Jack Ker-

ouac’s Beat novel The Dharma Bums(1958). This

novel, in which Snyder is fictionalized as Dharma

hero Japhy Ryder, inaugurated Snyder’s career as

public figure well before he became famous as a

poet and stamped him with a lingering, and ulti-

mately limiting, Beat identity. The Beat writers’ ap-

parently freewheeling religiosity, their casual dress

and manners, their adoption of jazz, and their ex-

periments with sex and mind-altering drugs set

them deliberately at odds with the establishment in-

telligentsia and cultural elite of the 1950s. One re-

viewer called them “the know-nothing Beats,” but

such a view belies the serious spiritual and politi-

cal commitments of Snyder and many Beat figures.

The poems of Riprap(1959) present the young

seeker-worker divesting himself of civilization—

“All the junk that goes with being human / Drops

away”—but an alternative vision is not clearly ar-

ticulated as yet. In “Piute Greek” he encounters the

sublime otherness of austere nature but is still un-

sure of his welcome there. What he is sure of is his

deep respect for ordinary manual work and for his

teachers among ordinary workers, to whom he ded-

icates the book. On the title page he defines the

wordriprapas “a cobble of stone laid on steep slick

rock to make a trail for horses in the mountains.”

He makes it the central metaphor of the collection

in the beginning of the title poem that is often taken

as an ars poetica:

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

placed solid, by hands

In choice of place, set

Before the body of the mind.

“Poetry,” as Snyder writes in Myths & Texts(1960),

is “a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics.”

“Riprap” is significant first because it presents Sny-

der’s solution to the Romantic problem of the re-

lation between mind and nature, though his solution

may be read as either advancing or diverging from

that tradition: to give words in poems the qualities

of things in nature. The poem is also important be-

cause it links the poetic solution to a life problem

through a key Snyder concept: work.Snyder’s “na-

ture poetry” is not about aesthetic perception of a

pristine nature but about work as an activity that

mediates between humans and the material world.

For Snyder the acts of the mind are grounded in

physical activity. As he noted in his contribution to

the classic anthology The New American Poetry

(1960), “I’ve just recently come to realize that the

rhythms of my poems follow the rhythms of the

physical work I’m doing... at any given time.”

Snyder writes in the American tradition articu-

lated by William Carlos Williams in Paterson

(1963), a poetry that discovers “no ideas but in

things,” or better, poetry as “a reply to Greek and

Latin with the bare hands.” Although as a West

Coast poet he looks to Asia for supplements to his

American experience rather than to Europe, he oc-

casionally invokes the Western tradition to define

True Night

One of the most

highly regarded postwar

American poets, Snyder has

produced a large body of

poetry intelligible to the

political and spiritual

aspirations of many readers

not normally concerned

with poetry.”

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