“The art of poetry No. 74” (Publication, 1996)
Year
1996
Text
Snyder, Gary. The art of poetry No. 74. Interviewed by Eliot Weinberger. In : The Paris review ; no. 141 (Winter 1996).
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1323/the-art-of-poetry-no-74-gary-snyder. (Sny3)
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1323/the-art-of-poetry-no-74-gary-snyder. (Sny3)
Type
Publication
Contributors (2)
Snyder, Gary
(San Francisco, Calif. 1930-) : Schriftsteller, Dichter, Professor of English, University of California Davis
[Reproduction of the texts with the permission by Gary Snyder, January 2013].
[Reproduction of the texts with the permission by Gary Snyder, January 2013].
Weinberger, Eliot
(New York, N.Y. 1949-) : Schriftsteller, Essayist, Übersetzer
Mentioned People (1)
Snyder, Gary
(San Francisco, Calif. 1930-) : Schriftsteller, Dichter, Professor of English, University of California Davis
[Reproduction of the texts with the permission by Gary Snyder, January 2013].
[Reproduction of the texts with the permission by Gary Snyder, January 2013].
Subjects
Literature : Occident : United States of America
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References / Sources
Chronology Entries (5)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
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| 1 | 1953 | Gary Snyder studied Oriental culture and languages (Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, French) at the University of California, Berkeley under Peter A. Boodberg and Chen Shixiang. He studied ink and wash painting under Chiura Obata and Tang Dynasty poetry under Chen Shixiang. |
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| 2 | 1969 | Gary Snyder returned to the United States. |
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| 3 | 1984.10.16-12.9 |
Gary Snyder travels in the Peoples' Republic of China as part of an American Academy of Arts & Letters delegation for a 4-day writers conference, as guest of the Writers' Union with Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Harrison Salisbury, William Gass, Francine du Plessix Gray. The American writers were taken to the most famous tourist destinations : Beijing, the Chinese Acrobat Theatre, the Imperial Palace, a section of the Great Wall. After a week in Beijing, the group went to Xian, to Shanghai, to see the Buddhist temples, the Tang gardens in Suzhou and Han Shan's Cold Mountain. After the other members of the mission went back to America, Allen Ginsberg stayed in China by himself for some time to have more communication with contemporary Chinese writers and a spiritual dialogue with great ancient Chinese poets. He wen to the universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Baoding and Guiling to read and instruct his own poems and other western poets. In this period he wrote more than ten poems : One morning I took a walk in China, Reading Bai Juyi, Improvisation in Beijing, I love old Whitman so, Black shroud. In these poems Ginsberg depicts his endearment of China and its profound culture. And the poems have been praised as opening a window for western readers to understand China. |
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| 4 | 1985- | Gary Snyder is Professor of English at the University of California, David. |
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| 5 | 1996 |
Snyder, Gary. The art of poetry No. 74. Interviewed by Eliot Weinberger. [ID D29189]. The interview took place before an audience at the Unterberg Poetry Center, New York, 1992. Eliot Weinberger : Gary Snyder is a rarity in the United States : an immensely popular poet whose work is taken seriously by other poets. He is America's primary poet-celebrant of the wilderness, poet-exponent of environmentalism and Zen Buddhism, and poet-citizen of the Pacific Rim – the first American poet to gaze almost exclusively west toward the East, rather than east toward Western civilization. … Weinberger But it is abnormal for poets not to be involved in the state. The United States remains an exception to most of the rest of the world, where poets commonly have served as diplomats or as bureaucrats in some ministry. Snyder Oh true. The whole history of Chinese poetry is full of great poets who played a role in their society. Indeed, I do too. I am on committees in my county. I have always taken on some roles that were there for me to take in local politics, and I believe deeply in civic life. But I don't think that as a writer I could move on to a state or national scale of politics and remain a writer. My choice is to remain a writer. Weinberger Let's get on to the writing and go back forty years or so. One of the amazing things about your work is that you seemed to burst on the scene fully formed with Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, which were published in 1959 and 1958 but written earlier in the fifties when you were in your twenties. The poems in both books are unmistakably Snyder poems, and apparently, unlike the rest of us, you are not embarrassed by the work of your youth, for you picked eighteen of the twenty-three poems in Riprap for your Selected Poems. Snyder Actually the poems in Riprap are not the poems of my youth. Those are the poems that I've kept because those were the ones I felt were the beginning of my life as a poet. I started writing poems when I was fifteen. I wrote ten years