Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology".
Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis, and for a time served as a member of the California Arts Council.
Life and career
Early life
Snyder was born in San Francisco, California, to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder. Snyder is of German, Scottish, Irish and English ancestry. His family, impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to King County, Washington, when he was two years old. There, they tended dairy-cows, kept laying-hens, had a small orchard, and made cedar-wood shingles. At the age of seven, Snyder was bedridden for four months by an accident. "So my folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle Public Library", he recalled in an interview, "and it was then I really learned to read and from that time on was voracious — I figure that accident changed my life. At the end of four months, I had read more than most kids do by the time they're 18. And I didn't stop." Also during his ten childhood years in Washington, Snyder became aware of the presence of the Coast Salish people and developed an interest in the Native American peoples in general and their traditional relationship with nature.In 1942, following his parents' divorce, Snyder moved to Portland, Oregon, with his mother and his younger sister, Anthea. Their mother, Lois Snyder Hennessy, worked during this period as a reporter for The Oregonian. One of his boyhood jobs was as a newspaper copy-boy at the Oregonian. During his teen years, he attended Lincoln High School, worked as a camp counselor, and went mountain-climbing with the Mazamas youth-group. Climbing remained an interest of his, especially during his twenties and thirties. In 1947, he started attending Reed College on a scholarship. Here, he met, and, for a time, roomed with the writer Carl Proujan, and became acquainted with the young poets Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. During his time at Reed, Snyder published his first poems in a student journal. In 1948 he spent the summer working as a seaman. To get this job, he joined the now-defunct Marine Cooks and Stewards union, and would later work as a seaman in the mid-1950s to gain experience of other cultures in port cities. Snyder married Alison Gass in 1950; they separated after seven months, and divorced in 1952.
While attending Reed, Snyder conducted folklore research on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon. He graduated with a dual degree in anthropology and literature in 1951. Snyder's senior thesis, entitled The Dimensions of a Myth, employed perspectives from anthropology, folklore, psychology, and literature to examine a myth of the Pacific Northwest's Haida people. He spent the following few summers working as a timber scaler at Warm Springs, developing relationships with its people that were rooted less in academia. This experience formed the basis for some of his earliest published poems, later collected in the book The Back Country. He also encountered the basic ideas of Buddhism and, through its arts, some East Asian traditional attitudes toward nature. He went to Indiana University with a graduate fellowship to study anthropology. He left after a single semester to return to San Francisco and to 'sink or swim as a poet'. Snyder worked for two summers in the North Cascades in Washington as a fire lookout, on Crater Mountain in 1952 and Sourdough Mountain in 1953. His attempts to get another lookout stint in 1954, however, failed. He found himself barred from working for the government due to his association with the Marine Cooks and Stewards. Instead, he went back to Warm Springs to work in logging as a choker setter. This experience contributed to his Myths and Texts and the essay Ancient Forests of the Far West.
The Beats
Back in San Francisco, Snyder lived with Whalen, who shared his growing interest in Zen. Snyder's reading of the writings of D. T. Suzuki had in fact been a factor in his decision not to continue as a graduate student in anthropology, and in 1953 he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study Asian culture and languages. He studied ink and wash painting under Chiura Obata and Tang dynasty poetry under Ch'en Shih-hsiang. Snyder continued to spend summers working in the forests, including one summer as a trail-builder in Yosemite. He spent some months in 1955 and 1956 living in a cabin outside Mill Valley, California with Jack Kerouac. It was also at this time that Snyder was an occasional student at the American Academy of Asian Studies, where Saburo Hasegawa and Alan Watts, among others, were teaching. Hasegawa introduced Snyder to the treatment of landscape painting as a meditative practice. This inspired Snyder to attempt something equivalent in poetry, and with Hasegawa's encouragement, he began work on Mountains and Rivers Without End, which would be completed and published 40 years later. During these years, Snyder was writing and collecting his own work, as well as embarking on the translation of the "Cold Mountain" poems by the 8th-century Chinese recluse Han Shan; this work appeared in chapbook form in 1959, under the title Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems.Snyder met Allen Ginsberg when the latter sought Snyder out on the recommendation of Kenneth Rexroth. Then, through Ginsberg, Snyder and Kerouac came to know each other. This period provided the materials for Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, and Snyder was the inspiration for the novel's main character, Japhy Ryder, in the same way Neal Cassady had inspired Dean Moriarty in On the Road. As the large majority of people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds, writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac found Snyder, with his backcountry and manual-labor experience and interest in things rural, a refreshing and almost exotic individual. Lawrence Ferlinghetti later referred to Snyder as 'the Thoreau of the Beat Generation'.
