CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
1295
Partner Institution:
Concordia University
Source Collection Label:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
Series:
The Poetry Series
Sub Series:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
ITEM DESCRIPTION
Title:
Gary Snyder at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 5 November 1971
Title Source:
Cataloguer
Title Note:
"POETRY READING GARY SNYDER #1 I006-11-106.1" written on sticker on the spine of the tape's box. "I006-11-106.1" written on sticker on the reel
"POETRY READING GARY SNYDER #2 I006-11-106.2" written on sticker on the spine of the tape's box. "I006-11-106.2" written on sticker on the reel
"POETRY READING GARY SNYDER #3 I006-11-106.3" written on sticker on the spine of the tape's box. "POETRY READING GARY SNYDER I006-11-106.3" written on sticker on the reel
"POETRY READING GARY SNYDER #4 I006-11-106.4" written on sticker on the spine of the tape's box. "POETRY READING GARY SNYDER I006-11-106.4" written on sticker on the reel
Language:
English
Production Context:
Documentary recording
Genre:
Reading: Poetry
Identifiers:
[I006-11-106.1, I006-11-106.2, I006-11-106.3, I006-11-106.4]
Rights
CREATORS
Name:
Snyder, Gary
Dates:
1930-
Role:
"Author",
"Performer"
Notes:
American poet and nature activist Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco on May 8, 1930. He spent most of his early life exploring the wilderness and cultures along the Pacific Coast around his parent’s dairy farm in Washington State. In 1942, his family moved to Portland, Oregon and in 1947 he enrolled in Reed College to study literature and anthropology. His senior thesis was later published in 1978 and called He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (Grey Fox Press). Snyder then worked various jobs with the U.S. Forest Service and Park Service, with timber companies on Native American Reservations, and Snyder even climbed aboard a ship traveling to South America. In 1951, Snyder completed his bachelor’s degree and went to Indiana University to study linguistics, which only lasted one semester, after which, he traveled to San Francisco. Snyder met and lived with the poet Philip Whalen before entering into the University of California, Berkley in 1952 to begin graduate studies in East Asian languages. The poetry scene in San Francisco (San Francisco Renaissance) had begun to take shape and on October 7, 1955, Snyder read with Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth and Philip Whalen at the famous “Six Poets at the Six Gallery”, a reading which launched the ‘Beat’ movement. In 1956, Snyder began formal Buddhist training in Kyoto, Japan, and traveled back and forth from the U.S. several times during the next decade, studying Buddhism and writing poetry. Snyder’s first collection of poetry was Riprap (Four Seasons Foundation, 1959), which was followed the next year by Myths and Texts (Totem Press, 1960), Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers without End (1965), Cold Mountain Poems (Four Seasons, 1965), The Back Country (New Directions, 1968), a collection of essays Earth House Hold (New Directions, 1969), Regarding Wave (Windhover Press, 1969), Manzanita (Four Seasons Foundation, 1972), The Fudo Trilogy (Shaman Drum, 1973) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974). With an increase in popularity, Snyder became a spokesman for environmental issues and served on the Board for the California Arts Council between 1974 and 1979. He began local projects and schools, including the North San Juan School House and the Ring-of-Bone Zendo Buddhist community centre. Snyder then published a series of essays and prose in The Old Ways (City Lights Books, 1977), The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979 (New Directions, 1980), and an account of his travels with poets Joanne Kyger and Allen Ginsberg Passage through India (1983), and a return to poetry with Axe Handles (North Point Press, 1983), and Left Out in the Rain (North Point Press, 1986). Snyder then began teaching at the University of California, Davis, in both the English and Nature and Culture Departments. More recently, he has published essays and poetry in No Nature: New and Selected Poems (Pantheon Books, 1992), a completed version of a long poem previously published Mountains and Rivers without End (Counterpoint, 1996) which won the Bollingen Prize. His collected poetry can be found in The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry and Translations 1952-1998 (Counterpoint, 1999) and The High Sierra of California: Poems and Journals of Gary Snyder (Quail Press, 2000). Snyder retired from teaching in 2002, but has continued advocating for environmental issues and writing poetry, publishing Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), Back on the Fire: Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007).
CONTRIBUTORS
Name:
Sommer, Richard
Dates:
1934-2012
Role:
"Series organizer",
"Presenter"
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Playback Mode:
Stereo
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Excellent
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Track Configuration:
2 track
Playback Mode:
Stereo
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Excellent
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Track Configuration:
2 track
Playback Mode:
Stereo
Sound Quality:
Excellent
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Track Configuration:
2 track
Playback Mode:
Stereo
Sound Quality:
Excellent
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:26:55
Size:
64.6 MB
Content:
gary_snyder_i006-11-106-1.mp3 [File 1 of 4]
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:00:00
Probably some of us are here in order to look at or touch the Gary Snyder
who actually went and did all those semi-mythological things, who has climbed mountains and traveled in India with Allen Ginsberg
, who provided Kerouac
with a book character, who has lived in or on the edges of several different kinds of wilderness, who has lived in the precincts of Japanese Buddhist monasteries, who has fought, I think has fought hard, to keep other cultures than ours, and other kinds of life than human life, from obliteration. And who has written poems out of the consciousness of these things. For myself, Gary Snyder hasn't made poems so much as he has provided me with windows made out of words. These are windows that have had a way of, themselves disappearing, leaving me usually standing where I think I want to be, out in the open world. So, I came here, I've come here, to meet whoever it is that makes so many good windows. I'll let you discover for yourselves how much this window-maker is what a windowmaker should be, himself, just open and clear. I'd like to present Gary Snyder.
Gary Snyder
00:02:58
I forgot one more thing I wanted to have out here. Good evening. I'm going to read in two sets this evening, with a little intermission. And first of all, I'm not going to read any poems tonight from my published books, because those poems are available and what is interesting to me is always what I'm doing, where I'm moving. So I'm going to read from a cycle of short poems, moderately short poems, which I call "Charms", and
then there'll be a break, and then I'm going to read recent sections that I've been working on from a long poem in progress called "Mountains and Rivers Without End". I came back to the United States
from Japan
with my wife and children about three years ago now, and went as rapidly as possible to settle in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada
, on the north slope of the south fork of the Yuba river
at three-thousand foot elevation. And I've been living there for almost two years now. I'm saying this by way of introduction to this first cycle of poems called "Charms". I was brought up on a farm, and all of my ancestors that I know of, for the last few generations on both sides, were rural people, or miners, miners in Colorado
, Leadville
, places like that. And it amazes me in a mysterious way how to get back to doing what my father was doing when I was a little boy, and what, and which I remember as a little boy, and to get back to doing what my grandfather was doing, which is to say--again, looking at the fences, looking at the stumps, looking at the house, looking at the well, looking at the spring and saying, how are we going to do it--touches me more deeply than I can possibly explain. And at the same time, being confronted again with these choices, which are the choices of the American frontier, and also the choices of medieval Europeans, and neolithic Mediterranean people, and neolithic Japanese people, and neolithic Chinese people. With what I've come to understand, a little more now, about history, anthropology, and biology, I feel an extraordinary responsibility to understand why I make the choices I make, in such matters as, where does one break the ground and locate a garden, or which trees does one select to fall. In other words, I find myself again in that position of entering virgin land, and this time, I want to understand, in the process of making my own choices, I want to understand why we did it wrong, every time before, and hope to get some insights in how one goes about doing it right, this time. In moving toward that understanding, in making the choices that I have to make, about how we are going to live, in the semi-wilderness and true wilderness of the Sierra Nevada, my teachers have to be scientific foresters, biologists and ecologists on the one hand, and the American Indians on the other. There are no other teachers available for these choices.
Gary Snyder
00:08:02
And so these poems, in the cycle called "Charms", reflect those debts and reflect the search for that knowledge, insofar as I've gotten into it up to this point. It starts with a little chant, called "Grace for Love". Before we...grace, in the sense of the grace that we say before meals. Which is, grace is gratitude, an expression of gratitude for a meal. And the gratitude that we say at my rancheria is a kind of a rough translation from a Japanese Buddhist grace which goes like this in English: "We venerate the three treasures and are thankful for this meal, the work of other people, and the suffering of other forms of life." The need for grace, for love, is something I became aware of when I realized that there was a level of validity in the Catholic Church's objection to contraceptive devices, insofar as love, like food, is a sacrament, and that there is level in which the act of love should inevitably be connected with the consciousness of its role in moving the seed, in transmitting the energy of the knowledge of the biomass, as transmitted down through time. But I felt that the church is far too simple-minded in assuming that the energy aroused in the sacrament of love, in the direction of fertility, has to mean literally that the people who are acting that sacrament out have to necessarily procreate their own kind. And so we came to this, I and several other people, came to this, as what primitive people would call the transferral of merit, or species-increase ritual. In other words, we make love with gratitude to other beings, and wish to transfer our fertility from the human race to the vanishing species.
Gary Snyder
00:11:09
Performs "Grace for Love".
Gary Snyder
00:14:20
Reads "A Curse on the Man In the Pentagon, Washington".
Gary Snyder
00:16:37
That's from a Cheyenne ghost dance song, that little last chorus.
