China and the West

The man in the clearing : Ian Sinclair meets Gary Snyder. In : London review of books ; vol. 34, no 10 (2012).
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n10/iain-sinclair/the-man-in-the-clearing.
…From early on, after seeing Chinese scroll paintings in the museum in Seattle, Gary Snyder adopted a linear continuity of narrative, with everything happening at once : the pilgrim with his staff on the mountain, the bridge over the stream, the forest and the ocean…
When he gives public performances, the reading is beautifully constructed between translations from the Japanese and Chinese, short sharp on-the-road squibs, and longer, serial compositions that may have been cooking for decades…
Driving down to work at UC David, Snyder had noticed another kind of urban edgeland. "There is a big rice field, flooded paddy, near Sacramento airport. It used to have a sign on it : 'This rice field annually feeds 20,000 people'. That's export only : There are a billion people in china. The Japanese don't import so much rice, they have their own subsidized industry. But they import wheat from Canada. It goes out through Vancouver. Along with wood, stripes forests, future furnishings for the new China…"
"I'm not a prose writer, I'm a poet. That means I write when it hits me. I scribble a few things. When I do my organized editing and classifying, rewriting, I do it here, mostly in the morning. But not real early. Because the first thing I do is that I mediate…"