Poet Gary Snyder Honored in Acton
9:33 pm in Uncategorized by Carly Cassano
Mid-March was the beginning of a false-Spring in Boston, Massachusetts. The sunshine was warm and the breezes didn’t bite, but when the sun went down the trees shook, the yards flooded, and the streets reflected Winter-cold light. Following the worst of the storm, poet Gary Snyder came out from California to warm our hearts.
As the recipient of the 10th Annual Robert Creeley Award, Snyder graciously accepted an emotional introduction by Creeley’s widow, Penelope. He slowly laid his hands flat on the podium, and I immediately felt let down by the bright fluorescence of the high school auditorium and Snyder’s small stature. But when he began to read, my heart soared: he was a mountain.
Snyder read some of Creeley’s poems and even granted his interpretation of one. Snyder reading his own work was extraordinary to witness, as the genuine hippies around me rocked their heads in an odd caustic yet welcome remembrance. No one needed much prodding to laugh or relish Snyder’s words, but he offered plenty; loose rocks of inflection and emphasis made slip the truly funny, evocative moments. But the tender chuckle that emitted from Snyder’s shoulders was so spirited, the forced-nature of old jokes quickly eased and then came to a stop altogether when Snyder finished the hour reading with his latest poetics.
He interrupted his own poems to share anecdotes about a temple in Japan and a novice monk. He talked about haiku, and that he doesn’t write them. Structure like that he supposed, isn’t built into the American poet. An important contribution to New American Poetry, Snyder’s work often sounds like traditional Native American storytelling strung with psychedelic Zen chimes.
Snyder grew up on the West Coast on farm land, and learned how to appreciate nuances in nature. He expanded upon experience by reading about Eastern culture. In his twenties, he lived in Japan, traveling throughout South-East Asia to study, to fall-in-love and to ‘Listen to the Wind,’ as his dharma name denotes. By the time he moved back to California, he had built a foundation for artists, philosophers and politicians to climb from.
It’s clear Buddhism and his environmental philosophy prepared Snyder for the “here and now.” In this place, if only for an hour, busy people sit and listen to stories of trees and rivers, animals and mountains, beards and braids. As Snyder wrote in the poem “Civilization,” though, “Those are the people who do complicated things.”