Happy birthday Gary Snyder (May 8 1930)
“Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.”
― Gary Snyder
“Clouds sink down the hills
Coffee is hot again. The dog
Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.”
― Gary Snyder, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems
Reality Insight (poem on youtube)
Paris Review Interview here.
Poetry foundation
”Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics”
“Once Only almost at the equator almost at the
equinox
exactly at midnight from a ship the full moon in the center of the sky.”
Iain Sinclair meets Gary Snyder (The Man In the Clearing)
Snyder on Kerouac
The dialectic that I observed in Jack, which was kind of charming, really, and you see it at work in his novels, was that be could play the fool and he could play the student very well. “But see, I really don’t know anything about this. Teach me!” “Wow! You really know how to do that?” and lead you on. ‘I’hat was balanced by sometimes great authoritativeness and great arrogance, and he would suddenly say, “I am the authority.” But then he would get out of that again. It was partly maybe like a really skillful novelist’s con, to get people to speak. And be uses that as a literary device in his novels, where he presents himself often as the straight guy and he lets the other guys be smart.
I much appreciated what he had to say about spontaneous prose, although I never wrote prose. I think it influenced my journal writing a lot, some of which would, say, be registered in the book Earth House Hold. I think that I owe a lot to Jack in my prose style, actually. And my sense of poetics has been touched by Jack for sure.
Our interchanges on Buddhism were on the playful and delightful level of exchanging the lore, exchanging what we knew about it, what he thought of Mahayana. He made up names. He would follow on the Mahayana Sutra invention of lists, and he would invent more lists, like the names of all the past Buddhas, the names of all the future Buddhas, the names of all the other universes. He was great at that. But it was not like a pair of young French intellectuals sitting down comparing their structural comprehension of something. We exchanged lore. And I would tell him, “Now look. Here are these Chinese Buddhists,” and that’s how we ended up talking about the Han-shan texts together, and I introduced him to the texts that give the anecdotes of the dialogues and confrontations between T’ang Dynasty masters and disciples, and of course he was delighted by that. Anybody is. ‘I’hat’s what we did.
