Gary Snyder

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Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American man of letters.

He is perhaps best known as a poet (often associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance), but also an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist with anarchoprimitivist leanings.

He has been dubbed the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology" by the author.

Snyder is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award.

His work, in various capacities, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature.

Snyder has converted literature from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese.

Snyder served as an academic at the University of California, Davis, and as a member of the California Arts Council.

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Life and career

Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco, California, to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder. Snyder is of German, Scottish, Irish, and English roots. When his family was two years old, they moved to King County, Washington, to be impoverished by the Great Depression. They raised dairy-cows, continued laying-hens, had a small orchard, and made cedar-wood shingles. Snyder was hospitalized for four months by an accident at the age of seven. "I'm sure my parents gave me piles of books from the Seattle Public Library," he explained in an interview, "I soon learned to read, and from that time on, I was voracious." By the time they're eighteen, I had read more than most girls do. "I didn't stop," says the writer. During his ten-year tenure in Washington, Snyder became aware of the Coast Salish people's presence in general and their common association with nature.

Following his parents' divorce, Snyder and his mother and his younger sister, Anthea, moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1942. Lois Snyder Hennessy (born Wilkey) was their mother during this time as a reporter for The Oregonian. At the Oregonian, one of his boyhood jobs was as a newspaper copy-boy. During his adolescence, he attended Lincoln High School, served as a camp counselor, and joined the Mazamas youth group. Climbing remained an obsession of his youth and thirties, particularly during his teens and thirties. He began attending Reed College on a scholarship in 1947. He encountered, and briefly lived with writer Carl Proujan, and became familiar with the young poets, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. Snyder wrote his first poems in a student journal during his time at Reed. He spent the summer as a seaman in 1948. He joined the now-defunct Marine Cooks and Stewards union in order to work as a seaman in the mid-1950s to gain exposure of other cultures in port cities. Snyder married Alison Gass in 1950; they separated after seven months and divorced in 1952.

Snyder conducted folklore study on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon while attending Reed. In 1951, he obtained a dual degree in anthropology and literature. The Dimensions of a Myth by Snyder's senior thesis used anthropology, folklore, psychology, and literature to explore a myth of the Pacific Northwest's Haida peoples. He spent the next few summers in Warm Springs as a timber scaler, strengthening links with the company's people who were less involved in academia. This experience spawned some of his oldest published poems (including "A Berry Feast"), which were later included in the book The Back Country. He also encountered Buddhism's basic beliefs and, via its arts, some East Asian traditional attitudes toward nature. He obtained a graduate fellowship at Indiana University to study anthropology. (Snyder has also started practicing self-taught Zen meditation.) He left after a single semester to return to San Francisco and'sink or swim as a poet.' Snyder spent two summers in Washington, Washington, as a fire lookout, on Crater Mountain in 1952 and Sourdough Mountain in 1953 (both locations along the upper Skagit River). In 1954, his attempts to get another lookout stint (at the height of McCarthyism) fell short of success. He was refused to serve in the government due to his ties with the Marine Cooks and Stewards. Rather, he returned to Warm Springs to work in logging as a choker setter. This experience inspired his book Myths and Texts as well as the Far West's essay Ancient Forests.

Snyder used to be a student at the University of San Francisco and he shared his growing obsession with Zen. Snyder's review of D. T. Suzuki's writings had influenced his decision not to pursue as a graduate student in anthropology, and in 1953, he joined the University of California, Berkeley, to study Asian cultures and languages. Under Ch'en Shih-hsiang's poetry, he studied ink and wash painting under Chiura Obata and Tang dynasty poetry. Snyder spent summers in the woods, with one summer as a trail-builder in Yosemite. He spent some months in 1955 and 1956 in a cabin (which he referred to as "Marin-an") outside Mill Valley, California, with Jack Kerouac. Snyder, an occasional student at the American Academy of Asian Studies, where Saburo Hasegawa and Alan Watts, among other things, were teaching. Hasegawa introduced Snyder to the art of landscape painting as a meditative art form. Snyder was inspired to write something similar to poetry, and he began to write Mountains and Rivers Without End, which would be finished and published 40 years later. During the years, Snyder was writing and collecting his own work, as well as beginning to translate the "Cold Mountain" poems by 8th-century Chinese recluse Han Shan's; this work appeared in chapbook form in 1959, under the name Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems.