of poetry before Riprap. Phase one: romantic teenage poetry about girls and mountains. … Snyder … So when I wrote the first poems in Riprap it was after I had given up poetry. I went to work in the mountains in the summer of 1955 for the U.S. Park Service as a trail crew laborer and had already started classical Chinese study. I thought I had renounced poetry. Then I got out there and started writing these poems about the rocks and blue jays. I looked at them. They didn't look like any poems that I had ever written before. So I said, these must be my own poems. I date my work as a poet from the poems in Riprap. … Snyder When I was twenty-two or twenty-three, I began working with Chinese and found myself being shaped by what I was learning from Chinese poetry, both in translation and in the original. And I had been reading Native American texts and studying linguistics. Weinberger What were you finding in Chinese poetry at that time? Snyder The secular quality, the engagement with history, the avoidance of theology or of elaborate symbolism or metaphor, the spirit of friendship, the openness to work, and, of course, the sensibility for nature. For me it was a very useful balancing force to set beside Sidney, The Faerie Queene, Renaissance literature, Dante. The occidental tradition is symbolic, theological, and mythological, and the Chinese is paradoxically more, shall we say, modern, in that it is secular in its focus on history or nature. That gave me a push. Weinberger Were you getting the ideogramic method from Pound or from the Chinese poetry directly? Snyder From the Chinese poetry directly. I could never make sense of that essay by Pound. I already knew enough about Chinese characters to realize that in some ways he was off, and so I never paid much attention to it. What I found in Pound were three or four dozen lines in the Cantos that are stunning—unlike anything else in English poetry—which touched me deeply and to which I am still indebted. … Weinberger Since we are talking about Chinese poetry I wanted to ask you about the Han Shan translations, Cold Mountain Poems. It is curious because Chinese poetry is so canonical, and Han Shan is not in the canon. I think at the time there were people who thought that you made him up. I wondered how you discovered him? Snyder Well, he is only noncanonical for Europeans and Americans. The Chinese and the Japanese are very fond of Han Shan, and he is widely known in the Far East as an eccentric and as possibly the only Buddhist poet that serious Far Eastern litterateurs would take seriously. They don't like the rest of Buddhist poetry—and for good reason, for the most part. To give you an example: in 1983 I was in China with a party of American writers—Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Harrison Salisbury, William Gass, Francine du Plessix Grey, and others—and we were introduced to some members of the Politburo upstairs in some huge building. The woman who was our simultaneous interpreter introduced me to these bureau members—I am embarrassed to say I don't remember who these impressive Chinese persons were—by saying, "He is the one who translated Han Shan." They instantly started loosening up, smiling and quoting lines from Han Shan in Chinese to me. He is well known. So whose canon are we talking about? Weinberger You haven't continued to translate much. Was this just something you felt you should do at the moment but that later there was too much other work to do? Snyder There is a line somewhere—is it Williams who says it?— "You do the translations. I can sing." Rightly or wrongly, I took that somehow, when I ran into it, as a kind of an instruction to myself, not to be drawn too much into doing translation. I love doing Chinese translations, and I have done more that I haven't published, including the longest shih in Chinese, the Ch'ang-hen ko, "The Long Bitter Song" of Po Chü-i. So I am not just translating these tiny things. I am working right now on finishing up the P'i-p'a hsing, the other long Po Chü-i poem about the woman who plays the lute. And I've done a few Tang poems. Maybe someday I'll get to doing more Chinese translations. … Weinberger Going back—you basically left the scene in 1956 to go to Japan. Snyder In May of 1956 I sailed away in an old ship, headed across the Pacific for Japan. Weinberger Why did you go? It seems like it was an exciting moment in America when you left. Snyder Well, exciting as the scene was looking in 1956, I was totally ready to go to Japan. I had laid plans to go to the Far East, oh, three years prior to that, and had had several setbacks. The State Department denied me a passport for some of my early political connections. Weinberger Would you have gone to China if the political situation had been different at the time? Snyder I certainly would have. Weinberger It would have completely changed the course of the rest of your life. Snyder I'm sure it would have changed my life, although I don't know just how much, because my focus in going to the Far East was the study of Buddhism, not to find out if socialism would work, and the only Buddhists I would have found in China would have been in hiding at that time and probably covered with bruises. So it wouldn't have been a good move. Weinberger I get the sense that you are much more attracted to Chinese poetry than Japanese poetry. Snyder To some extent that's true. It