Gary Snyder
00:16:43
Reads "I went into the Maverick Bar" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:18:25
The Navajo word "Anasazi" means "the ancient ones." It's the name that the Navajo gave to the people who lived in the canyons and cliffs of Chaco Canyon
and Canyon De Chelly
and Mesa Verde
and many other sites. Probably the people were the ancestors of the present Pueblo people, living there probably up until the twelfth century, till the great drought of the thirteenth century. The people who more than any others, to judge from what the Pueblo people are still able to transmit today, the people who more than any others have achieved what could truly be called "civilization" on this continent, and whose lore embodies perhaps two millennia of deep experience. I wrote this at Canyon De Chelly.
Gary Snyder
00:19:52
Reads “Anasazi” [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:21:11
The Canyon De Chelly, which will come up in another poem I'm going to read later today, and in fact, all over the West, all over the Great Basin
, and in other parts of North America
too, notably on the granite outcroppings on th]e northern shores of Lake Superior
, for example, are designs pecked into the rocks, petroglyphs. Anthropologists, Americanists, whatever you call 'em, haven't had much time to study those petroglyphs yet, because they've been engaged through all the years of this century in a hasty, half-successful salvage operation. Salvaging the remnants of this or that dying culture, recording and taping the last words of a dying language, and they've had no time to give to studying these older things that they know are there, such as the petroglyphs. But the petroglyphs have a repeated vocabulary of motifs which are found in patterns distributed all over North America, and particularly in the West. One of the most widespread is a hand, that someone has put on a cliff or a boulder face, apparently outlined, and then filled it in with red, hematite, or a red hand. That red hand often is lacking a finger, or lacking a finger-joint. This would not be notable in itself if it weren't that in the caves of southern France
and northern Spain
, there are dated, back as far as 40,000 years, the same red hands, with missing fingers and missing finger-joints are found. This is only one of a number of things which are found all the way. And so this next poem, "The Way West Underground", is one of a number of poems, and this is perhaps the most intellectual of them, in which I'm trying to trace out how you get back to make the line of connection between what I know the American knows, what I am beginning to know the American Indian knew, and what I am beginning to know our prehistoric ancestors knew, which was not a different knowledge. And the question of why our prehistoric ancestors lost it is another question. Actually the main impetus of this poem deals with the bears, because there's an international mystery religion called the Bear Cult, that runs all the way from Finland
to Utah
, across Siberia
, and it shares the mysterious central theme, which is a girl who marries a bear. I've written several poems about that girl. And about the bears. And so this is coming in on that from another angle.
Gary Snyder
00:25:12
Reads "The Way West Underground" [published later in Turtle Island].
END
00:26:55
Notes:
Gary Snyder reads poems later collected in Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974), originally published in a limited edition book called Manzanita (Four Seasons Press, 1972). He also reads one poem from Regarding Wave (Fulcrum Press, 1971), one poem from Coyote’s Journal #9 (1971), one poem from The Fudo Trilogy (Shaman Drum, 1973), and several from Mountains and Rivers Without End (Counterpoint) only published in 1997, as well as other poems from unknown sources.
I006-11-106=AC.1
00:17- Introducer (Perhaps Richard Sommer) introduces Gary Snyder. [INDEX: semi mythological things, climbed mountains and traveled to India with Allen Ginsberg, Jack
Kerouac’s book character, wilderness, living in precincts of Japanese Buddhist
monasteries, keeping cultures from obliteration, poems out of the consciousness,
windows, open world, window-maker].
02:58- Gary Snyder introduces the reading, and poetry cycle “Charms” and long poem
“Mountains and Rivers Without End”. [INDEX: reading in two sets, all poems read
are unpublished, long poem in-progress “Mountains and Rivers Without End”, returning
from Japan to the U.S. three years prior, wife and children, settling in the foothills of the
Sierra Nevada, north slope of the south fork of the Yuba river, three-thousand foot
elevation, origins on a farm, miners in Leadville, Colorado, how to get back to father’s
occupation, childhood, grandfather, fences, as a child in nature, spring (river), American
frontier, medieval Europeans, neolithic Mediterranean people, neolithic Japanese people, neolithic Chinese people, history, anthropology, biology, responsibility of humans’ place on earth, choices we make in terms of nature, scientific foresters, ecologists, American Indians (as teachers)].
08:02- Introduces poetry cycle “Charms”, and “Grace for Love”. [INDEX: debts, search for knowledge, grace (gratitude for meal), rancheria, Japanese Buddhist grace, love, level of validity in the Catholic Church’s objection to contraception, food, sacrament, act of love, transference of ‘seed’ or knowledge, transferral of merit, species-increase ritual; from unknown source].
11:09- Chants “Grace for Love”.
14:20- Reads “A Curse on the Man in the Pentagon, Washington”. [INDEX: from unknown source].
16:37- Explains last chorus of “A Curse on the Man in the Pentagon, Washington”.
16:43- Reads “I went into the Maverick Bar”. [INDEX: from Turtle Island].
18:25- Introduces “Anasazi”. [INDEX: means ‘ancient ones’ in Navajo, name of people living in Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly, ancestors of present Pueblo people, 12th century, the great drought of the 13th century, civilization, two millennia of ‘deep experience’, written at Canyon de Chelly; from Turtle Island]
19:52- Reads “Anasazi”.
21:11- Introduces “The Way West Underground”. [INDEX: Canyon de Chelly, West and Great Basin, granite outcroppings of the northern shores of Lake Superior, petroglyphs,
Anthropologists, salvaging remnants of dying cultures, vocabulary of motifs, hand
petroglyph, caves of southern France and northern Spain, 40,000 years ago, intellectual
poem, tracing out lines of connections between Americans, American Indians, prehistoric ancestors, main impetus of the poem is an international mystery religion called the Bear Cult, runs from Finland to Utah, Siberia, central theme: girl who marries a bear; from Turtle Island].
25:12- Reads “The Way West Underground”.
26:55- Interjects comment about poem. [INDEX: Finnish men singing folk songs].
[*note: cut or edit made in transcript, time elapsed unknown*]
29:16- Snyder is talking (not sure if it’s about the poem). [INDEX: observation, plants, seeds, birds, small members of food chain, ocean, exuberance of sexuality, reproductive organs of grasses, wheat, rice, herring, cod, millions of eggs, food chain of the ocean].
30:11- Reads “The Song of the Taste”. [INDEX: from Regarding Wave].
31:46- Introduces “Song for the Raw Material”. [INDEX: food, natural vs. supermarket foods, vegetarian vs. carnivore, being part of the food chain, being eaten by a bear, biological ignorance of society, basic systems, chemicals, Tibetans and Parsis, Herodotus, Maghi in Persia, feeding dead to the vultures, Eskimo shaman quote].
35:07- Reads “Song of the Raw Material”. [INDEX: perhaps “Song to the Raw Material”,
unknown source].
36:07- Reads “Steak”. [INDEX: from Turtle Island].
37:48- Introduces “No matter, never mind”. [INDEX: Lethbridge, Alberta, creation mythology of Japan (koji-ki); from Turtle Island].
38:23- Reads “No matter, never mind”.
39:19- Introduces “The Bath”. [INDEX: no electricity (wood heating), Finnish sauna, poem as a sauna, Michigan, personae in the poem are his wife, three sons; from Turtle Island].
40:55- Reads “The Bath”.
46:26- Introduces “Front Lines”. [INDEX: evading the struggle; from Turtle Island].
46:54- Reads “Front Lines”.
48:31- Explains parts of “Front Lines”, introduces “Control Burn”. [INDEX: wilderness,
California ‘Indians’, control burns, forest fires in California, logging, mining, Manzanita
brush, flora changing; from Turtle Island].
50:55- Reads “Control Burn”.
52:32- Reads “The Great Mother”. [INDEX: from Turtle Island].
FIRST CD (I006-11-106=AC.1)
Poem Read: Time Stamp Duration (mins):
“Grace for Love” 00:11:09 03:10
“A Curse on the Man in the Pentagon…” 00:14:20 02:17
“I went into the Maverick Bar…” 00:16:23 01:42
“Anasazi” 00:19:52 02:17
“The Way West Underground” 00:25:12 04:01
“The Song of the Taste” 00:30:11 01:35
“Song for the Raw Material” 00:35:07 00:58
“Steak” 00:36:07 01:41
“No Matter, Never Mind” 00:38:23 00:46
“The Bath” 00:40:55 05:29
“Front Lines” 00:46:54 01:36
“Control Burn” 00:50:55 01:37
“The Great Mother” 00:52:32 00:42
Content Type:
Sound Recording
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:26:55
Size:
63.2 MB
Content:
gary_snyder_i006-11-106-2.mp3 [File 2 of 4]
Gary Snyder
00:00:00
--which is a way Finnish men sing folk songs together.
Gary Snyder
00:00:05
Resumes reading of "The Way West Underground".
Unknown
00:02:20
[Cut or edit made in tape].
Gary Snyder
00:02:21
So I had to trace back again in my mind, with my eyes, with my observation: of course, the plants produce seeds, the birds feed on the seeds, and so forth. Small members of the food chain. The ocean is similar but in a different set of relationships. We live on an exuberance of sexuality. We eat the reproductive organs of grasses: wheat, rice. Because herring or cod have millions of eggs that hatch into millions of almost-microscopic fry, the food chains of the ocean are made possible.
Gary Snyder
00:03:16
Reads "The Song of the Taste" from Regarding Wave.
