Gary snyder why i take good care

A centerpiece in this collection is a long poem about the death of his beloved, Carole Koda, a rich poem of grief and sorrow, rare in its steady resolved focus on a dying wife, of a power unequaled in American poetry.

As a friend is quoted in one of these new poems: "I met the other lately in the far back of a bar, musicians playing near the window and he sweetly told me "listen to that music. The self we hold so dear will soon be gone.

Language eng. Publication Berkeley, CA, Counterpoint, Extent 66 pages. Isbn Library Locations Map Details. Ladd Library Borrow it. Library Links.

Luckily, I knew the Heart Sutra, so that was O. After that was over, they took me to a mountain temple with a dirt floor—it was small and dark and all smoky with incense—and we blew the conch for hours. I have some very wonderful overalls from them. As a student of Zen, Snyder lived an existence that was austere, and sometimes humorless. Snyder let her buy it only after she had memorized the name of each one.

In the middle of June, Snyder visited New York for a long weekend. With his younger son, Gen, who is thirty-eight, he went twice to the Met. They looked at rare pre-Columbian feather-working, Himalayan art, and samurai gear, and visited an exhibit on Chinese painting and calligraphy.

On the Saturday of the trip, wearing jeans, a vest, and a long skull-and-bead necklace—a symbol of impermanence that he picked up at a Buddhist supply shop in Kyoto—Snyder reported to the Asia Society, on the Upper East Side, for a symposium devoted to his travels through India with Kyger, Ginsberg, and Orlovsky.

Reading aloud is crucial to his process; he improvises, makes substitutions, supplies glosses on difficult words. Sometimes he sings a poem, or gestures with his hands, like a conductor before an orchestra. In India, he attended an all-night poetry reading, and several years ago he tried one himself, with dancers, musicians, and costumes. The exposure to it is part of its power.

He leaned into the stresses as if boosted by an updraft, making of each word a surprising curiosity. The audience was suffused with happy, baffled pleasure and good vibes. Snyder sat down in the audience. Meanwhile, Snyder got to work. He put on a pair of glasses, and took a small notebook from the front pocket of his shirt. He paged through it, periodically jotting something down. We were all so different from each other, all these unique cases. That makes it really kind of untidy.

Allen and I had that out even when we were in our twenties. We had mutual respect, and mutual disagreement. I am very symptomatic of the West Coast, and the West Coast is a slightly different culture from the rest of the country. He took a branch to a paint store and had the supplier mix the shade accordingly. A gable covers the old smoke hole. In , Snyder sought ten volunteers to help him build a home that was to be part Japanese farmhouse, part Indian lodge.

They came—some from Berkeley, some from Antioch College—in the summer of , and, with Snyder and Uehara, built the house in a few months, using ponderosa pines from within three hundred feet of the site to frame, and local incense cedar for siding. The foundation stones came from the middle fork of the Yuba River.

There was no electricity Kitkitdizze is still off the grid, and nowadays runs on solar and generators , so they felled the trees with a two-man handsaw. Days were hot and nakedness prevailed. Some of his ideas seem implausible now—polyandrous marriages as a remedy for overpopulation, walking the Coast Range as a way to get from San Francisco to L. It was a manifesto, and the national environmental movement had to take it seriously. The others were dull as paste.

They needed someone attractive, and Gary understood something about his own attractiveness. Informed by the Buddhist principle of ahimsa , or non-harming, and also by Native American religious thought, Snyder argues that humans must take the nonhuman elements of the planet into account, not for our sakes but for theirs.

Using Kitkitdizze as a prototype, he encourages others to inhabit more fully the places they live—settle down, get to know the neighbors including, in his conception, the plants and animals , join the school board and the watershed council, and defend the local resources and way of life.

Place, he writes, should be defined by natural indicators, like rivers and the flora and fauna they support. Snyder is among the first to sense this conjunction. Humans may be in for some difficult times, but nature will take care of itself, he says. Accept impermanence. Here's "Anger, Cattle, and Achilles" in its entirety:. Just to finish off our 'unBeat' discussion, listen to the evenness of Snyder's tone there. The speaker could be called a participant-informant, and the poem, which might be given to drama or schmaltz, or both—the very pairing of Snyder and schmaltz is an oxymoron—resorts to neither.

Instead, the tone, which I think is deeply characteristic of him, is like a smooth bathing of light across the time and space of the story told, compassion and sadness deeply vibrant beneath. Let's also note the quiet wit of the poem, the "herder" idea to pair these feuding friends, and the suggestiveness of "nuances" in that phrase about power.

The Buddhist letting go of ego and world, the poem's point and ending, speaks for itself. Again there's fine wit, wit that powerfully signifies, in the last line. But perhaps more important is his expressed attempt to "slow down" his mind, what it tells us of a discipline of going beyond, of this man's attempt—really as all good poets do—but maybe especially this one—to slip personal confines, to perceive the larger. Which, in a wide variety of ways, is what portions of This Present Moment are doing.

Some of the poems seem to be more or less found poems, like "The Names of Actaeon's Hounds," which, exactly as the title says, is a vivid list of names which Snyder's notes tell us was taken from a translation of Ovid; "Old New Mexico Genetics," which is more or less a transcription of an eighteenth century listing of genetic possibilities he found on the wall of the Palace of Governors in Santa Fe; "Polyandry," which he says was taken from a book on the subject.

Poems like this seem to me, again, to be an exercise in 'thisness', a kind of direct pouring of the world by way of Snyder's mindful selection through to the reader. Something of this effect, although much more talked and thought, is produced by the opening of "Stories in the Night":. But what starts out as a straight eavesdropping on Snyder's handy man or engineer's mind turns as the poem moves, a two-pager, into something very different.

It cuts to , a tour through Japan with his first wife, the poet Joanne Kyger, visiting Hiroshima, from there to thinking about the Bomb, about power, the Old Testament God, and much else. This easy informality; 'This is where my thoughts are darting'; 'These are the poems, folks'—to paraphrase the old stand-up comedian's patter-line—seems to me very much another characteristic of his work.

We should also note his warm reverencing of the "old time people" and for the candle-lit stories that give the poem its title. Many poems here take us into more private niches of Snyder's experience, like the poem that takes us quietly into Hai-en Temple in South Korea page 44 , its chanting of sutras, its "great drum," bonging of bells, its eighty thousand carved birch wood blocks; like this poem, also, "The Earth's Wild Places":.

I want to come back to that essential image of the Earth as body of the lover later, but here it's that last line that takes me, that gives this city boy a special telephoto inkling of wilderness.

How lovely that is and startling, even shocking. Artemis, chaste goddess of the hunt, and Pan, sexual, the satyr, who gave her the pick of his hunting hounds, the poem potently joins these two, as they've been joined in painting. Snyder gives the poem an epigraph from Thoreau, "The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

Snyder seems to be recalling his own wild pleasures, in hunting—and in love as well? That last point is unclear to me. But the power is clear, delivered in the cut-back, abbreviated language, "bring down a deer…eat fresh liver," that he initiated, made characteristic in his celebrated 'bear shit in the trail' poems.

And I wonder if he's secretly amused as well, knowing that most of his readers, me certainly included, if they've eaten venison at all, let alone deer liver, have only done so in high-toned restaurants. Who Lives Far Away," a charming, rhymed letter to a young poet; "Charles Freer in a Sierra Snowstorm little did I know ," a visit to a museum founded by a railroad tycoon to look at a Chinese scroll, probably, I'm guessing, to fertilize his work on his own epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End.