Poetry

Above Pate Valley by Gary Snyder Listen Online We finished clearing the last Section of trail by noon, High on the ridge-side Two thousand feet above the creek Reached the pass, went on Beyond the white pine groves, Granite shoulders, to a small Green meadow watered by the snow, Edged with Aspen-sun Straight high and blazing But the air was cool. Ate a cold fried trout in the Trembling shadows. I spied A glitter, and found a flake Black volcanic glass-obsidian- By a flower. Hands and knees Pushing the Bear grass, thousands Of arrowhead leavings over a Hundred yards. Not one good Head, just razor flakes On a hill snowed all but summer, A land of fat summer deer, They came to camp. On their Own trails. I followed my own Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill, Pick, singlejack, and sack Of dynamite. Ten thousand years. "Above Pate Valley" by Gary Snyder from Riprap and Cold Mountain. © Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

Today is the birthday of poet Gary Snyder (books by this author), born in San Francisco (1930). When he was 15, he read Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, and he liked it so much that he went to the library to see what else Lawrence had written. He found a book called Birds, Beasts and Flowers.He said, "I was disappointed to find out that it wasn't a sexy novel, but read the poems anyway, and it deeply shaped me for that moment in my life." He began writing his own poetry, and continued to write during his years at Reed College, where he studied anthropology and literature. After graduating, he decided that the life of a poet wasn't for him, and he went to work on a trail crew in the mountains. In the mountains, he started writing again, poems about rocks and birds. He had never written anything like them before, and he realized that he must finally be writing in his own voice. He taught himself Chinese, and was particularly inspired by Chinese poetry. In 1955, at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, Snyder read his poem "A Berry Feast." He spent many years studying Zen Buddhism in Japan. In 1961, he published an essay about what he called "Buddhist anarchism," a concept that excited many of his fellow Beat writers. He was the model for Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums (1958). He lived with a counterculture group on a Japanese island, translated poetry, taught English at the University of California Davis, and became an environmental activist. His books include Turtle Island (1974), No Nature (1992), New and Selected Poems (1992), and most recently, Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places (2014). He said, "I am a poet who has preferred not to distinguish in poetry between nature and humanity."