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Gary Snyder

American poet

Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet (originally, often associated with the Beat Generation), essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion.

Quotes

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  • As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
    • "Statement for the Paterson Society" (1961), as quoted in David Kherdian, Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance: Portraits and Checklists (1967), p. 52. Snyder repeated the first part of this quote (up to "… common work of the tribe.") in the introduction to the revised edition of Gary Snyder, Myths & Texts (1978), p. viii.
  • I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.
    • The Beat Vision (1974)
  • Better, the perfect, easy discipline of the swallows dip and swoop, without east or west.
    • On open form poetry in "Some Yips & Barks in the Dark" in Naked Poetry : Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (1976) edited by Stephen Berg
  • How could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions—gravity and livable temperature range between freezing and boiling—have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place"... gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind.
    • The Practice of the Wild (1990)
  • If, after obtaining Buddhahood, anyone in my land
    gets tossed in jail on a vagrancy rap, may I
    not attain highest perfect enlightenment.
    • Burning, from No Nature; New and Selected Poems (1992)
  • 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.
    • I Went into the Maverick Bar, from No Nature; New and Selected Poems (1992)
  • The Sioux idea of living creatures is that trees, buffalo and men are temporary energy swirls, turbulence patterns ... that’s an early intuitive recognition of energy as a quality of matter. But that’s an old insight, you know, extremely old—probably a Paleolithic shaman’s insight. You find that perception registered so many ways in archaic and primitive lore. I would say that it is probably the most basic insight into the nature of things, and that our more common, recent Occidental view of the universe as consisting of fixed things is out of the main stream, a deviation from basic human perception.
    • Lee Bartlett, “Interview—Gary Snyder,” California Quarterly 9 (1975): 43-50. Quoted in: Starhawk (1999). The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (20th Anniversary Edition). San Francisco: HarperCollins.

"Buddhism and the Coming Revolution" (1961, 1969)

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  • Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion.
  • The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear. ... The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet. ... They create populations of “preta” — hungry ghosts, with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles. The soil, the forests and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of the planet is being fouled by them.
  • The Bodhisattva lives by the sufferer’s standard, and he must be effective in aiding those who suffer.
  • The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.

"Buddhist Anarchism" (1961)

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Full text online
  • Historically, Buddhist philosophers have failed to analyze out the degree to which ignorance and suffering are caused or encouraged by social factors. ... Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion.
  • The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear.
  • The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.

Quotes about Gary Snyder

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  • Gary Snyder says that in a good year, he harvests 10 to 15 usable poems.
  • Toni Morrison and I and Leslie Marmon Silko traveled through China together five years ago, with Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Francine du Plessix Gray...Ginsberg and Snyder are Buddhists. Gary Snyder had that book, Cold Mountain Poems, and we went to the Cold Mountain Monastery where he presented the poems to the monks that were there. And there was a painting on the wall that was the same painting that was in his book, which he identified with. And it felt really good because though the Chinese have wiped out the temples, his temple was still there.
  • I am struck by how much we talk about rebirthing but never about rebearing. The word itself is unfamiliar to most people. Yet both women and men are capable of rebearing, women literally and men metaphorically. A door opens just by changing the name. We don't have to be reborn; we can rebear. This is part of the writer's job, either to rebear the metaphors or refuse to use them. Gary Snyder's lifelong metaphor is watershed. How fruitful that is!
  • the actual writing was probably a year and a half, but the getting ready to be able to write it was three or four years, roughly. I was kind of getting my head in place. (“How did you do that?”) I don't know. It's underground material. It's what Gary Snyder calls "composting." You know, stuff has to go down inside of you, get into the dark and turn into something else, before you can use it in art. If you use raw experience, straight experience, you're doing journalism which is another discipline.
  • I admire Gary Snyder and his ecological commitment very much.
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