Books
Legendary poet/activist Gary Snyder finds his voice again

By Paul de Barros
Seattle Times staff reporter

"Danger on Peaks" is Pulitzer-winning writer Gary Snyder's first new volume in two decades. He is shown here in an undated photo.

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In "Atomic Dawn," a segment of his exquisite new book, "Danger on Peaks" (Shoemaker & Hoard, 122 pp, $22) Snyder recalls, "I swore a vow to myself, something like, 'By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mount St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.' "

Lots of young people make idealistic vows.

Snyder — Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, hero of beat writer Jack Kerouac's novel, "Dharma Bums," environmental crusader, inspirer of backpackers and Buddhist messenger to the west — has never wavered from his youthful vows — from, as he calls it, "the real work."

Now 74, the crusty, twinkling-eyed poet laureate of the high country has just published his first collection of new poems in 20 years. Recent chuffing and puffing by the mountain has lent a topical jolt to what was already a major Northwest cultural event.

Snyder reads from the new book at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Town Hall.

"Danger on Peaks" is a book many observers thought Snyder would never write.

Born in San Francisco, Snyder spent his early childhood in Lake City, where he was raised in the Depression by a single mom.

Coming up Gary Snyder reads from "Danger on Peaks," at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Town Hall, Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street, Seattle ($10; 206-624-6600).

"Lake City was outside the city limits," he recalls. "It was mostly cut-over logging land, with dairy pastures and horse pastures. It was not densely populated at all. Bothell was all a dairy community then. We had a weekly trip to the University District, where I exchanged eight or nine books at the U District library, starting from when I was seven."

Snyder graduated from Reed College in 1951, where his classmates included poets Lew Welch and Philip Whalen. In the summer of 1952, Snyder worked as a fire lookout on Crater Mountain, later encouraging Kerouac to do the same on Desolation Peak.

from "1980: Letting Go" Centuries, years and months of — let off a little steam cloud up and sizzle growl stamp-dance quiver swell, glow glare bulge (swarms of earthquakes, tremors, rumbles she goes 8:32 AM 18 May 1980 "Falling From a Height, Holding Hands" What was that? storms of flying glass & billowing flames a clear day to the far sky — better than burning, hold hands. We will be two peregrines diving all the way down "After Bamiyan" Not even under mortar fire do they flinch. The Buddhas of Bamiyan Take Refuge in the dust.

In 1959, Snyder published his first book, "Riprap," spending most of the years between 1956 and 1968 in Japan, writing poetry, practicing Zen and studying and translating Chinese and Japanese poetry. Dog-eared copies of 1968's "The Back Country" have been peeking out of Northwest backpacks for decades.

For the past two decades, the California-based poet has been so wrapped up in teaching and environmental activism, as well as consolidating the final edition of his lifelong work, "Rivers and Mountains Without End," he has produced few new poems.

In a phone interview last week from Las Vegas, where he had been lecturing and teaching, Snyder confessed that poetry came back into his life almost by accident.

"After I finished 'Mountains and Rivers Without End,' " he said, in his deliberate and authoritative bass voice, "I had the feeling that it didn't matter if I did any more poetry or not. I returned to writing just for fun. As I worked with a mix of prose and short poems, I recalled [Japanese haiku master] Basho."

"Danger on Peaks" is written in a form called haibun, in which passages of prose crystallize into lyric poems. As Snyder was working on the new poems, a geologist invited him to explore the blast zone at Mount St. Helens, which reminded him of his adolescent experience there.

"That shaped the rest of my life," he said. "It put me on guard against the modern world, against the direction of militaristic and industrial governments of all sorts and to the dangers to the environment."

Snyder's lyric poems often are composed of condensed, imagistic nuggets from nature: "paw track, lizard-slither, tumble of/a single bounder down" (from "Claws/Cause"). "Danger on Peaks" proceeds with a more supple line, often through urban areas as well as the back country.

From Hiroshima, it arcs through three more "blasts" — Mount St. Helens, 9/11 and the Taliban's demolition of the gigantic Buddhas in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley, offering a potent meditation on violence — and its antidote, compassion.

"The Bamiyan destruction prefigured what happened at the World Trade Center, which nobody has noticed," declared the poet, linking, as always, culture to nature, the cooked to the raw, the image to the thing itself.

Snyder has lived since 1971 at Kitkitdizze, a pole-and-beam homestead with an open fireplace in the middle he built in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The new poems are peppered with the quotidian trivia of housekeeping, local politics, fatherhood (he is raising stepkids with his fourth wife), and being a famous poet.

In "What to Tell, Still," he laments having to deal with a nefarious local lobbyist, rejoices in the clarity of a friend's manuscript and glances with a sigh at another, "next in line for comment."

Ever alert to shifts in the language, Snyder notes the freeway, I-5, which runs through California's nearby Central Valley, is now called by locals "the five." He contrasts the artificiality of its "gleaming bikes" and "huge BMW" with the "really the real world" of sandhill cranes in a flooded field.

"I've been labeled a beatnik, and I've been labeled a nature poet," said Snyder. "But actually, I'm a Buddhist poet. And for Buddhists, all of reality is in its own terms natural. But the cranes are really the real world in the sense that 'the five' is impermanent on a different time scale. The cranes have been doing this migration [much longer], and it's my fervent wish that they continue to be able to do it."

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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