Gary Snyder
00:04:51
I read that because it goes so nicely with this other poem, called "Song to the Raw Material". I really think a lot about these things these days because I've put myself deliberately in the position of having to know where my food comes from, and it's no longer a question of, like do I eat natural foods or supermarket foods, or do I eat meat or am I a vegetarian, it's more sophisticated than that, it's a lot more subtle than that. Like literally, where did it come from. And by what means can I have a sense of responsibility and gratitude to what it is that I'm eating and in what sense can I repay that world, whichever world it is, that I am feeding off of. Well of course one way you can repay it is by being a willing, and gracious, member of the food chain yourself. Now we are rather large animals, which means that we are rather high in the food chain. But nonetheless, quite edible. And it would be a great honour, really, to be eaten by a large, rare predator, and I can't think of any way I'd rather finish my days than to give myself to a grizzly bear, if I could, you know, choose when. [Laughter]. Like get all my affairs in order first. I'm not ready yet! Or at least, go back, as large creatures often do, go back into the cycle of feeding smaller creatures. But you can see the basic biological ignorance of this society, the ignorance of what systems really are, what basic systems are, and what our responsibilities to our membership in basic systems is, by the fact that they either burn people up or they fill them full of chemicals which make them not tasty, and lock them in bronze caskets, and so forth. The only people in the world who are righteous about this particular question seem to be the Tibetans and the Parsis, I mean, really righteous about it. The Tibetans and the Parsis have an old tradition, which is mentioned, it's so old that it's mentioned by Herodotus
, in talking about a group of people called the Magi, in Persia
, that is to say they expose their dead in elevated places and feed them to the vultures. That's one very elegant way, actually, to deal with it. The Eskimo, an Eskimo shaman whose name I forget, is reputed to have said, "We live dangerous lives, because our food consists entirely of souls". “Song to the Raw Material”.
Gary Snyder
00:08:12
Reads "Song of the Raw Material".
Gary Snyder
00:09:12
Reads "Steak" [published later in Turtle Island; audience laughter and applause throughout].
Gary Snyder
00:10:53
I saw that in Lethbridge
, Alberta
. [Audience laughter]. The creation mythology of Japan, called the kojiki, is very long, and very complicated. I tried to boil it down to some kind of a formula I could understand, at least boil down the first hundred pages of it, so I wrote this--it's about how the world is created according to the Japanese creation mythology. I think. I think that's what it is.
Gary Snyder
00:11:28
Reads "No matter, never mind" [published later in Turtle Island].
Audience
00:12:14
Laughter and applause.
Gary Snyder
00:12:24
It's funny how the language is smarter than we are, [audience laughter] yeah. Like we can get hung up on mind/matter dualism, but the language won't accept it. It says the same thing two ways. "The Bath". Where we live we don't have any electricity or propane, and so we do everything with wood, including heating our bath, which we found the best wood-fired bathing system was a Finnish-type sauna, and...so this poem, you know just to set the scene, it's a somewhat longer poem, this poem is a sauna, with a wood-burning stove that also heats a tank of water on the side, and with a bench that you sit up on and a lower place that you can get down on and wash with. You can get these wood-fired sauna-stoves from some Finnish outfit in Michigan
. The only place in the United States that I have been able to locate that makes sauna stoves that fire wood. I highly recommend them. The personae in this are my wife, my three-year old son, my three-and a-half year old son, my two-year-old son.
Gary Snyder
00:14:00
Reads "The Bath" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:19:31
Some friends said to us, when we moved up to the backcountry, ah, you're just getting away from your responsibilities. You're evading the struggle. So I wrote this little poem as a, kind of a light answer to that. It's called "Front Lines".
Gary Snyder
00:19:59
Reads "Front Lines" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:21:36
That poem is not an exaggeration of what we're doing. We are, like, where I am and a number of other people I know around this continent, have their backs up against the wilderness, so to speak, and they're not going to let this thing go past them. If they can help it, or as you say, over my dead body. The California Indians used to set control burns, as distinct from wildfires, forestry terms, which contributed to the maintenance of what you might call a climax timber stand, keeping the undergrowth burnt out, keeping an annual deer-forage coming in, and protecting the large timber, as it were, from destructive forest fires, because whenever a forest fire--which is very common in California
, it's an annual event--whenever forest fires go through, went through the forests when they were in that condition, it simply went through taking the ground cover off, but couldn't get hot enough or high enough to kill the large trees. With the advent of logging, mining, and the Manzanita brush that follows on that, the whole flora of California changed radically. All of the flora of California changed. What happened was that the woods got very brushy, and then the early forestry practices which were, of course, to put forest fires out whenever they came on them, in some ways contributed to the increasingly dangerous situation of dense brush, logging slash laying around, second-growth trees not really very large yet, and a situation where every brush fire that went through killed absolutely everything grew up. And that's the state of the state now, to a large extent, although there are some hip foresters now who are back into control burns as best as they can. This poem is called "Control Burn" and it only starts from what I'm just talking about, taking that as an image.
Gary Snyder
00:24:00
Reads "Control Burn" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:25:37
Reads "The Great Mother" [published later in Turtle Island].
END
00:26:55
Notes:
Gary Snyder reads poems later collected in Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974), originally published in a limited edition book called Manzanita (Four Seasons Press, 1972). He also reads one poem from Regarding Wave (Fulcrum Press, 1971), one poem from Coyote’s Journal #9 (1971), one poem from The Fudo Trilogy (Shaman Drum, 1973), and several from Mountains and Rivers Without End (Counterpoint) only published in 1997, as well as other poems from unknown sources.
I006-11-106=AC.1
00:17- Introducer (Perhaps Richard Sommer) introduces Gary Snyder. [INDEX: semi mythological things, climbed mountains and traveled to India with Allen Ginsberg, Jack
Kerouac’s book character, wilderness, living in precincts of Japanese Buddhist
monasteries, keeping cultures from obliteration, poems out of the consciousness,
windows, open world, window-maker].
02:58- Gary Snyder introduces the reading, and poetry cycle “Charms” and long poem
“Mountains and Rivers Without End”. [INDEX: reading in two sets, all poems read
are unpublished, long poem in-progress “Mountains and Rivers Without End”, returning
from Japan to the U.S. three years prior, wife and children, settling in the foothills of the
Sierra Nevada, north slope of the south fork of the Yuba river, three-thousand foot
elevation, origins on a farm, miners in Leadville, Colorado, how to get back to father’s
occupation, childhood, grandfather, fences, as a child in nature, spring (river), American
frontier, medieval Europeans, neolithic Mediterranean people, neolithic Japanese people, neolithic Chinese people, history, anthropology, biology, responsibility of humans’ place on earth, choices we make in terms of nature, scientific foresters, ecologists, American Indians (as teachers)].
08:02- Introduces poetry cycle “Charms”, and “Grace for Love”. [INDEX: debts, search for knowledge, grace (gratitude for meal), rancheria, Japanese Buddhist grace, love, level of validity in the Catholic Church’s objection to contraception, food, sacrament, act of love, transference of ‘seed’ or knowledge, transferral of merit, species-increase ritual; from unknown source].
11:09- Chants “Grace for Love”.
14:20- Reads “A Curse on the Man in the Pentagon, Washington”. [INDEX: from unknown source].
16:37- Explains last chorus of “A Curse on the Man in the Pentagon, Washington”.
16:43- Reads “I went into the Maverick Bar”. [INDEX: from Turtle Island].
18:25- Introduces “Anasazi”. [INDEX: means ‘ancient ones’ in Navajo, name of people living in Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly, ancestors of present Pueblo people, 12th century, the great drought of the 13th century, civilization, two millennia of ‘deep experience’, written at Canyon de Chelly; from Turtle Island]
19:52- Reads “Anasazi”.
21:11- Introduces “The Way West Underground”. [INDEX: Canyon de Chelly, West and Great Basin, granite outcroppings of the northern shores of Lake Superior, petroglyphs,
Anthropologists, salvaging remnants of dying cultures, vocabulary of motifs, hand
petroglyph, caves of southern France and northern Spain, 40,000 years ago, intellectual
poem, tracing out lines of connections between Americans, American Indians, prehistoric ancestors, main impetus of the poem is an international mystery religion called the Bear Cult, runs from Finland to Utah, Siberia, central theme: girl who marries a bear; from Turtle Island].
25:12- Reads “The Way West Underground”.
26:55- Interjects comment about poem. [INDEX: Finnish men singing folk songs].
[*note: cut or edit made in transcript, time elapsed unknown*]
29:16- Snyder is talking (not sure if it’s about the poem). [INDEX: observation, plants, seeds, birds, small members of food chain, ocean, exuberance of sexuality, reproductive organs of grasses, wheat, rice, herring, cod, millions of eggs, food chain of the ocean].
30:11- Reads “The Song of the Taste”. [INDEX: from Regarding Wave].
31:46- Introduces “Song for the Raw Material”. [INDEX: food, natural vs. supermarket foods, vegetarian vs. carnivore, being part of the food chain, being eaten by a bear, biological ignorance of society, basic systems, chemicals, Tibetans and Parsis, Herodotus, Maghi in Persia, feeding dead to the vultures, Eskimo shaman quote].
35:07- Reads “Song of the Raw Material”. [INDEX: perhaps “Song to the Raw Material”,
unknown source].
36:07- Reads “Steak”. [INDEX: from Turtle Island].
37:48- Introduces “No matter, never mind”. [INDEX: Lethbridge, Alberta, creation mythology of Japan (koji-ki); from Turtle Island].
38:23- Reads “No matter, never mind”.
