GARY SNYDER’S EYE FOR THE REAL WORLD 351Robert Frost gets the sound of sense in an ax-helve ’s lines “native to the grain,”
Paul Celan finds his “unannullable witness” “Deep / in the time-crevasse, /
by / honeycomb ice,” Ted Hughes tracks a fox across “dark snow” till the poem
is done. So in Riprap, “each rock a word / a creek-washed stone” lays down
mountain trail. Snyder’s economy and ecology make his way through steep
terrain using native materials, fitting words. Saying “Lay down these words...
like rocks,” something more than likeness drives him. Physically, psychically
part of nature, as we all are, he wants the same source of energy and design in
his poems as he finds in the world they speak for.
At a volcano on a Japanese island, looking down to “red molten lava in a
little bubbly pond” in 1967 at the new moon, Snyder married Masa Uehara, and
when a son was born, they settled in the States. There all the segments of his
life and work have made up a whole: rural youth, avid hiker-climber, redneck
(his word) logger, seaman, and firewatcher, Amerindian anthropologist, Zen
Buddhist adept, erotic lyricist, teacher, traveler, translator, Beatster in Jack
Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, social critic, environmental guru and activist, essayist,
speaker, interviewee, inheritor of Hopkins, Whitman, Thoreau, Yeats, Eliot,
Pound, Williams, Lawrence ’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers, after Jeffers and Rexroth
the American West ’s leading twentieth-century poet.
But “America” and our carved-out “States” don’t identify his native coun-
try for Gary Snyder. What does is “Turtle Island—the old/new name for the
continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living
here for millennia,” myths of the earth sustained on the back of a great turtle.
HisTurtle Island (1974), changing the stories our culture lives by, starts with a
section called “Manzanita”—that tough Pacific Coast shrubby tree with crooked
slick red-brown peeling branches, glossy green leaves, early-blooming pinkish-
white flowers favored by hummingbirds, and “little-apple” fruit eaten by bear,
coyote, deer.
“Manzanita,” published first in the Sixties enclave of Bolinas, California,
opens with “Anasazi”—ancient Southwest pueblo people, ancestors to the Hopi,
who migrated mysteriously, leaving grand desert dwellings, pictographs and
petroglyphs, including the humpback flute-playing fertility figure Kokopelli or
Kokopilau much loved by Snyder among others.
Anasazi,
Anasazi,
tucked up in clefts in the cliffs
growing strict fields of corn and beans
sinking deeper and deeper in earth
up to your hips in Gods
your head all turned to eagle-down