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ashington’s North Cascades mountains
never faded for Gary Snyder (b. 1930), wherever his paths between nature and
poetry took him: South America and the Persian Gulf as a working seaman, San
Francisco and the Beat Movement, the Northwest on logging teams, trail crews,
fire lookout, Japan for Zen practice and mountain climbing, Reed College and
Berkeley studying American Indian anthropology and East Asian languages,
California’s Sierra Nevada where he ’s lived sustainably since 1970.
“Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout” opens his first book, Riprap,
with a keen sense for what the poet now “saw as real.”
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.Noting nothing but what ’s present, these “small nouns / Crying faith” (as Oppen
put it) take no needless adjectives, and one verb draws us close, illumining an
“It looks just like the Cascades”
Gary Snyder’s Eye for the Real World
When I was eleven or twelve, I went into the Chinese room at the
Seattle art museum and saw Chinese landscape paintings; they blew
my mind. My shock of recognition was very simple: “It looks just
like the Cascades.” The waterfalls, the pines, the clouds, the mist
looked a lot like the northwest United States. The Chinese had an
eye for the world that I saw as real.W