When Allen Ginsberg demanded Snyder out on Kenneth Rexroth's recommendation, he met him. Through Ginsberg, Snyder, and Kerouac, then got to know each other. This period provided the inspiration for Kerouab's book The Dharma Bums, and Snyder was the inspiration for Japhy Ryder's main character, in the same way Neal Cassady inspired Dean Moriarty in On the Road. As the overwhelming majority of those in the Beat movement had urban roots, writers such as Ginsberg and Kerouac discovered Snyder, with his backcountry and manual-labor knowledge, as well as a rural interest, a refreshing and almost exotic individual. Lawrence Ferlinghetti later referred to Snyder as 'the Thoreau of the Beat Generation.'

At the poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco (October 7, 1955) where we first heard of Ginsberg's poem "Howl" and her appearance in mainstream Beats publication. . Snyder's first appearance with the Beats came as a result of his membership in Whalen and Welch, though he wasn't a member of the original New York circle, but he was still a member of the group. Even at age 25 Snyder, as recounted in Kerouac's Dharma Bums, felt he might have played a role in the crucial future meeting between West and East. Riprap, Snyder's first book, based on his experiences as a forester lookout and on the trail crew in Yosemite, was released in 1959.

Some of the Beats, including Whalen, were involved in Zen, but Snyder, one of the more serious scholars of the area, was already researching in Japan for eventual study. The First Zen Institute of America gave him a scholarship for a year of Zen training in Japan in 1955, but the State Department refused to give him a passport, informing him that "you are a Communist." A new District of Columbia Court of Appeals decision prompted a change in strategy, and Snyder obtained his passport. His expenses were covered by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, who was supposed to work; but he started as personal attendant and English tutor to Zen abbot Miura Isshu, a temple in Shokoku-ji, where American Buddhist popularizer Dwight Goddard and Japanese culture devotee R. H. Blyth had preceded him. Mornings, after zazen, sutta chanting, and chores for the abbot, he started Japanese classes, improving his spoken Japanese to a level appropriate for kan study. He began a friendship with Philip Yampolsky, a leading translator and scholar of Zen Buddhism who led him around Kyoto. He escaped and asked to be Miura's disciple in early July 1955, becoming officially a Buddhist.

He returned to California via the Persian Gulf, Turkey, Sri Lanka, and several Pacific Islands, voyaging as a crewman in the engine room of the oil tanker Sappa Creek in 1958 and then moved to Marin-an. With just six regular participants, he converted one room into a zendo. He met poet Joanne Kyger in early June. She became his mother and then wife. He left Japan in 1959, renting a cottage outside Kyoto. He became Rinzai Rshi Sesso, the new abbot of Daitoku-ji, as the first foreign disciple. On February 28, 1960, she married Kyger immediately after her arrival in Japan, which Fuller Sasaki insisted they do if they were to live together and be associated with the Nichibe Zen Kyokai. Snyder and Kyger were married from 1960 to 1965.

Snyder went back and forth between California and Japan, learning Zen, translating with Fuller Sasaki, and then living for a while with a group of other people on Suwanosejima's tiny, volcanic island of Suwanosejima. His latest study of written Chinese helped with his immersion in the Zen style, which has roots in Tang Dynasty China, and enabled him to support himself while living in Japan. Snyder received the Zen precepts and his dharma name Chofu ("Listen to the Wind") and lived as a de facto monk, but not to return to the United States to "turn the wheel of the dharma." During this period, he released two collections of his poems from the early to mid 1950s, Myths & Texts (1960), and Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965). This was the start of a project that would continue to be carried out into the late 1990s. Many of Snyder's poetry refers to life, places, and knowledge associated with the profession he has done for a living: logger, firefighter crew, translator, carpenter, and itinerant poet, to name a few. Snyder was also initiated into Shugendo, a highly syncretic ascetic cult, during his time in Japan. He travelled for six months in India with Kyger, Ginsberg, and Ginsberg's companion, poet and actor Peter Orlovsky in the early 1960s. Snyder and Kyger became separated shortly after a single trip to India and divorced in 1965.

