Gary Snyder Reading

I was in Ken Field's class last quarter and we read Gary Snyder's 'No Nature.' Ken, of course, urged us to see Snyder when he came to campus this quarter. This reading was pretty much what I expected. Snyder read some of poetry, sang a little, and rambled a lot. He talked about eastern philosophy, haiku, and the environment. He told us about his place in Nevada and all the different generators he has out there. He has three, at one point they all broke. He also has a cherry tree that he uses to tell seasonal time. There was some kind of larger, climatic phenomena he had learned about from the tree and he explained it to us, but it went over my head a little because I was paying more attention to Snyder himself than what he was actually saying. I got the impression that Synder was a very smart, funny guy, but that he mostly lived with his own ideas and was pretty isolated. Some of what he said made a lot of sense, some of it I felt was a little looney.

Snyder read a lot of translated work, some of it I think was by Basho. I could definitely see what an influence Japan had had on Snyder's work. He talked about how some of the best poets never became famous until they were dead. There were a lot of funny moments durring this talk, Snyder is a pretty personable guy. I was impressed by how calm he was, even as he was being a bit of a goof. He seemed like a very patient, observant, and nice guy. I was also struck by how old and little he was, he had this great big voice coming out of him, out of his little wrinkled face and scraggly beard. The audience was also cool, there were lots of older ex-hippies in the audience, sometimes watching them was just as fun as watching Snyder.