Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyderis an American man of letters. Perhaps best known as a poet, he is also an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. He has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder served...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth8 May 1930
CountryUnited States of America
Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks.
Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics
Burning the small dead branches broke from beneath thick spreading whitebark pine. A hundred summers snowmelt rock and air hiss in a twisted bough.
Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things: Cobble of milky way. straying planets, These poems, people, lost ponies with Dragging saddles -- and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional Game of Go. ants and pebbles In the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stone Granite: ingrained with torment of fire and weight Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, As well as things.
(Resort) players are finding that bunker. I can tell; they don't rake the sand.
It gave a sense of the possibilities of an alternative culture. And it wasn't just poetry that moved people. It was the sense of a community, of people with a vision.
That's the part most of us can remember being part of homeroom,
My Grandmother standing wordless fifteen minutes Between rows of loganberries, clippers poised in her hand.
Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife
In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.
I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness America your stupidity. I could almost love you again.
Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.
I don't know of any other city where you can walk through so many culturally diverse neighborhoods, and you're never out of sight of the wild hills. Nature is very close here.
The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void.