Creative Writing Event: Gary Snyder

Response to a Creative Writing Event at Stanford

April 12, 2013

Gary Snyder

On April 12th I attended an event that featured poet Gary Snyder. In addition to being a hilarious man in his early eighties, Snyder is an avid storyteller who often gets carried away with his tales and forgets what he originally meant to say, and is a die-hard environmental activist. This storytelling nature and love of the environment resurface in his poetry again and again and give his poems a style unique to Snyder alone. Snyder works mainly from a narrative standpoint that is based off his own experiences, and this is reflected both in his poems’ subject matter - childhood events, what he sees in and around his home - and his colloquial tone. His poems are vastly composed in free verse or blank verse, giving the text a conversational tone that is more like speaking to a friend than reading from a book.

He read very few of his own poems, which was a little disappointing. But the poems that he did read, mainly by Emily Dickinson and a friend of his, Nanao Sakaki, were chosen with intent. He is obviously a fan of the poets, but more specifically, all of the poems he recited pertain to the external world and surrounding nature, and many times, humans’ exploitation of that nature for self-serving reasons. “Let’s Eat Stars” by Sakaki focuses on humans’ destruction of the planet and consumerist nature that views the environment as something for the taking. It builds in a catalog like structure, listing off how humans are exploiting the environment, from bulldozing forests to build golf courses, to polluting the air so that we can function on the ground, to filling the skies with airplanes as though they were meant for that. It ends with children yelling in unison, “Let’s eat the stars! Let’s eat the stars!” All in all, it’s a moving poem that ends with even the youngest of these chorusing for complete consumerism, leaving every inch of the place we call home decimated by our hunger for wealth and material goods. That poem stuck with me more than any of the others, and with its casual tone and striking subject, especially with the heartbreaking final line, I can see why Snyder likes it so much.