is a karmic empathy that is inexplicable. I love Japanese literature and Japanese poetry too, but I feel a deep resonance with Chinese poetry. … Weinberger Are you still a practicing Buddhist? Do you sit every day? Snyder Almost every day. Zazen becomes a part of your life, a very useful and beautiful part of your life—a wonderful way to start the day by sitting for at least twenty, twenty-five minutes every morning with a little bit of devotional spirit. My wife and I are raising a thirteen-year-old adopted daughter. When you have children you become a better Buddhist too, because you have to show them how to put the incense on the altar and how to make bows and how to bow to their food and so forth. That is all part of our culture, so we keep a Buddhist culture going. My grown sons say, when they are asked what they are, because they were raised that way, "Well, we are ethnic Buddhists. We don't know if we really believe it or not, but that is our culture." Weinberger What does zazen do for the poetry? Do you feel that there is a relation there that helps somehow in the writing? Snyder I was very hesitant to even think about that for many years, out of a kind of gambler's superstition not to want to talk too much or think too much about the things that might work for you or might give you luck. I'm not so superstitious anymore, and to demystify zazen Buddhist meditation, it can be said that it is a perfectly simple, ordinary activity to be silent, to pay attention to your own consciousness and your breath, and to temporarily stop listening or looking at things that are coming in from the outside. To let them just pass through you as they happen. There's no question that spending time with your own consciousness is instructive. You learn a lot. You can just watch what goes on in your own mind, and some of the beneficial effects are you get bored with some of your own tapes and quit playing them back to yourself. You also realize—I think anyone who does this comes to realize— that we have a very powerful visual imagination and that it is very easy to go totally into visual realms where you are walking around in a landscape or where any number of things can be happening with great vividness. This taught me something about the nature of thought and it led me to the conclusion—in spite of some linguists and literary theorists of the French ilk—that language is not where we start thinking. We think before language, and thought-images come into language at a certain point. We have fundamental thought processes that are prelinguistic. Some of my poetry reaches back to that. … Weinberger Just as Chinese poetry is full of empty words, deliberately empty words for the ch'i, the sort of breath, to circulate through. In 1970 you moved back to the Sierra Nevadas, and you've been there ever since. I think from that moment on, when you finally settle down, you're talking much more about a poetry rooted in place. Snyder Certainly a number of the poems written since 1970 reflect the position of being in a place, a spot in the world to which I always return. A lot of poems, however, do come out of my hunting and gathering trips to other territories. The idea of being a person of place never excludes the possibility of travel. To the contrary, it reminds people of place—everybody else in the world except Canadians, Australians, and Americans—that they know where they come from. .. … Weinberger Since we're talking about your map of the world, people have wondered about the general absence of European civilization—or at least Europe after the Paleolithic—in your work. To me it's no more shocking than the absence of Asia—not to mention Africa—from everyone else's work. But still the question comes up. Is this a deliberate criticism of Eurocentrism or merely just the track your interest followed? Snyder It's true that I haven't visited Europe much, but it isn't totally absent from my poetry, and there are some key points in my work that connect with occidental cultural insights that are classical, if not Paleolithic… … Snyder If one's real work is the writing and if one is a fiction writer, I guess one's work as a writer really holds one to the literally physical act of writing and visualizing and imagining and researching and following out the threads of one's project. However, if one is a nonfiction prose writer or a poet, one is apt to be much more closely engaged with daily life as part of one's real work, and one's real work actually becomes life. And life comes down to daily life. This is also a very powerful Buddhist point: that what we learn and even hopefully become enlightened by is a thorough acceptance of exactly who we are and exactly what it is we must do, with no evasion, no hiding from any of it, physically or psychologically. And so finding the ceremonial, the almost sacramental quality of the moves of daily life is taught in Buddhism. That's what the Japanese tea ceremony is all about. The Japanese tea ceremony is a model of sacramental tea drinking. Tea drinking is taken as a metaphor for the kitchen and for the dining room. You learn how to drink tea, and if you learn how to drink tea well, you know how to take care of the kitchen and dining room every day. If you learn how to take care of the kitchen and the dining room, you've learned about the household. If you know about the household, you know about the watershed… … |