Snyder read his poem "A Berry Feast" at the poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco that heard the first reading of Ginsberg's poem "Howl" and marked the emergence into mainstream publicity of the Beats. This also marked Snyder's first involvement with the Beats, although he was not a member of the original New York circle, having entered the scene through his association with Whalen and Welch. As recounted in Kerouac's Dharma Bums, even at age 25 Snyder felt he could have a role in the fateful future meeting of West and East. Snyder's first book, Riprap, which drew on his experiences as a forest lookout and on the trail crew in Yosemite, was published in 1959.
Japan and India
Independently, some of the Beats, including Whalen, had become interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the more serious scholars of the subject among them, preparing in every way he could think of for eventual study in Japan. In 1955, the First Zen Institute of America offered him a scholarship for a year of Zen training in Japan, but the State Department refused to issue him a passport, informing him that "it has been alleged you are a Communist." A subsequent District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruling forced a change in policy, and Snyder got his passport. In the end, his expenses were paid by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, for whom he was supposed to work; but initially he served as personal attendant and English tutor to Zen abbot Miura Isshu, at Rinko-in, a temple in Shokoku-ji in Kyoto, where American Buddhist popularizer Dwight Goddard and British author and Japanese culture devotee R. H. Blyth had preceded him. Mornings, after zazen, sutra chanting, and chores for the abbot, he took Japanese classes, bringing his spoken Japanese up to a level sufficient for kōan study. He developed a friendship with Philip Yampolsky, an eminent translator and scholar of Zen Buddhism, who took him around Kyoto. In early July 1955, he took refuge and requested to become Miura's disciple, thus formally becoming a Buddhist.In 1958, he returned to California via the Persian Gulf, Turkey, Sri Lanka and various Pacific Islands, voyaging as a crewman in the engine room on the oil tanker Sappa Creek, and took up residence at Marin-an again. He turned one room into a zendo, with about six regular participants. In early June, he met the poet Joanne Kyger. She became his girlfriend, and eventually his wife. In 1959, he shipped for Japan again, where he rented a cottage outside Kyoto. He became the first foreign disciple of Rinzai Rōshi Oda Sesso, the new abbot of Daitoku-ji. He married Kyger on February 28, 1960, immediately after her arrival in Japan, which Fuller Sasaki insisted they do, if they were to live together and be associated with the Nichibei Daiichi Zen Kyokai,. Snyder and Kyger were married from 1960 to 1965.
During the period between 1956 and 1969, Snyder went back and forth between California and Japan, studying Zen, working on translations with Fuller Sasaki, and finally living for a while with a group of other people on the small, volcanic island of Suwanosejima. His previous study of written Chinese assisted his immersion in the Zen tradition, which has its roots in Tang dynasty China, and enabled him to support himself while he was living in Japan. Snyder received the Zen precepts and his dharma name of Chofu, and lived occasionally as a de facto monk, but never registered to become a priest, planning eventually to return to the United States to "turn the wheel of the dharma". During this time, he published two collections of his poems from the early to mid 1950s, Myths & Texts, and Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End. This last was the beginning of a project that he was to continue working on until the late 1990s. Much of Snyder's poetry expresses experiences, environments, and insights involved with the work he has done for a living: logger, fire-lookout, steam-freighter crew, translator, carpenter, and itinerant poet, among other things. During his years in Japan, Snyder was also initiated into Shugendo, a highly syncretic ascetic religious cult.
In the early 1960s he traveled for six months through India with Kyger, Ginsberg, and Ginsberg's partner, the poet and actor Peter Orlovsky. Their sojourn took them to Sri Lanka, then to south India, and eventually travelling up into the north. They observed the folkways of the various peoples, went on hikes, stopped at landmarks, temples, burning ghats, monastic caves, and ashrams. As they went, they learned in part through conversations with many Indians and Europeans who could speak English. They visited numerous cities, including Madras, Calcutta, Mumbai, Banaras, Old Delhi and New Delhi, as well as Rishikesh and Hardwar, and Bodh Gaya. Especially important to Snyder and Ginsberg, in Dharamashala the Dalai Lama met with them and they discussed Buddhist principles and practices.
Snyder and Kyger separated soon after their trip to India, and divorced in 1965.