Interviews
Grasping the Natural: A Conversation with Gary Snyder
Anne Greenfield
In the fall of 2004, I heard Gary Snyder read from his most recent collection of poems, Danger on Peaks. In a calm, steady tone, Snyder delivered his selection to what is likely the most attentive audience that the Bellingham High School auditorium has ever boasted. His poetry is renowned for its ability to arrest and articulate specific moments in nature. The simplicity and clarity of Snyder’s rendering almost masks the careful rhythm, which implicitly structures his voice. His work blends respect for the natural world with Zen Buddhist thought, achieving truly innovative modes of telling.
Snyder was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Over the years he has undertaken many endeavors: he was a logger in his youth, he studied anthropology at Reed College, then Chinese language at Berkeley, and Buddhism while living in Japan. In the late 1950s, he was influential in the Beat Generation/San Francisco Movements (along with Ginsberg and Kerouac). Snyder is now the critically acclaimed author of sixteen collections of poetry and prose and was awarded numerous literary prizes, including a Guggenheim fellowship (1968) and the Pulitzer Prize (1975). Until recently, he taught Creative Writing and literature as a professor at UC-Davis.
Snyder and I met on the morning following his reading in the lobby of the Fairhaven Inn in Bellingham. Before we commenced with the formality of the tape recorder, we discussed our common literary interests and he even offered me thoughtful insights for my upcoming move to China. Eventually, we turned to a more formal discussion of his experiences in the Pacific Northwest as well as his most recent collection of poems. As I suspected from his public demeanor during the reading, Snyder proved a warm, intelligent conversationalist.
Anne Greenfield: You mention Bellingham in Mountains and Rivers Without End and, more recently, in Danger on Peaks. How did you come to know Bellingham and how has this relationship changed over time?
Gary Snyder: I was raised on a little dairy farm just north of Seattle, through the thirties and up early into WWII. The country between Seattle and the Canadian border was mostly dairy farming or logging in those days. We had a little dairy farm, so in our spare time when we wanted to go out and travel and look at things we would go look at dairy farms. That would bring us all the way up here once or twice to Bellingham, Sedro-Woolley, up the Skagit Valley, Mount Vernon, and back down. That’s my first memory of Bellingham. Later, from the age of fifteen on, I started mountaineering. And one of those summers (I think 1946 or 1947) I came up with some Mazamas (a climbing group from Portland, Oregon) to climb Mount Baker. And I worked in the forest service, up the Skagit, in the summers of 1952 and 1953, when it was still the Mt. Baker National forest. I often came to Bellingham with friends, particularly one friend who I’m going to meet for dinner tonight: Jack Francis, who’s lived in Bellingham all these years. I came through here with Alan Ginsberg in 1966 on my way to British Columbia.
So, Bellingham has been in my consciousness as part of Ish Country (the Puget Sound region) and the culture of Maritime Northwest Pacific.
AG: Speaking of sense of place, much of your work is grounded in and speaks to location and specific places. In fact, your recent collection takes up the 1980 blast at Mount St. Helens. Have the recent eruptions there triggered anything new for you?
GS: Well more thoughts of the same. Pacific Rim Circle of fire: the chain of volcanic activity down the west coast as far south as Mount Lassen, actually as far south as Mono Lake. The actual instability of the earth’s crust and that fact that every volcano that exists on the west coast is more apt to erupt again than any place that doesn’t exist as a volcano already. Mt. St. Helens – if you look at its history- which I did – erupts every few centuries. It has been erupting every few centuries for some time. Mt. Rainier is quite capable of doing a major eruption at any time. So this is part of our life here. Except, being very short lived creatures, human beings, and being new to the region – that is to say the present American population has only been here for a hundred and fifty years – we don’t have much consciousness of it. I am exploring what that consciousness would tell us. So, having some recent events at Mt. St. Helens is hardly surprising. It’s part of the story and the story goes on. Who knows what comes next?
AG:Danger on Peaks has been deemed your “most personal collection yet.” To what degree do you see your poems as autobiographical?