39:19- Introduces “The Bath”. [INDEX: no electricity (wood heating), Finnish sauna, poem as a sauna, Michigan, personae in the poem are his wife, three sons; from Turtle Island].
40:55- Reads “The Bath”.
46:26- Introduces “Front Lines”. [INDEX: evading the struggle; from Turtle Island].
46:54- Reads “Front Lines”.
48:31- Explains parts of “Front Lines”, introduces “Control Burn”. [INDEX: wilderness,
California ‘Indians’, control burns, forest fires in California, logging, mining, Manzanita
brush, flora changing; from Turtle Island].
50:55- Reads “Control Burn”.
52:32- Reads “The Great Mother”. [INDEX: from Turtle Island].
FIRST CD (I006-11-106=AC.1)
Poem Read: Time Stamp Duration (mins):
“Grace for Love” 00:11:09 03:10
“A Curse on the Man in the Pentagon…” 00:14:20 02:17
“I went into the Maverick Bar…” 00:16:23 01:42
“Anasazi” 00:19:52 02:17
“The Way West Underground” 00:25:12 04:01
“The Song of the Taste” 00:30:11 01:35
“Song for the Raw Material” 00:35:07 00:58
“Steak” 00:36:07 01:41
“No Matter, Never Mind” 00:38:23 00:46
“The Bath” 00:40:55 05:29
“Front Lines” 00:46:54 01:36
“Control Burn” 00:50:55 01:37
“The Great Mother” 00:52:32 00:42
Content Type:
Sound Recording
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:30:59
Size:
74.4 MB
Content:
gary_snyder_i006-11-106-3.mp3 [File 3 of 4]
Gary Snyder
00:00:00
Everything in this next poem is all true. Almost everything.
Gary Snyder
00:00:17
Reads "The Call of the Wild", Part I [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:00:32
Reads "The Call of the Wild", Part II [published later in Turtle Island].
Annotation
00:01:52.06
Reads "The Call of the Wild," Part III [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:04:11
Reads "Source" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:05:40
In the poem "Charms", which is dedicated to Michael McClure
, who has more than any other living poet, or person even that I know, has gone farther than anyone else, I think, into becoming one with, in understanding, in penetrating, in perceiving the consciousness of other beings.
Gary Snyder
00:06:15
Reads "Charms" [published later in Turtle Island].
Audience
00:07:45
Applause.
Gary Snyder
00:08:01
I want to read one little poem that kind of, that I just wrote on the plane the other day. Flying in here yesterday I wrote this. And then we'll take a break. But this belongs, really, with these poems.
Gary Snyder
00:08:15
Reads "How did a great red-tailed Hawk come to lie on the shoulder of Interstate 5" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:10:05
Okay, let's take a break.
Audience
00:10:07
Applause.
Unknown
00:10:17
Ambient Sound [voices].
Audience Member 1
00:10:29
Do you remember getting tiny toys for your children from San Francisco
? There was a small book that I saw in the States, folded out in a certain, section-by-section, parts of the earth kinda, growing larger and larger and larger...
Gary Snyder
00:10:46
I haven't seen it.
Audience Member 1
00:10:48
No, I guess...it's sort of, um, anti-war toys.
Gary Snyder
00:10:51
Sounds nice. Yeah. Some place in San Francisco you can get it?
Audience Member 1
00:10:56
Um, I don't know, it was from a certain, a certain group of people, and I don't remember their names. It was beautiful. Nice gift to give little kids.
Gary Snyder
00:11:07
I shall watch for it when I go there again. Thank you.
Audience Member 1
00:11:13
Okay. You bet. [Inaudible]
Gary Snyder
00:11:14
Okay. [Laughter].
Audience Member 2
00:11:19
Man you're incredible. You're so good. I really dig your stuff.
Gary Snyder
00:11:26
[Laughter]. Thank you.
Audience Member 2
00:11:26
I really dig it, will you come for a drink with me later? With me and my friends?
Gary Snyder
00:11:31
I gotta go some place later.
Audience Member 2
00:11:33
You sure?
Gary Snyder
00:11:34
Yeah. I mean, like I...they got something set up for me.
Audience Member 2
00:11:38
I don't, I don't know, I really dig that, I really dig that [inaudible] I just came in, I thought your stuff was so incredible...Your stuff, the way you bring it across to people!
Gary Snyder
00:11:51
Well, that's what I try to do.
Audience Member 2
00:11:54
Have you written a book?
Gary Snyder
00:11:54
I've written a lot of books. [Laughter].
Audience Member 2
00:11:58
No no no, no really, no really, I don't know too much about...Gary Snyder, you know?
Gary Snyder
00:12:04
Well, you'd probably find, I don't know, because I'm coming here, because of my being here now, they've probably got some of my books in the bookstore, if you want to go look. [Laughter].
Audience Member 2
00:12:13
See I'm writing this play right now, you know? I'm trying to express myself and it's really...it's really strange [Cut off abruptly].
Unknown
00:12:27
[Cut or edit in tape. Unknown amount of time elapsed].
Gary Snyder
00:12:28
Well, there has been a great deal of opposition to nuclear energy, and nuclear power-generating stations, in the United States so effective in some areas that a lot of generating plants have been blocked or slowed down in their construction. And I think that the United States government is about to launch on an enormous effort to calm the public and to lull it into accepting massive developments of nuclear energy generating centres, fast-breeder and later, perhaps, fusion. Now I myself would have no objection to such a thing if I could be convinced that it was safe, both in the long term and the short term, and although it might be conceivably safe in the short term, I can see no way in which it would be safe in the long run, because nuclear wastes accumulated over, say, several centuries, as they might be, or more, in increasing quantities around the globe, are going to out eventually, and even though you can say, well, we're putting it off for five hundred thousand years, five hundred thousand years is not a very long time. And if we are feeding a wasteful, industrial, technological, consumer society for a few more centuries, buying it a few more centuries of life, at the expense of all future biological health on the planet, it's obviously not worth it. The Amchitka test, which is possibly interested in such things as what uses very large explosions would have in releasing oil from oil-bearing shale or something like that, I think the U.S. administration is going ahead with this test in the face of all this criticism, deliberately, as a deliberate and very intelligent gamble. The chances are that nothing will happen. When nothing happens, then they will be able to say, "All you people were hysterical. You see? Nothing happened". And that will buy them a lot of time and a lot of credibility to proceed strongly and forcibly with more nuclear testing and more nuclear power generation development. And the conservationists, perhaps, have in a way, played into their hands, by making such a big issue out of it, so that they will be left holding an empty bag if nothing happens. If something does happen, then the administration can say, "You're right, we were wrong", and Nixon
perhaps forfeits the next election. That's all. Okay.
Gary Snyder
00:15:25.61
"Mountains and Rivers Without End" is a poem that I've been working on, it's a long poem, a long series of interconnected long poems that I've been working on for some years. I'm going to read several sections from that tonight. Including one or two that are very recent, in fact these are all pretty recent. "Mountains and Rivers without End". The title of the poem comes from a Yuan Dynasty
Chinese scroll, that unfolds sideways and is thirty-five feet long. By way of introduction, a little poem called "The Rabbit". There are many sections to this, I'm only going to read [counts under breath.]..six tonight.
Gary Snyder
00:16:27
Reads "The Rabbit" [published later in Mountains and Rivers Without End].
Gary Snyder
00:18:04
"The California Water Plan". The state of California at the moment is engaged in a large, incredibly wasteful, incredibly stupid, illegal, even by their own terms, water plan project, which if they're lucky, will salinate the Sacramento Valley
and make agriculture permanently impossible. I was up in the Minarets
in the Sierra last summer, thinking about the California Water Plan
, and I perceived something of what the true California Water Plan was. So I wrote this down. It refers to an obscure little Buddhist god called Fudo, or Achala
, who is my particular guardian, my personal guardian and my personal teacher, and, so I use, I refer to him, in several poems. The other two poems in which I refer to him actually are a piece called "Smokey the Bear Sutra", and another piece called "Spell Against Demons". This is the final, actually, this is the third and final poem in the trilogy of Fudo poems. Also. But you'll find all about Fudo in this poem, it'll drive you crazy.
Gary Snyder
00:19:48
Reads "The California Water Plan" [later published in The Fudo Trilogy].
Gary Snyder
00:25:34
"Kumarajiva's Mother". Now, the rest of these poems that I'm going to read this evening are cutting back and forth between ancient India
and ancient North America. I--living as I do and where I have lived all my life, we face the Pacific
. And, the American Indian came from Asia
, or vice versa, the Asians came from North America. I mean I know a Shoshone who says that. He says, "We've always been here, those Asians came from here". [Laughter]. "What do you mean we came from someplace else, that's some white anthropologist theory". [Laughter]. "Kumarajiva's Mother." Kumarajiva
was a great Buddhist monk-scholar-translator, who was kidnapped by the Chinese from Central Asia, by force, and carried off to China
where he was made to translate Sanskrit Buddhist texts into Chinese, and he stayed there the rest of his life, with a crew of about eighty Chinese assistants, day and night, translating sutras. He did a lot of translation. He also got in trouble, because he liked girls, and on one occasion, because he actually had mistresses apparently, he ate a bowl of needles, like you sew with needles, in front of an assembly of all the monks and assistants in Peking
, or no it wasn't Peking in those days, it was Chang'an
, all of the monks and assistants in the capital, Chang'an, and then he said, "When you boys can eat needles, you can have girlfriends too". [Audience laughter]. But this poem is about his mother. [Audience laughter]. And I really, I mean I could explain to you why I wrote this poem but it isn't really worth explaining, I'll just read it. It has to do partly with the fact that my mother has freckles. And I was trying to figure out at this time, when I wrote this, I was trying to figure out whatever happened to women in Buddhism? Like something happened to 'em. They got lost. For a long time, anyway.
