Poet Joanne Kyger published The Fool in April: A Poem In Two Parts in 1966. Assigning myself a fool, born on All Fool’s Day, finding this text became a years-long endeavor and in this timeframe I thought I might as well purchase Gary Snyder books. Snyder, briefly married to Kyger, would have something to say of the fool I hoped. I knew he was a scholar of the wilderness, of seaside hemlocks and redwoods, I knew he preferred Eastern cultures and languages to Western, I knew Ferlinghetti had called him “the Thoreau of the Beat Generation,” and that he had inspired a character Kerouac wrote in Dharma Bums. I knew very little and assigned his status and lore as rather elusive to begin with (see: foolish). Perhaps Snyder would have been amenable to this. “I never did know exactly what was meant by the term 'The Beats', but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Ginsberg, myself, McClure, Ferlinghetti, Whalen, Welch and Corso, to me, did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways and then went our own ways for many years. Where we began to come really close together again, in the late 60s was when Ginsberg began to take a deep interest in Buddhism which added another dimension to our levels of agreement.” Raised in rural Washington he worked as a logger and seasonal farm worker through his teenage years, later serving as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service. Degrees in literature and anthropology guided him towards studying Oriental thought and linguistics at UC Berkeley. Here, and among his raucous peers, he would hone theories of nature and ethic, though his early publications speak directly to physical labor jobs, exploring the land and longing.
The prose is modest, sparse, and could be a poetic field guide wedged in the back pocket of blue jeans, clocked in on company time. “July 9 - Granite Creek Guard Station: The boulder in the creek never moves / the water is always falling together! A ramshackle little cabin built by Frank Beebe the miner / Two days walk to here from roadhead / Arts of the Japanese: moon-watching, insect-hearing / Reading the sutra of Hui Neng / One does not need universities and libraries / One need be alive to what is about, saying ‘I don’t care.’” Another, “July 28 - If one wished to write poetry of nature, where an audience? Must come from the very conflict of an attempt to articulate the vision, poetry and nature in our time.” These murmurs, free from pretension, tender yet resolute, are consistent in Snyder’s writing all his life.
“The work I see for myself remains on the mythopoetic level of understanding the interface of society, ecology, and language, and I think it is valuable to keep doing that,” he tells the Paris Review in 1992, after thirteen years traveling between Japan and India intensively studying Buddhist doctrine. “In old Sanskrit, ahimsa means ‘do no harm’ or ‘cause the least harm.’ The precepts in Buddhism are meant as challenges, like koans, in which you keep asking, ‘Well, how did I deal with that today?’ And you don’t beat yourself up because you didn’t do so well. Instead you say, ‘Well, I’ll do better next time.’ This is an important difference between the East Asian approach to ethics and the more absolutist, dualistic rules of the Occidental religions.” Snyder mountaineers terrains of blame and shame as much as he does Cascade Range. There is no definitive statement one can give on what he should be remembered for, but it is particularly moving he tells the fool she must always take heart in compassion and asters that do sprout in untimely season.
-Katie Calderon