MID -AUGUST AT SOURDOUGH MOUNTAIN LOOKOUT

MID -AUGUST AT SOURDOUGH MOUNTAIN LOOKOUT

Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder (born May  8 & ,1930) is an American poet (often associated with the Beat movement and an environmental activist who is frequently described as the ‘ laureate of Deep Ecology ‘ ; both reflecting  his studies of Buddhist spirituality and nature ,Snyder is also  a social a social critic whose views have shared  something in common with  Lewis Mumford , Aldous  Huxley , Karl Hess ,and Aldo Leopold .

Snyder was born in San Francisco ,California ,but his family , impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to Washington ,when he was  two and to Portland ,Oregon ten years later .During the ten childhood years n Washington .Snyder  become aware of the presence of Coast Salish people and developed an interest in American Native  peoples in general and their traditional relationship with nature .

In 1947, he started attending red college as a scholarship student. Here he, and for a time roomed with Philip Whalen and Lew welch. At Red Snyder published his first poems in a student journal .He also spent at least one summer working as a seaman .In 1951 ,he graduated with a BA In anthropology and literature and spent the summer working in forestry in Yosemite , experiences which formed the basis for his earliest published poems ,later  collected in the book riprap . Snyder had also encountered the basic ideas of Buddhism and, through its arts, some of the Far East’s traditional attitudes toward nature .Going onto Indiana University to study anthropology (where Snyder also practiced self - taught Zen meditation), he left a single semester to return to San Francisco and to ‘sink or swim as a poet ’.

Back in San Francisco, Snyder lived with Whalen, who shared his growing interest in Zen Buddhism. In 1953, he enrolled with the University of California, Berkeley to study Oriental culture and language. Snyder continued to spend summers working in the forest s ,as a logger or as lookout in forest parks and spend some months in 1955 living in a cabin mill Valley 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  leaching ,this period provided the materials for Kerouac’s  novel the dharma Bums . As the large majority of people in the beat Movement  had urban backgrounds , writers like Allen 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 ‘.

That same year ,after Snyder met with Ginsberg, the latter having  sought Snyder out on the recommendation of Kenneth Rexroth ,Snyder performed at the famous poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco (October 13, 1955)that heralded what was to become known as the san Francisco renaissance .this also marked Snyder’s  first involvement with the Beats ,although he was not a  member of the original New York circle , but rather entered the scene through an association with Kenneth Rexroth .as entered 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 crews in Yosemite 1959 .

Independently ,a number of the Beats such as Philip Whalen had become interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the subject among them .He ,in fact ,became a trainee spending most of the period between 1968 in Japan studying Zen first at Shokoku -ji and later in the Daitoku-ji  monastery in Kyoto .His previous study of written Chinese assisted his immersion in the Zen tradition (with its roots in Tang dynasty china ) and enabled him to take on certain professional projects while he was living in japan .Eventually ,he decided not to become a monk and to return to the United States to turn the “ wheel or the dharma ‘.

During this time, he published myths & Texts (1960) and Six Sections from Mountains and rivers without End (1965). (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 - logging  fire lookout ,steam -`  freighter  laboring , translation of texts , carpentry ,and life on- the -road presenting his poetry .

Ever the participant - observer, during  his years in Japan Snyder not only immersed himself in Zen practice  in monasteries   but also was initiated into shugendo ,a form of ancient  Japanese animism .(See also Yamabushi .) As well, in the early travelled for some months through India.

In the late 1960s  and after, he content of  Snyder’s poetry increasingly has to do with family , friends  and community .He continued to publish poetry throughout  the 1970s , much of it reflecting his re- immersion in life on the American continent and his involvement  in the re- inhabitation for back to the land ) movement in the  sierra Nevada  mountains of Northern California .His 1974  Turtle Island ,named  for the aboriginal name for the North American continent  won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He also wrote a number of essays outlining his views on poetry, culture, and the environment. Many of these  were collected in  Earth House Hold (1969) ,and the Old Ways (1977) ,the Real work (1980) , A Place in space ( 1995) ,and  The Gary Snyder reader ( 1999) . In 1978, Snyder published He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s village; the dimensions of a Haida Myth, based on his Reed thesis.

In 1985, Snyder became a professor in the writing program at the University of California, Davis here began to influence a new generation of authors interested in writing about the Far East, including novelist Robert Clark Young.

As Snyder’s involvement in environmental issues and his teaching grew, he seemed to move away from poetry for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, in 1996  he published the complete Mountains and Rivers  Without  end ,which in its mixture of the lyrical and epic modes celebrating the act of  inhabitation on a specific  place on the planet ,I both his finest wok and a  summation of a re- inhibitory poetic stands for .

Along the way, Gary Snyder was awarded the American poetry society Shelley Memories Award (1986) and inducted into the American academy of Arts and Letters (1987).

Snyder  is the author of several volumes of poetry ,including Turtle Island Mountains and rivers Without End and danger on Peaks and collections of essays like the Practice of the Wild .A Place  in space and Back on the fire .the year 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of his land mark  compendium of mountain poetry , Riprap and  cold Mountain Poems .Snyder served as a fire lookout on Sourdough and Crater  Mountains in the North Cascades during the summers of 1952-53 , writing some of his most inspired verse on ridge  high above  North cascades  Environmental learning Center .Earlier  this year ,he was awarded the Ruth Prize for his body of work ;he had previously won the Pulitzer, Bollinger and Levinson Prizes and the john hay Award for Nature Writing and was  inducted into  the American Academy of Arts and Litters in 1987 . Snyder is professor emeritus of English at University of California ,Davis , and lives in the foothills of Northern California ‘s Sierra Nevada range .