Gary Snyder Has Had It With You Puny Humans

He's also a terrific essayist, and long before many, many people, Snyder was writing about ecology and ecosystems and watersheds, and the way we have painted over natural boundaries with our less significant and sometimes dangerous socio-political ones.

Last night he read from both poems and essays--interspersed with habitual, didactic footnotes and digressions, so that it was sometimes hard to tell which was which--beginning with his early stuff. The difference between a young poet and an adult one is the difference between where the poet stands. In his early work, you can hear Snyder the dockworker, Pacific Northwest lumberjack, engine room worker, critiquing trade, logging, and oil--he sees darkly where it all leads, but he's still very much caught up in it, and there's less of a sense of his own complicity.

Later come his trademark excursions that can start with a pebble and end up dropping you off somewhere in the Milky Way. Snyder has never been averse to an expedition. He's a local boy, in some ways--his parent moved to what's now Seattle, north of Lake City Way, from San Francisco during the Great Depression. When he was nine he took the train back by himself, to see the 1939 World's Fair. (His Wobbly grandfather lived in Kitsap County, and used to head down to Yesler Square to harangue from atop a soapbox, a mode of discourse that Snyder hasn't entirely avoided himself.)

Now it pleases him to take the long view, working on 500-year sustainable forestry plans. "A thousand years will come before you know it," he exclaimed, trying to shake the audience out of its tomorrow-and-tomorrow stupor, and read from an essay that explained why California will never be like Tuscany: nothing built in California is supposed to last 50 years, let alone a few hundred, and not speak of 1,000. There is no inventory of old, stone California villas to delight future generations.

New poems he'd been working on rang with that elliptical sharpness of old, but one contained so many awkward inversions he sounded like a basso Yoda--instructing us in wisdom he was.

Then came the Q&A, where he announced that the other animals like to hear people play music; that not only should kids get sent outside, but they should be sent with tools to do work; that poverty is a great aid to cooperation; that sustainability means an ecosystem that functions without losing any of its parts; that "Allen Ginsberg taught me never to be ashamed of anything" (by opening his mail when they were roommates); and that when he says "wild" he means "self-managing" or "self-directed."