GS: I’ve never written autobiographical poetry as such. On the other hand, whatever one does in poetry has to be grounded in deep personal experience. But personal experience is not necessarily autobiographical experience because we are all vertebrate mammals. And we live in very much the same body and the very same mind. To be grounded in your body is not autobiographical. And to be aware of the world is our mutual heritage, but not everybody sees it immediately and clearly. Which is something that my own artistic inclination, plus my Buddhist practice, pushes me towards: mindfulness in the present moment.
AG: So, there’s a distinction in what you’re saying between having an autobiography that’s based on one’s personal life and having a text that’s grounded in the universal, the physical body.
GS: Well, there’s the personal-history-ego mind and then there’s what I call deeper being, which we share with all other human beings and indeed a lot of other creatures. And there is our personal and immediate ego history, and then there is the deep history of our nature, which is in our genetic and physical body that makes us turn our head when somebody shouts, “Hey!” or feel fear or have an adrenaline rush or have a sudden moment of overwhelming lust. Whatever it is, that is our deep heritage, which is as much what our poetry and art should do as your personal story, which is not, maybe, always that interesting.
AG: I want to ask you about a rumor that I heard recently: that there may be a Gary Snyder biography in the works.
GS: That’s not even a rumor, it’s an actual truth. John Suiter, who did the book Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the Cascades, has decided to go ahead and do a biography of me. He’s got a contract and he’s working on it right now. I’m very pleased to have John working on it because he is such a good writer and researcher. And he lives in Boston so he brings something other than just a west coast sensibility to it, which is interesting.
AG: Turning to Danger on Peaks, I found one of the most innovative and interesting aspects of this collection to be the blending of poetry and prose.
GS: Good point.
AG: I noticed that the prose often puts forward a fuller story, filling in the background information to the reader, whereas the poetic sections seem to zoom in on the rendering of specifics moments. How do you view poetry and prose in terms of their functionality in a text?
GS: Well, let’s take the section called “Dust in the Wind”, that is specifically inspired by the Japanese form called haibun: a little block of storytelling plus a short poem. Think of it as storytelling and singing, which would be the older, oral literature model for what that is. And out there from ancient times there have been people who told stories and sang a little song. It’s modeled on that. But when Basho and his circle (the Japanese 18th century Haiku masters) took up doing not only haiku but doing the little prose block and then the haiku, they were looking very closely at what the finer aesthetics of it might be. I studied Basho’s haibun with that question in mind and then took it, in a way, in my own direction.
How you just described it, yourself, is accurate. But to say a little more, what I would like to be able to do, and I’m not always able to do it, is to make the short poem provide something that you weren’t expecting, to give it one more twist or surprise with a direction that is not necessarily implied in the introductory story. It is, as you said, narrowing in on one point. It might be narrowing in on what didn’t seem the most important point and finding another way into it. So that’s what’s enjoyable in it; that’s what the challenge is in that. That is, to make something happen that takes it beyond what the intention of the story might seem to be.
Now there are some other prose/poetry mixes in the Bamiyan section: “After Bamiyan”. It is more traditional: prose, with points made in poetry, then prose again, each informing the other. That’s what I intended there. In some cases prose is called for, in some cases the poetic line is called for. The section called “Daily Life Poems” is treading a middle ground between poetry and prose and that is like a kind of poeticized storytelling, which is (to a considerable degree) personal. But personal should be personal in the sense that we can all share this. If it is privately personal, it’s not interesting. “That’s her problem”, you would say. Too personal.
AG: Looking at your poem, “Blast Zone”, I wonder about the way you take up issues of environmentalism in your writing. Do you find it difficult to balance an environmental/activist agenda with an artistic one?
GS: What do you see as the activist message in this poem?
AG: Well, the poem looks at nature’s ability to take care of itself and compares that with other, more artificial groups trying to restore the area around Mt. St. Helens. So, I guess I see the poem as exploring that distinction between the artificial and the natural.
GS: Yes, and evenhandedly. That is to say, the planted zone, the boundary of the monument, is doing really well. The trees are bigger and I’m not knocking that. The area inside the blast zone, which they have not done any tree planting in, is also doing well in its own terms, at its own speed. Both are okay; that’s what I would like people to come away with.