Snyder played a key role in the revival of a form of Buddhist anarchism that came from the Beat movement in the 1950s. In Kerouac's book The Dharma Bums (1958), Snyder was the inspiration for the Japhy Ryder character. Snyder had spent considerable time in Japan studying Zen Buddhism, and in 1961, he wrote "Buddhist Anarchism," describing the link he noticed between these two cultures, which had arisen in different parts of the world: "The mercy of the East has been personal insight into the basic self/void." He promoted "the right of individuals to smoke ganja, be polite, polygynous, or homosexual" as a prohibition by "the Judaeo-Marxist West" and suggested using "serious condemnation, outspoken condemnation, outspoken critique, violence, voluntary poverty, and even mild strife."

Snyder, Richard Baker, the San Francisco Zen Center's future Roshi, and Kriyananda aka Donald J Walters, bought 100 acres (40 ha) in the Sierra foothills north of Nevada City, California, in 1966. This will be his home in 1970, with the Snyder family's portion dubbed Kitkitdizze. Snyder spent the summers of 1967 and 1968 on Suwanosejima (a small Japanese island off the coast of East China), where they combed the beaches, collected edible plants, and fished. Masa Uehara, a young man from Osaka, had married Masa Uehara, who had met there a year before. They and their infant son, Kai (born April 1968), moved to California in 1968. Gen Gen was the couple's second son and came a year later. They lived in San Juan, California, near the South Yuba River, where they and friends built a house that drew on rural-Japanese and Native-American architectural concepts in 1971. His book The Back Country appeared in 1967, but it was mostly a collection of poems dating back to around fifteen years. Snyder dedicated a section at the end of the book to his translations of eighteen poems by Kenji Miyazawa.

Waves appeared in January 1970, marking a stylistic change in poetry that were more emotional, metaphoric, and lyrical. The content of Snyder's poetry has increasingly had to do with family, friends, and community. He continued to publish poetry in the Sierra foothills throughout the 1970s, much of it reflected his re-immersion in life on the American continent and his role in the back-to-the-land movement. A Pulitzer Prize winner for his 1974 book Turtle Island, named after a Native American name for the North American continent, received a Pulitzer Prize. Several West Coast Generation X writers, including Alex Steffen, Bruce Barcott, and Mark Morford, were also influenced by it, including Alex Steffen, Bruce Barcott and Mark Morford. An American Book Award went to his 1983 book Axe Handles. Snyder wrote a number of essays outlining his views on poetry, culture, social experimentation, and the climate. Many of these were found in Earth House Hold (1969), The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work (1980), The Practice of the Wild (1990), The Gary Snyder Reader (1999). Snyder wrote He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village in 1979, based on his Reed thesis. In 1983, Snyder's journals from his travel in India in the mid-1960s were published as "Passage Through India." His wide-ranging interests in cultures, natural history, religion, feminist analysis, and contemporary America's hands-on aspects of rural life, as well as his literary theories, were all explored in these.

Snyder was a professor at the University of California, Davis, in 1986. Snyder is now a professor emeritus of English.

Snyder was married to Uehara for twenty-two years; the couple divorced in 1989. Snyder married Carole Lynn Koda (October 3, 1947 – June 29, 2006), who would write Homegrown: Thirteen brothers and sisters, a century in America, in 1991, and she stayed married to her until her death from cancer. She was born in the third generation of a flourishing Japanese-American farming family, known for its delicious rice. She taught Buddhism, extensive travels, and work with Snyder, as well as doing independent work as a naturalist.

He began to write more poetry in the 1980s and early 1990s as Snyder's involvement in environmental issues and teaching grew. Nonetheless, he released Complete Mountains and Rivers Without End in 1996, a mash-up of the lyrical and epic modes commemorating the act of habitation on a specific location on the planet. The work was published over a 40-year period. It has been translated into Japanese, French, and Russian. Danger on Peaks, Snyder's first collection of new poems in 20 years, was released in 2004.

Snyder received the Levinson Prize from the American Poetry Society (1986), was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1987), and received the John Hay Award for Nature Writing in the same year. Snyder also received the Buddhist Transmission Award (1998) from the Japan-based Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation, making him the first American to receive the award. Snyder was selected as one of the 100 visionaries selected by Utne Reader in 1995 for his ecological and social activism.

In John J. Healy's 2010 film The Practice of the Wild, Snyder's life and work were recapped. Snyder and poet, essay, and longtime colleague Jim Harrison's film, which premiered at the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival, was shot mainly on the Hearst Ranch in San Simeon, California. The film also features archive photographs and a film of Snyder's life.

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