Gary Snyder
00:28:22
Reads "Kumarajiva's Mother".
END
00:30:59
Notes:
I006-11-106=AC.2
00:02- Gary Snyder introduces “The Call of the Wild”. [INDEX: true; from Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974).]
00:17- Reads “The Call of the Wild”, Part I.
00:32- Reads “The Call of the Wild”, Part II.
01:52- Reads “The Call of the Wild”, Part III.
04:11- Reads “Source”. [INDEX: from Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974).]
05:40- Introduces “Charms”. [INDEX: dedicated to Michael McClure, consciousness of other beings; from Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974).]
06:15- Reads “Charms”.
08:01- Introduces “The Dead by the Side of the Road” [INDEX: wrote on the plane the previous day; from Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974)]
08:15- Reads “The Dead by the Side of the Road”.
09:55- Break is taken, audience member #1 asks question. [INDEX: suggests small anti-war children’s toys.]
11:26- Audience member #2 asks question (part is cut). [INDEX: books, bookstore, writing play]
12:21- Gary Snyder speaks about opposition to nuclear energy. [INDEX: nuclear energy, nuclear power-generating stations, U.S. government, energy generating centres, industrial technological consumer society, expense on the future biological health of the planet, Amchitka test, oil-bearing shale, conservationists, Nixon, election.]
15:25- Introduces “Mountains and Rivers Without End” and “The Rabbit”. [INDEX: long poem, inter-connected long poems, reading several sections from it, title from Yuan Dynasty Chinese scroll, little poem called “The Rabbit”, many sections- only reading 6; perhaps published as “Jackrabbit”, published much later in Mountains and Rivers Without End (Counterpoint, 1997).]
16:27- Reads “The Rabbit”.
18:04- Introduces “The California Water Plan”. [INDEX: state of California, water plan project, salinate the Sacramento Valley and make the Sacramento Valley agriculturally dead, Minarets in the Sierra, Buddhist god called Fudo or Achala, personal guardian or teacher, other two poems that reference Buddhist god: “Smokey the Bear Sutra” and “Spell Against Demons”, third poem in trilogy of Fudo poems; from The Fudo Trilogy (Shaman Drum, 1973).]
19:48- Reads “The California Water Plan”.
25:34- Introduces “Kumarajiva’s Mother”. [INDEX: rest of poems read are from ancient India and ancient North America, Pacific Ocean, American Indians from Asia or vice versa, Shoshone, white anthropologist theory, Kumarajiva was Buddhist monk-scholar- translator, Central Asia, China, translated Sanskrit Buddhist texts to Chinese, translating sutras, Peking (or Chang’an), Snyder’s mother, women in Buddhism; from unknown source.]
28:22- Reads “Kumarajiva’s Mother”.
30:59- CUT made in tape, Snyder begins mid-sentence, introduces “The Humpbacked Flute Player”. [INDEX: 8th century, Mahayana university called NAllenda, China, Buddhism, school of the Mind Only, the school of Emptiness, two aspects of the poem, American Indian petroglyph figure of a hump-backed flute player, Sonora, Mexico, Great Basin, The Ghost Dance (Messianic Indian Religion started by a Paiute named Wovoka), oldest living beings are the bristle-coned pine, White Mountains, California; published in Coyote’s Journal 9 (1971) and in Mountains and Rivers Without End (Counterpoint, 1997).]
32:59- Reads “The Humpbacked Flute Player”.
39:36- Introduces “Down”. [INDEX: ordering of poems; from unknown source.]
40:05- Reads “Down”.
43:18- Introducer Richard Sommer thanks Gary Snyder, announces Charles Simic’s reading. [INDEX: Charles Simic, November 19th, 1971.]
SECOND CD (I006-11-106=AC.2)
Poems Read Time Stamp: Duration:
“The Call of the Wild” – Part I 00:00:17 00:16
“The Call of the Wild” – Part II 00:00:32 01:17
“The Call of the Wild” – Part III 00:01:52 02:15
“Source” 00:04:11 01:27
“Charms” 00:06:15 01:29
“The Dead by the Side of the Road” 00:08:15 01:40
“The Rabbit” 00:16:27 01:35
“The California Water Plan” 00:19:48 05:45
“Kumurajiva’s Mother” 00:28:22 02:36
“The Hump-Backed Flute Player” 00:32:59 06:34
“Down” 00:40:05 02:42
Content Type:
Sound Recording
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:12:45
Size:
30.6 MB
Content:
gary_snyder_i006-11-106-4.mp3 [File 4 of 4]
Gary Snyder
00:00:00
...alone in the 8th century, and studied at an enormous Buddhist, Mahayana university called Nalanda
, for fifteen years, and then walked back to China, with a fraying pack full of books, which he translated for the next twenty years after he got back to China. He brought the school of Buddhism, which is called the school of Mind Only, and the school of Emptiness. That's one aspect of this next poem. Another aspect is a little petroglyph, American Indian petroglyph figure, called the hump-backed flute player, a little stick figure playing the flute, with a pack on his back, walking. He was found pecked on the rocks from Sonora
, Mexico
up into the Great Basin, and about which almost nothing is known. The Ghost Dance, which was a Messianic Indian religion, started by a Paiute named Wovoka https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q558420], which asserted that perhaps by magic the white man could be swept away from North America and the game would return. And finally, the oldest living beings are the bristle-coned pine, who live in the White Mountains
, at an elevation of nine thousand feet in eastern California, the oldest of which is something like four thousand five hundred years old. So this poem is called "The Humpbacked Flute Player".
Gary Snyder
00:01:59
Reads "The Humpbacked Flute Player" from Coyote’s Journal #9 [and published later in Mountains and Rivers Without End].
Gary Snyder
00:08:36
I'm going to finish with one more poem called "Down". These poems are not in the order that they're going to be, but they're in a convenient order for the moment.
Gary Snyder
00:09:05
Reads "Down".
Audience
00:11:48
Applause.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:12:18
I can't thank you for that. I don't know any way. Charles Simic
will be reading on November 19th. Thank you.
Audience
00:12:40
Applause.
END
00:12:45
Notes:
I006-11-106=AC.2
00:02- Gary Snyder introduces “The Call of the Wild”. [INDEX: true; from Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974).]
00:17- Reads “The Call of the Wild”, Part I.
00:32- Reads “The Call of the Wild”, Part II.
01:52- Reads “The Call of the Wild”, Part III.
04:11- Reads “Source”. [INDEX: from Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974).]
05:40- Introduces “Charms”. [INDEX: dedicated to Michael McClure, consciousness of other beings; from Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974).]
06:15- Reads “Charms”.
08:01- Introduces “The Dead by the Side of the Road” [INDEX: wrote on the plane the previous day; from Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974)]
08:15- Reads “The Dead by the Side of the Road”.
09:55- Break is taken, audience member #1 asks question. [INDEX: suggests small anti-war children’s toys.]
11:26- Audience member #2 asks question (part is cut). [INDEX: books, bookstore, writing play]
12:21- Gary Snyder speaks about opposition to nuclear energy. [INDEX: nuclear energy, nuclear power-generating stations, U.S. government, energy generating centres, industrial technological consumer society, expense on the future biological health of the planet, Amchitka test, oil-bearing shale, conservationists, Nixon, election.]
15:25- Introduces “Mountains and Rivers Without End” and “The Rabbit”. [INDEX: long poem, inter-connected long poems, reading several sections from it, title from Yuan Dynasty Chinese scroll, little poem called “The Rabbit”, many sections- only reading 6; perhaps published as “Jackrabbit”, published much later in Mountains and Rivers Without End (Counterpoint, 1997).]
16:27- Reads “The Rabbit”.
18:04- Introduces “The California Water Plan”. [INDEX: state of California, water plan project, salinate the Sacramento Valley and make the Sacramento Valley agriculturally dead, Minarets in the Sierra, Buddhist god called Fudo or Achala, personal guardian or teacher, other two poems that reference Buddhist god: “Smokey the Bear Sutra” and “Spell Against Demons”, third poem in trilogy of Fudo poems; from The Fudo Trilogy (Shaman Drum, 1973).]
19:48- Reads “The California Water Plan”.
25:34- Introduces “Kumarajiva’s Mother”. [INDEX: rest of poems read are from ancient India and ancient North America, Pacific Ocean, American Indians from Asia or vice versa, Shoshone, white anthropologist theory, Kumarajiva was Buddhist monk-scholar- translator, Central Asia, China, translated Sanskrit Buddhist texts to Chinese, translating sutras, Peking (or Chang’an), Snyder’s mother, women in Buddhism; from unknown source.]
28:22- Reads “Kumarajiva’s Mother”.
30:59- CUT made in tape, Snyder begins mid-sentence, introduces “The Humpbacked Flute Player”. [INDEX: 8th century, Mahayana university called NAllenda, China, Buddhism, school of the Mind Only, the school of Emptiness, two aspects of the poem, American Indian petroglyph figure of a hump-backed flute player, Sonora, Mexico, Great Basin, The Ghost Dance (Messianic Indian Religion started by a Paiute named Wovoka), oldest living beings are the bristle-coned pine, White Mountains, California; published in Coyote’s Journal 9 (1971) and in Mountains and Rivers Without End (Counterpoint, 1997).]