AG: And this message does come out in the text. In the poem following “Blast Zone”, you say that both the natural and artificial sides will be instructive to watch for centuries to come.
GS: And at one point, of course, they’ll be equal. In about two hundred years the trees will be the same size. Now, how the under-story will look will be an interesting forester’s study. It’ll be more monocultural on the managed side, more diverse on the unmanaged side. In general, ecologists say that diversity is a good thing. But it’s not a major difference in this case. So my underlying message, if anything, is, don’t be too judgmental either way, watch what happens. What else can you do when you take major volcanic eruptions as part of life? And keep your cool.
AG: In “Atomic Dawn” your fifteen year old narrator as self swears a vow: “By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.” Here, it seems to be the greatness of Mt. St. Helens that makes this vow a solemn one. At what point in your life did you begin to view nature as sacred?
GS: Well, I couldn’t say exactly at what point. I grew up in an area of second growth forest, kind of scrubby, coming back. But I didn’t know that there was anything wrong with that, I thought it was great. This was north of Seattle. That country between Seattle and Everett was clear-cut around the turn of the nineteenth century. You’ve seen the photographs of gigantic trees? It was gigantic trees all the way from Seattle to Everett, probably from Everett to Bellingham too. So, this is the history of the west coast. Then it was all clear-cut. And Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, all the cities up and down the west coast were built with pacific northwest douglas fir. A lot of lumber went to Asia too, although maybe not so much as now. Now, a tremendous amount of ponderosa pine goes to Japan and a certain amount of douglas fir. So, another forest came back except for the little places where people developed dairy farms which were gradually enlarged. So, it was either second growth stump land or dairy farms.
I realized at a certain point in my childhood that something else had happened by the size of the stumps. And my parents said, “Oh yeah, well those were the big trees”. But the beauty of the second growth forest, and its energy, its vitality, can get lots of credit.
Then, I sought out the Cascades. We got into the high country and realized, this is the source of it all. That is truly impressive. To see the mountains and to be in the mountains touches you. It’s a good question: why does it? To see from a distance Mt. Rainier or Mt. Baker sitting there. It’s vertical, it’s high. You look at it and you say, “What kind of a place is that? Can I go there? Should I go there? What would it be like if I went there?” It’s a different world. Archetypally, spiritually, psychologically, the mountains are a different world. They’re not subject to our usual economic uses. They fit another pattern. And so, they enter our dreams in that way.
So, I was touched by the mountains and the high country too as a zone that does not fit into ordinary human preoccupations. That was part of what I was feeling as the purity and the specialness of Mt. St. Helens. Just before the line you quoted, I describe what it was like to be on the summit of Mt. St. Helens. Just one little paragraph of how remarkable it is when you’re on top of the snow peak. And I say you are higher than you ever get in an airplane; it somehow is a higher place. And then when I looked down, there was nothing down there. I actually experienced that and you would too if you went up on Mt. Baker, which you ought to do, climb Mt. Baker. Get out there and experience what is.
AG: Well, I have done some hiking out on Baker. I haven’t yet made it to the top.
GS: You don’t have to go all the way up. Go out to Skagit and go up on Sourdough Mountain, there’s a trail that will take you right up there. You have the most extraordinary viewpoint of a country full of glaciers and peaks you didn’t know was there. One can’t see it until you get up there. So, it is archetypally another world. That is what I’m echoing back from the age of fifteen when I say “by the purity and beauty of Mt. St. Helens”, ironically.
AG: I want to turn now to some of the teaching you have done. Until recently, you were teaching poetry at UC-Davis. What is your relationship to academia currently? Do you see writing as a process that should be taught and learned formally?
