Poetry for Students

304 Poetry for Students

establishment during a rest from the road: “My long

hair was tucked up under a cap / I’d left the ear-

ring in the car.” Cowboys, country music, a cou-

ple dancing, holding each other “like in High

School dances / in the fifties”—Snyder acknowl-

edges the innocent appeal of this world: “The short-

haired joy and roughness— / America—your

stupidity. / I could almost love you again.” But out

on the road “under the tough old stars” he “came

back” to himself, “to the real work, to / ‘What is

to be done.’ ” The revolutionary aim of Snyder’s

work—not just in poetry—is indicated in the cita-

tion from Lenin. “Work” in being qualified by the

adjective “real” becomes a master term for his cul-

tural project.

American “stupidity” is not “real” because it

is complicit in the destruction of the wild. In “The

Call of the Wild” the wild is figured as the Native

American trickster figure Coyote: amoral, unpre-

dictable, always ungainsayable by human design.

But Snyder’s coyote is a real animal as well as a

figure. The old man who doesn’t like coyote

“songs” puts out traps; the acidheads from the cities

shut him out from their “oil-heated / Geodesic

domes, that / Were stuck like warts / In the woods”;

the government wages all-out war, “Across Asia

first, / And next North America.” The coyote is not

a spirit that can survive the devastation of the wild.

There is “A war against earth. / When it’s done

there’ll be / no place // A Coyote could hide.” The

envoy reads: “I would like to say / Coyote is for-

ever / Inside you. // But it’s not true.”

The question posed by this poem is who will

inhabit the land: “my sons ask, who are we? / dry-

ing apples picked from homestead trees / drying

berries, curing meat, / shooting arrows at a bale of

straw.” Up above “military jets head northeast,

roaring every dawn. / my sons ask, who are they?”

The poet challenges: “WE SHALL SEE / WHO

KNOWS / HOW TO BE.” Against the abstract in-

nocence of a country bar and an invasive govern-

ment, Snyder in “The Bath” celebrates the religious

values of his new life of family in nature. Like

“Burning the Small Dead,” “The Bath” traces a

movement from the commonplace phenomena to

the apprehension of cosmic significance and back

to an immediate reality invested with a larger mean-

ing but in a more elaborate, personal, and ecstatic

manner. The bath here is the family soak in the

sauna, poet-father-husband-lover, two young sons,

and wife-lover-cosmic-mother. The poem depends

on juxtaposition, but its principal structural feature

is a refrain, “is this our body?,” that in its final ren-

dering becomes the declarative “this is our body.”

Consciously or not, Snyder echoes the Christian

mass, which transforms ordinary bread and wine into

the body of a dead savior by transforming the daily

family bath into an event of religious significance.

Several of Snyder’s most perceptive critics

have seen the shift in Turtle Islandas a problem-

atic development. Either the political statements are

not justified dramatically, as Altieri argues, or as

Robert Kern suggests in Critical Essays on Gary

Snyder, the statements seem like slogans because

Snyder’s style is made “for the quick, accurate, and

reticent notation of metonymic detail that would

provide no foothold for the subjective ego or ana-

lytic intellect.” Michael Davidson cautions that in

Snyder’s turn toward a more explicit rhetorical in-

tent “the attendant danger is that the poet will move

from seer to prophet and begin to instruct where he

might present.” But this is only to beg the question

of whether didacticism in general, and Snyder’s di-

dacticism in particular, must be considered intrin-

sically antipoetic.

Turtle Island, despite the limitations some crit-

ics find, can perhaps best be appreciated within its

historical context. Snyder wrote the book after the

bloom had gone off 1960s radicalism and in the

midst of the first widely perceived ecological cri-

sis, the oil shortage of the early 1970s. His trust in

the body, in the goodness of natural impulses, in

the ability of poetry to share in that goodness—a

poetics of immediate experience—gives way in the

1970s to a more rhetorical style capable of dealing

with the disappointments and complexities of new

kinds of politics. At the same time, Snyder ac-

knowledges both the temptation of rhetoric and its

dangers, because, as he told Ekbert Faas, it may af-

ford only a quick-fix of emotion and ideas “as

against the work of doing it structurally. Convinc-

ing people with ideas is one system, the other is to

change its structural basis.”

Many critics have noted Snyder’s tendency to

elide the pronoun “I” in his poetry. For example,

in “Six-Month Song in the Foothills” from The

Back Countrythe preparation of tools for the spring

is described. Instead of stating, “Iam sharpening

the saws,” the “I” is elided, leaving only the par-

ticiple: “In the cold shed sharpening saw.” The

speaker is a function of the work, a belief that can

be related to Snyder’s more general sense of how

human subjectivity is derived. In The Practice of

the Wildhe writes:

how could we bewere it not for this planet that pro-

vided our very shape? Two conditions—gravity and

a livable temperature range between freezing and

boiling—have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we

True Night

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