32:59- Reads “The Humpbacked Flute Player”.
39:36- Introduces “Down”. [INDEX: ordering of poems; from unknown source.]
40:05- Reads “Down”.
43:18- Introducer Richard Sommer thanks Gary Snyder, announces Charles Simic’s reading. [INDEX: Charles Simic, November 19th, 1971.]
SECOND CD (I006-11-106=AC.2)
Poems Read Time Stamp: Duration:
“The Call of the Wild” – Part I 00:00:17 00:16
“The Call of the Wild” – Part II 00:00:32 01:17
“The Call of the Wild” – Part III 00:01:52 02:15
“Source” 00:04:11 01:27
“Charms” 00:06:15 01:29
“The Dead by the Side of the Road” 00:08:15 01:40
“The Rabbit” 00:16:27 01:35
“The California Water Plan” 00:19:48 05:45
“Kumurajiva’s Mother” 00:28:22 02:36
“The Hump-Backed Flute Player” 00:32:59 06:34
“Down” 00:40:05 02:42
Content Type:
Sound Recording
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 1 - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 1 - Front
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 1 - Spine
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 1 - Reel
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 2 - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 2 - Spine
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 2 - Reel
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 3 - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 3 - Front
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 3 - Spine
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 3 - Reel
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 4 - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 4 - Front
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 4 - Spine
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Gary Snyder Tape Box 4 - Reel
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Dates
Date:
1971 11 5
Type:
Production Date
Source:
Supplemental Material
Notes:
Date apecified in written announcements
LOCATION
Address:
1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Venue:
Hall Building Room H-651
Latitude:
45.4972758
Longitude:
-73.57893043
CONTENT
Contents:
gary_snyder_i006-11-106-1.mp3 [File 1 of 4]
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:00:00
Probably some of us are here in order to look at or touch the Gary Snyder
who actually went and did all those semi-mythological things, who has climbed mountains and traveled in India with Allen Ginsberg
, who provided Kerouac
with a book character, who has lived in or on the edges of several different kinds of wilderness, who has lived in the precincts of Japanese Buddhist monasteries, who has fought, I think has fought hard, to keep other cultures than ours, and other kinds of life than human life, from obliteration. And who has written poems out of the consciousness of these things. For myself, Gary Snyder hasn't made poems so much as he has provided me with windows made out of words. These are windows that have had a way of, themselves disappearing, leaving me usually standing where I think I want to be, out in the open world. So, I came here, I've come here, to meet whoever it is that makes so many good windows. I'll let you discover for yourselves how much this window-maker is what a windowmaker should be, himself, just open and clear. I'd like to present Gary Snyder.
Gary Snyder
00:02:58
I forgot one more thing I wanted to have out here. Good evening. I'm going to read in two sets this evening, with a little intermission. And first of all, I'm not going to read any poems tonight from my published books, because those poems are available and what is interesting to me is always what I'm doing, where I'm moving. So I'm going to read from a cycle of short poems, moderately short poems, which I call "Charms", and
then there'll be a break, and then I'm going to read recent sections that I've been working on from a long poem in progress called "Mountains and Rivers Without End". I came back to the United States
from Japan
with my wife and children about three years ago now, and went as rapidly as possible to settle in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada
, on the north slope of the south fork of the Yuba river
at three-thousand foot elevation. And I've been living there for almost two years now. I'm saying this by way of introduction to this first cycle of poems called "Charms". I was brought up on a farm, and all of my ancestors that I know of, for the last few generations on both sides, were rural people, or miners, miners in Colorado
, Leadville
, places like that. And it amazes me in a mysterious way how to get back to doing what my father was doing when I was a little boy, and what, and which I remember as a little boy, and to get back to doing what my grandfather was doing, which is to say--again, looking at the fences, looking at the stumps, looking at the house, looking at the well, looking at the spring and saying, how are we going to do it--touches me more deeply than I can possibly explain. And at the same time, being confronted again with these choices, which are the choices of the American frontier, and also the choices of medieval Europeans, and neolithic Mediterranean people, and neolithic Japanese people, and neolithic Chinese people. With what I've come to understand, a little more now, about history, anthropology, and biology, I feel an extraordinary responsibility to understand why I make the choices I make, in such matters as, where does one break the ground and locate a garden, or which trees does one select to fall. In other words, I find myself again in that position of entering virgin land, and this time, I want to understand, in the process of making my own choices, I want to understand why we did it wrong, every time before, and hope to get some insights in how one goes about doing it right, this time. In moving toward that understanding, in making the choices that I have to make, about how we are going to live, in the semi-wilderness and true wilderness of the Sierra Nevada, my teachers have to be scientific foresters, biologists and ecologists on the one hand, and the American Indians on the other. There are no other teachers available for these choices.
Gary Snyder
00:08:02
And so these poems, in the cycle called "Charms", reflect those debts and reflect the search for that knowledge, insofar as I've gotten into it up to this point. It starts with a little chant, called "Grace for Love". Before we...grace, in the sense of the grace that we say before meals. Which is, grace is gratitude, an expression of gratitude for a meal. And the gratitude that we say at my rancheria is a kind of a rough translation from a Japanese Buddhist grace which goes like this in English: "We venerate the three treasures and are thankful for this meal, the work of other people, and the suffering of other forms of life." The need for grace, for love, is something I became aware of when I realized that there was a level of validity in the Catholic Church's objection to contraceptive devices, insofar as love, like food, is a sacrament, and that there is level in which the act of love should inevitably be connected with the consciousness of its role in moving the seed, in transmitting the energy of the knowledge of the biomass, as transmitted down through time. But I felt that the church is far too simple-minded in assuming that the energy aroused in the sacrament of love, in the direction of fertility, has to mean literally that the people who are acting that sacrament out have to necessarily procreate their own kind. And so we came to this, I and several other people, came to this, as what primitive people would call the transferral of merit, or species-increase ritual. In other words, we make love with gratitude to other beings, and wish to transfer our fertility from the human race to the vanishing species.
Gary Snyder
00:11:09
Performs "Grace for Love".
Gary Snyder
00:14:20
Reads "A Curse on the Man In the Pentagon, Washington".
Gary Snyder
00:16:37
That's from a Cheyenne ghost dance song, that little last chorus.
Gary Snyder
00:16:43
Reads "I went into the Maverick Bar" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:18:25
The Navajo word "Anasazi" means "the ancient ones." It's the name that the Navajo gave to the people who lived in the canyons and cliffs of Chaco Canyon
and Canyon De Chelly
and Mesa Verde
and many other sites. Probably the people were the ancestors of the present Pueblo people, living there probably up until the twelfth century, till the great drought of the thirteenth century. The people who more than any others, to judge from what the Pueblo people are still able to transmit today, the people who more than any others have achieved what could truly be called "civilization" on this continent, and whose lore embodies perhaps two millennia of deep experience. I wrote this at Canyon De Chelly.
Gary Snyder
00:19:52
Reads “Anasazi” [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:21:11
The Canyon De Chelly, which will come up in another poem I'm going to read later today, and in fact, all over the West, all over the Great Basin
, and in other parts of North America
too, notably on the granite outcroppings on th]e northern shores of Lake Superior
, for example, are designs pecked into the rocks, petroglyphs. Anthropologists, Americanists, whatever you call 'em, haven't had much time to study those petroglyphs yet, because they've been engaged through all the years of this century in a hasty, half-successful salvage operation. Salvaging the remnants of this or that dying culture, recording and taping the last words of a dying language, and they've had no time to give to studying these older things that they know are there, such as the petroglyphs. But the petroglyphs have a repeated vocabulary of motifs which are found in patterns distributed all over North America, and particularly in the West. One of the most widespread is a hand, that someone has put on a cliff or a boulder face, apparently outlined, and then filled it in with red, hematite, or a red hand. That red hand often is lacking a finger, or lacking a finger-joint. This would not be notable in itself if it weren't that in the caves of southern France
and northern Spain
, there are dated, back as far as 40,000 years, the same red hands, with missing fingers and missing finger-joints are found. This is only one of a number of things which are found all the way. And so this next poem, "The Way West Underground", is one of a number of poems, and this is perhaps the most intellectual of them, in which I'm trying to trace out how you get back to make the line of connection between what I know the American knows, what I am beginning to know the American Indian knew, and what I am beginning to know our prehistoric ancestors knew, which was not a different knowledge. And the question of why our prehistoric ancestors lost it is another question. Actually the main impetus of this poem deals with the bears, because there's an international mystery religion called the Bear Cult, that runs all the way from Finland
to Utah
, across Siberia
, and it shares the mysterious central theme, which is a girl who marries a bear. I've written several poems about that girl. And about the bears. And so this is coming in on that from another angle.
Gary Snyder
00:25:12
Reads "The Way West Underground" [published later in Turtle Island].
END
00:26:55
gary_snyder_i006-11-106-2.mp3 [File 2 of 4]
Gary Snyder
00:00:00
--which is a way Finnish men sing folk songs together.
Gary Snyder
00:00:05
Resumes reading of "The Way West Underground".
Unknown
00:02:20
[Cut or edit made in tape].