GS: I never got a PhD and I taught briefly at UC-Berkeley. I taught one academic year at Berkeley during 64-65. I was back in the United States from Japan and then returned to Japan. Later I was invited to come to UC-Davis primarily to teach in the graduate creative writing program but also to teach a literary course or two. I taught half time for sixteen years and I always taught a creative writing workshopping class. I also taught several various interesting (to me) literary courses like a history of the mid-century San Francisco poetry Renaissance and the beginnings of the beat generation – that was fun to teach. Another class I taught from time to time was on Chinese and Japanese poetry coming into English language translation and its effect on 20th century American literature. That is a topic you might consider. Going to China you’re going to get exposed to East Asian culture and there is a really interesting territory on the effect of the translations from Chinese that started before WWI even. And then through the translations of Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound, which had enormous influence on English and American poetry.
One of our most striking local examples is Robert Sund, whose poetry is shot through with the influence of East Asia. So that’s been my teaching life. Half-time, courses of my own description, courses of my own choice, and always working at finding a good way to teach poetry. I experimented a lot with that. I never was completely satisfied with it but I always felt it was worth doing. I do believe that you can teach something about poetry. As I always said to my students: it’s not a program that will lead to a career, but it will give you a hunting license.
AG: So, you see it as a venue for practice and conversation more than a place for formal instruction.
GS: And exchanging ideas and mutual critiques so that it’s useful. I say, if you don’t want to go to college and take a course in creative writing, go live in downtown San Francisco or New York and just hang out. That’s the alternative.
AG: I wonder about the craft of your writing. Your language choice in your poems comes across as so carefully and thoughtfully crafted. Is this a product of many drafts and revisions? Or are you more apt to get it right the first time around?
GS: I have my own demanding standards, which some people might disagree with but at least they are standards of some sort. If a poem fits those standards right away then I don’t have to revise it. If it doesn’t fit those standards I’ll keep revising it. So it depends. Sometimes I’m lucky and the first draft is almost exactly what I want. But I’m willing to spend a lot of time with a poem, sometimes seven or eight years. I just keep looking at it until it comes around.
AG: Speaking of craft, your poem “How” is one for which timing is important to the resulting meaning:
How
small birds flit
from bough
to bough to bough
to bough to bough to bough
As you create a poem, do you find that you need to always have pencil and paper to see how it will look on the page? Or do you find that you can imagine the line breaks before you commit it to paper?
GS: Well, I think I composed that poem in my mind entirely. You know, it’s so short. I probably was just watching the little brown birds in the underbrush. Bush dwelling small birds, watching the way they move within the shrubs and the smaller trees, repeating it to myself in a way. So, saying it aloud as I watched them do it: to bough, to bough, to bough-to bough-to bough. And then say okay, maybe I’ll write that down. So the first version was probably oral, saying it to myself.
AG: I want to turn to the sequencing of Danger on Peaks because the movement from beginning to end feels very purposeful. You begin with your experiences on Mt. St. Helens in 1945, eventually moving to the recent events on September 11th, 2001. Do you find that the meaning of a specific poem is likely to change heavily based on its positioning?
GS: I wouldn’t say that the meaning of a poem changes. But, its resonance changes. Which is a common sense observation. Things are affected by their surroundings and so you want them to inform each other and that’s a choice: how you cause them to inform each other, how they relate to each other.
AG: I also noticed this with the photographs on the front and back covers. Even the positioning of these pictures informed my reading of the text as a whole. The front cover of Danger on Peaks displays a picture of Mount St. Helens after the 1980 eruption. The back cover has a picture you took in 1945, which is, of course, pre-eruption.
GS: Well, everything there is deliberate and by using graphics that way I don’t have to explain it. It’s truly visual.
AG: Because you’ve been writing for many years, I’m curious about your literary influences. Do you find that these change over time or stay fairly static?
GS: One has one’s initial artistic influences that get you started and for me they were people like Whitman and Pound and Williams and Yeats and I could name others. And then, your own peers, your own age-mates, later, and people that you’re working with, become influences. And you share with each other. That would have been people like Allen Ginsberg and Lew Welch and Phil Whalen And the influences might be from music and painting and architecture. Oddball things that come not just from literature. Or from reading non-fiction, science and so forth. An artist is always curious. An artist is like a crow always picking up bits of string from everywhere, which some people call stealing. But somebody said, “Artists borrow, great artists steal”.