Gary Snyder
00:02:21
So I had to trace back again in my mind, with my eyes, with my observation: of course, the plants produce seeds, the birds feed on the seeds, and so forth. Small members of the food chain. The ocean is similar but in a different set of relationships. We live on an exuberance of sexuality. We eat the reproductive organs of grasses: wheat, rice. Because herring or cod have millions of eggs that hatch into millions of almost-microscopic fry, the food chains of the ocean are made possible.
Gary Snyder
00:03:16
Reads "The Song of the Taste" from Regarding Wave.
Gary Snyder
00:04:51
I read that because it goes so nicely with this other poem, called "Song to the Raw Material". I really think a lot about these things these days because I've put myself deliberately in the position of having to know where my food comes from, and it's no longer a question of, like do I eat natural foods or supermarket foods, or do I eat meat or am I a vegetarian, it's more sophisticated than that, it's a lot more subtle than that. Like literally, where did it come from. And by what means can I have a sense of responsibility and gratitude to what it is that I'm eating and in what sense can I repay that world, whichever world it is, that I am feeding off of. Well of course one way you can repay it is by being a willing, and gracious, member of the food chain yourself. Now we are rather large animals, which means that we are rather high in the food chain. But nonetheless, quite edible. And it would be a great honour, really, to be eaten by a large, rare predator, and I can't think of any way I'd rather finish my days than to give myself to a grizzly bear, if I could, you know, choose when. [Laughter]. Like get all my affairs in order first. I'm not ready yet! Or at least, go back, as large creatures often do, go back into the cycle of feeding smaller creatures. But you can see the basic biological ignorance of this society, the ignorance of what systems really are, what basic systems are, and what our responsibilities to our membership in basic systems is, by the fact that they either burn people up or they fill them full of chemicals which make them not tasty, and lock them in bronze caskets, and so forth. The only people in the world who are righteous about this particular question seem to be the Tibetans and the Parsis, I mean, really righteous about it. The Tibetans and the Parsis have an old tradition, which is mentioned, it's so old that it's mentioned by Herodotus
, in talking about a group of people called the Magi, in Persia
, that is to say they expose their dead in elevated places and feed them to the vultures. That's one very elegant way, actually, to deal with it. The Eskimo, an Eskimo shaman whose name I forget, is reputed to have said, "We live dangerous lives, because our food consists entirely of souls". “Song to the Raw Material”.
Gary Snyder
00:08:12
Reads "Song of the Raw Material".
Gary Snyder
00:09:12
Reads "Steak" [published later in Turtle Island; audience laughter and applause throughout].
Gary Snyder
00:10:53
I saw that in Lethbridge
, Alberta
. [Audience laughter]. The creation mythology of Japan, called the kojiki, is very long, and very complicated. I tried to boil it down to some kind of a formula I could understand, at least boil down the first hundred pages of it, so I wrote this--it's about how the world is created according to the Japanese creation mythology. I think. I think that's what it is.
Gary Snyder
00:11:28
Reads "No matter, never mind" [published later in Turtle Island].
Audience
00:12:14
Laughter and applause.
Gary Snyder
00:12:24
It's funny how the language is smarter than we are, [audience laughter] yeah. Like we can get hung up on mind/matter dualism, but the language won't accept it. It says the same thing two ways. "The Bath". Where we live we don't have any electricity or propane, and so we do everything with wood, including heating our bath, which we found the best wood-fired bathing system was a Finnish-type sauna, and...so this poem, you know just to set the scene, it's a somewhat longer poem, this poem is a sauna, with a wood-burning stove that also heats a tank of water on the side, and with a bench that you sit up on and a lower place that you can get down on and wash with. You can get these wood-fired sauna-stoves from some Finnish outfit in Michigan
. The only place in the United States that I have been able to locate that makes sauna stoves that fire wood. I highly recommend them. The personae in this are my wife, my three-year old son, my three-and a-half year old son, my two-year-old son.
Gary Snyder
00:14:00
Reads "The Bath" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:19:31
Some friends said to us, when we moved up to the backcountry, ah, you're just getting away from your responsibilities. You're evading the struggle. So I wrote this little poem as a, kind of a light answer to that. It's called "Front Lines".
Gary Snyder
00:19:59
Reads "Front Lines" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:21:36
That poem is not an exaggeration of what we're doing. We are, like, where I am and a number of other people I know around this continent, have their backs up against the wilderness, so to speak, and they're not going to let this thing go past them. If they can help it, or as you say, over my dead body. The California Indians used to set control burns, as distinct from wildfires, forestry terms, which contributed to the maintenance of what you might call a climax timber stand, keeping the undergrowth burnt out, keeping an annual deer-forage coming in, and protecting the large timber, as it were, from destructive forest fires, because whenever a forest fire--which is very common in California
, it's an annual event--whenever forest fires go through, went through the forests when they were in that condition, it simply went through taking the ground cover off, but couldn't get hot enough or high enough to kill the large trees. With the advent of logging, mining, and the Manzanita brush that follows on that, the whole flora of California changed radically. All of the flora of California changed. What happened was that the woods got very brushy, and then the early forestry practices which were, of course, to put forest fires out whenever they came on them, in some ways contributed to the increasingly dangerous situation of dense brush, logging slash laying around, second-growth trees not really very large yet, and a situation where every brush fire that went through killed absolutely everything grew up. And that's the state of the state now, to a large extent, although there are some hip foresters now who are back into control burns as best as they can. This poem is called "Control Burn" and it only starts from what I'm just talking about, taking that as an image.
Gary Snyder
00:24:00
Reads "Control Burn" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:25:37
Reads "The Great Mother" [published later in Turtle Island].
END
00:26:55
gary_snyder_i006-11-106-3.mp3 [File 3 of 4]
Gary Snyder
00:00:00
Everything in this next poem is all true. Almost everything.
Gary Snyder
00:00:17
Reads "The Call of the Wild", Part I [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:00:32
Reads "The Call of the Wild", Part II [published later in Turtle Island].
Annotation
00:01:52.06
Reads "The Call of the Wild," Part III [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:04:11
Reads "Source" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:05:40
In the poem "Charms", which is dedicated to Michael McClure
, who has more than any other living poet, or person even that I know, has gone farther than anyone else, I think, into becoming one with, in understanding, in penetrating, in perceiving the consciousness of other beings.
Gary Snyder
00:06:15
Reads "Charms" [published later in Turtle Island].
Audience
00:07:45
Applause.
Gary Snyder
00:08:01
I want to read one little poem that kind of, that I just wrote on the plane the other day. Flying in here yesterday I wrote this. And then we'll take a break. But this belongs, really, with these poems.
Gary Snyder
00:08:15
Reads "How did a great red-tailed Hawk come to lie on the shoulder of Interstate 5" [published later in Turtle Island].
Gary Snyder
00:10:05
Okay, let's take a break.
Audience
00:10:07
Applause.
Unknown
00:10:17
Ambient Sound [voices].
Audience Member 1
00:10:29
Do you remember getting tiny toys for your children from San Francisco
? There was a small book that I saw in the States, folded out in a certain, section-by-section, parts of the earth kinda, growing larger and larger and larger...
Gary Snyder
00:10:46
I haven't seen it.
Audience Member 1
00:10:48
No, I guess...it's sort of, um, anti-war toys.
Gary Snyder
00:10:51
Sounds nice. Yeah. Some place in San Francisco you can get it?
Audience Member 1
00:10:56
Um, I don't know, it was from a certain, a certain group of people, and I don't remember their names. It was beautiful. Nice gift to give little kids.
Gary Snyder
00:11:07
I shall watch for it when I go there again. Thank you.
Audience Member 1
00:11:13
Okay. You bet. [Inaudible]
Gary Snyder
00:11:14
Okay. [Laughter].
Audience Member 2
00:11:19
Man you're incredible. You're so good. I really dig your stuff.
Gary Snyder
00:11:26
[Laughter]. Thank you.
Audience Member 2
00:11:26
I really dig it, will you come for a drink with me later? With me and my friends?
Gary Snyder
00:11:31
I gotta go some place later.
Audience Member 2
00:11:33
You sure?
Gary Snyder
00:11:34
Yeah. I mean, like I...they got something set up for me.
Audience Member 2
00:11:38
I don't, I don't know, I really dig that, I really dig that [inaudible] I just came in, I thought your stuff was so incredible...Your stuff, the way you bring it across to people!
Gary Snyder
00:11:51
Well, that's what I try to do.
Audience Member 2
00:11:54
Have you written a book?
Gary Snyder
00:11:54
I've written a lot of books. [Laughter].
Audience Member 2
00:11:58
No no no, no really, no really, I don't know too much about...Gary Snyder, you know?
Gary Snyder
00:12:04
Well, you'd probably find, I don't know, because I'm coming here, because of my being here now, they've probably got some of my books in the bookstore, if you want to go look. [Laughter].
Audience Member 2
00:12:13
See I'm writing this play right now, you know? I'm trying to express myself and it's really...it's really strange [Cut off abruptly].
Unknown
00:12:27
[Cut or edit in tape. Unknown amount of time elapsed].
Gary Snyder
00:12:28
Well, there has been a great deal of opposition to nuclear energy, and nuclear power-generating stations, in the United States so effective in some areas that a lot of generating plants have been blocked or slowed down in their construction. And I think that the United States government is about to launch on an enormous effort to calm the public and to lull it into accepting massive developments of nuclear energy generating centres, fast-breeder and later, perhaps, fusion. Now I myself would have no objection to such a thing if I could be convinced that it was safe, both in the long term and the short term, and although it might be conceivably safe in the short term, I can see no way in which it would be safe in the long run, because nuclear wastes accumulated over, say, several centuries, as they might be, or more, in increasing quantities around the globe, are going to out eventually, and even though you can say, well, we're putting it off for five hundred thousand years, five hundred thousand years is not a very long time. And if we are feeding a wasteful, industrial, technological, consumer society for a few more centuries, buying it a few more centuries of life, at the expense of all future biological health on the planet, it's obviously not worth it. The Amchitka test, which is possibly interested in such things as what uses very large explosions would have in releasing oil from oil-bearing shale or something like that, I think the U.S. administration is going ahead with this test in the face of all this criticism, deliberately, as a deliberate and very intelligent gamble. The chances are that nothing will happen. When nothing happens, then they will be able to say, "All you people were hysterical. You see? Nothing happened". And that will buy them a lot of time and a lot of credibility to proceed strongly and forcibly with more nuclear testing and more nuclear power generation development. And the conservationists, perhaps, have in a way, played into their hands, by making such a big issue out of it, so that they will be left holding an empty bag if nothing happens. If something does happen, then the administration can say, "You're right, we were wrong", and Nixon
perhaps forfeits the next election. That's all. Okay.
Gary Snyder
00:15:25.61
"Mountains and Rivers Without End" is a poem that I've been working on, it's a long poem, a long series of interconnected long poems that I've been working on for some years. I'm going to read several sections from that tonight. Including one or two that are very recent, in fact these are all pretty recent. "Mountains and Rivers without End". The title of the poem comes from a Yuan Dynasty
Chinese scroll, that unfolds sideways and is thirty-five feet long. By way of introduction, a little poem called "The Rabbit". There are many sections to this, I'm only going to read [counts under breath.]..six tonight.
Gary Snyder
00:16:27
Reads "The Rabbit" [published later in Mountains and Rivers Without End].
Gary Snyder
00:18:04
"The California Water Plan". The state of California at the moment is engaged in a large, incredibly wasteful, incredibly stupid, illegal, even by their own terms, water plan project, which if they're lucky, will salinate the Sacramento Valley
and make agriculture permanently impossible. I was up in the Minarets
in the Sierra last summer, thinking about the California Water Plan
, and I perceived something of what the true California Water Plan was. So I wrote this down. It refers to an obscure little Buddhist god called Fudo, or Achala
, who is my particular guardian, my personal guardian and my personal teacher, and, so I use, I refer to him, in several poems. The other two poems in which I refer to him actually are a piece called "Smokey the Bear Sutra", and another piece called "Spell Against Demons". This is the final, actually, this is the third and final poem in the trilogy of Fudo poems. Also. But you'll find all about Fudo in this poem, it'll drive you crazy.
Gary Snyder
00:19:48
Reads "The California Water Plan" [later published in The Fudo Trilogy].
Gary Snyder
00:25:34
"Kumarajiva's Mother". Now, the rest of these poems that I'm going to read this evening are cutting back and forth between ancient India
and ancient North America. I--living as I do and where I have lived all my life, we face the Pacific
. And, the American Indian came from Asia
, or vice versa, the Asians came from North America. I mean I know a Shoshone who says that. He says, "We've always been here, those Asians came from here". [Laughter]. "What do you mean we came from someplace else, that's some white anthropologist theory". [Laughter]. "Kumarajiva's Mother." Kumarajiva
was a great Buddhist monk-scholar-translator, who was kidnapped by the Chinese from Central Asia, by force, and carried off to China
where he was made to translate Sanskrit Buddhist texts into Chinese, and he stayed there the rest of his life, with a crew of about eighty Chinese assistants, day and night, translating sutras. He did a lot of translation. He also got in trouble, because he liked girls, and on one occasion, because he actually had mistresses apparently, he ate a bowl of needles, like you sew with needles, in front of an assembly of all the monks and assistants in Peking
, or no it wasn't Peking in those days, it was Chang'an
, all of the monks and assistants in the capital, Chang'an, and then he said, "When you boys can eat needles, you can have girlfriends too". [Audience laughter]. But this poem is about his mother. [Audience laughter]. And I really, I mean I could explain to you why I wrote this poem but it isn't really worth explaining, I'll just read it. It has to do partly with the fact that my mother has freckles. And I was trying to figure out at this time, when I wrote this, I was trying to figure out whatever happened to women in Buddhism? Like something happened to 'em. They got lost. For a long time, anyway.
Gary Snyder
00:28:22
Reads "Kumarajiva's Mother".
END
00:30:59
gary_snyder_i006-11-106-4.mp3 [File 4 of 4]
Gary Snyder
00:00:00
...alone in the 8th century, and studied at an enormous Buddhist, Mahayana university called Nalanda
, for fifteen years, and then walked back to China, with a fraying pack full of books, which he translated for the next twenty years after he got back to China. He brought the school of Buddhism, which is called the school of Mind Only, and the school of Emptiness. That's one aspect of this next poem. Another aspect is a little petroglyph, American Indian petroglyph figure, called the hump-backed flute player, a little stick figure playing the flute, with a pack on his back, walking. He was found pecked on the rocks from Sonora
, Mexico
up into the Great Basin, and about which almost nothing is known. The Ghost Dance, which was a Messianic Indian religion, started by a Paiute named Wovoka https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q558420], which asserted that perhaps by magic the white man could be swept away from North America and the game would return. And finally, the oldest living beings are the bristle-coned pine, who live in the White Mountains
, at an elevation of nine thousand feet in eastern California, the oldest of which is something like four thousand five hundred years old. So this poem is called "The Humpbacked Flute Player".
Gary Snyder
00:01:59
Reads "The Humpbacked Flute Player" from Coyote’s Journal #9 [and published later in Mountains and Rivers Without End].
Gary Snyder
00:08:36
I'm going to finish with one more poem called "Down". These poems are not in the order that they're going to be, but they're in a convenient order for the moment.
Gary Snyder
00:09:05
Reads "Down".
Audience
00:11:48
Applause.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:12:18
I can't thank you for that. I don't know any way. Charles Simic
will be reading on November 19th. Thank you.
Audience
00:12:40
Applause.
END
00:12:45
Notes:
Gary Snyder reads poems later collected in Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974), originally published in a limited edition book called Manzanita (Four Seasons Press, 1972). He also reads one poem from Regarding Wave (Fulcrum Press, 1971), one poem from Coyote’s Journal #9 (1971), one poem from The Fudo Trilogy (Shaman Drum, 1973), and several from Mountains and Rivers Without End (Counterpoint) only published in 1997, as well as other poems from unknown sources.
NOTES
Type:
General
Note:
Year-Specific Information:
In 1971, Gary Snyder published The back country (New Directions Press) and First time round (Roaring Fork Press), the first edition of Manzanita (Kent State University), Swimming naked in the Yuba River (Maidu Press), Anasazi (Yes! Press), Regarding Wave: Poems (Fulcrum Press) contributed to Sky, sea, birds, trees, earth, house, beasts, flowers (Unicorn Press) with Kenneth Rexroth, to Coyote’s journal: #9 (Book People) with Albert Glover, James Coller and Allen Ginsberg, and to Six poems/seven prints (Kent State University) with Alex Gildzen, John Ashbery, James Bertolino, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov and Steven Osterlund.
Type:
General
Note:
Local Connections:
It is not clear what Gary Snyder’s connection to Sir George Williams University or Montreal was, but he no doubt had an influential role in the shaping of American poetry, specifically in the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat movement. The series tried to include poets from all types of poetry backgrounds and from both Canada and the U.S.; Snyder was an important American poet at this time.
Type:
Cataloguer
Note:
Original transcript and print catalogue by Rachel Kyne
Original print catalogue, introduction, research and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones
Additional research and edits by Ali Barillaro
Type:
Preservation
Note:
4 reel-to-reel tapes>2 CDs>4 digital files
RELATED WORKS
Citation:
Boxer, Avi; Bryan McCarthy and Graham Seal. “Letters: re: Reverend Richard J. Sommer”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 12 November 1971, page 4.
Citation:
Boxer, Avi; Bryan McCarthy and Graham Seal. “Letters: Get Your Shit Together...”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 19 November 1971, page 4.
Citation:
DiFranco, Aaron K. "Snyder, Gary". The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Jay Parini (ed). Oxford University Press, 2004.
Citation:
Maxwell, Glyn. "Snyder, Gary". The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Ian Hamilton (ed). Oxford University Press, 1996.
Citation:
Morrissey, Stephen. “Letters: Inexcusable Ignorance”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 26 November 1971, page 4.
Citation:
Pearson, Allen. “Letters: The Second Coming?”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 12 November 1971, page 4.
Citation:
Snyder, Gary. The Fudo Trilogy. Berkley, California: Shaman Drum, 1973.
Citation:
Snyder, Gary. Mountains and Rivers Without End. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 1996.
Citation:
Snyder, Gary. Regarding Wave. New York: New Directions Press, 1967.
Citation:
Snyder, Gary. Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End. San Francisco: Four Seasons Press, 1965.
Citation:
"Snyder, Gary". The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature. James D. Hart (ed). Oxford University Press, 1986.
Citation:
"Snyder, Gary [Sherman]". The Oxford Companion to American Literature. James D. Hart (ed.), Phillip W. Leininger (rev). Oxford University Press, 1995.
Citation:
Snyder, Gary. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions Press, 1969.