Gary Sherman Snyder was born on May 8, 1930. He is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poems are linked to the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. He is known as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology." Snyder has won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work shows a deep interest in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated works from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese into English. For many years, he worked as an academic at the University of California, Davis. At one time, he was also a member of the California Arts Council.

Life and career

Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco, California, to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder. He has German, Scottish, Irish, and English ancestors. His family had very little money because of the Great Depression and moved to King County, Washington, when he was two years old. There, they raised dairy cows, kept laying hens, had a small orchard, and made cedar wood shingles. At age seven, Snyder was sick in bed for four months due to an accident. "My parents brought me books from the Seattle Public Library," he said in an interview. "That is when I learned to read, and I became very interested in reading. I think that accident changed my life. After four months, I had read more than most kids do by the time they are 18. And I didn’t stop." During his ten years in Washington, Snyder learned about the Coast Salish people and became interested in Native American cultures and their connection to nature.

In 1942, after his parents divorced, Snyder moved to Portland, Oregon, with his mother and younger sister, Anthea. His mother, Lois Snyder Hennessy (born Wilkey), worked as a reporter for The Oregonian. One of his early jobs was as a newspaper copyboy at The Oregonian. During his teen years, he attended Lincoln High School, worked as a camp counselor, and climbed mountains with the Mazamas youth group. Climbing remained an interest, especially during his twenties and thirties. In 1947, he began attending Reed College on a scholarship. There, he met writer Carl Proujan, and became friends with poets Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. While at Reed, Snyder published his first poems in a student journal. In 1948, he worked as a seaman during the summer. To get this job, he joined the now-defunct Marine Cooks and Stewards union. He later worked as a seaman in the mid-1950s to learn about other cultures in port cities. Snyder married Alison Gass in 1950; they separated after seven months and divorced in 1952.

While at Reed, Snyder studied folklore on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon. He graduated with two degrees: one in anthropology and one in literature in 1951. His senior thesis, titled The Dimensions of a Myth, used ideas from anthropology, folklore, psychology, and literature to study a myth from the Haida people of the Pacific Northwest. He worked as a timber scaler at Warm Springs during the summers, building relationships with the people there. These experiences inspired some of his earliest poems, including "A Berry Feast," later collected in The Back Country. He also learned about Buddhism and East Asian views of nature. He went to Indiana University with a graduate fellowship to study anthropology. (He also began practicing Zen meditation on his own.) He left after one semester to return to San Francisco and try to become a poet. Snyder worked as a fire lookout in the North Cascades in Washington for two summers, on Crater Mountain in 1952 and Sourdough Mountain in 1953 (both near the Skagit River). His attempts to get another lookout job in 1954 failed because he was not allowed to work for the government due to his connection with the Marine Cooks and Stewards union. Instead, he returned to Warm Springs to work in logging as a choker setter. This experience helped him write Myths and Texts and the essay Ancient Forests of the Far West.

Back in San Francisco, Snyder lived with Whalen, who shared his growing interest in Zen. Reading the writings of D. T. Suzuki influenced Snyder’s decision not to continue studying anthropology. In 1953, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study Asian culture and languages. He studied ink and wash painting with Chiura Obata and Tang dynasty poetry with Ch’en Shih-hsiang. Snyder spent summers working in the forests, including one summer as a trail builder in Yosemite. He lived in a cabin outside Mill Valley, California, with Jack Kerouac in 1955 and 1956. He also studied at the American Academy of Asian Studies, where teachers like Saburo Hasegawa and Alan Watts taught. Hasegawa introduced Snyder to landscape painting as a meditative practice, which inspired Snyder to write poetry in a similar way. With Hasegawa’s help, he began work on Mountains and Rivers Without End, which was completed and published 40 years later. During these years, Snyder wrote and collected his own work and translated the "Cold Mountain" poems by the 8th-century Chinese poet Han Shan. These poems were published in a chapbook in 1959 under the title Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems.

Snyder met Allen Ginsberg when Ginsberg asked him to meet after being recommended by Kenneth Rexroth. Through Ginsberg, Snyder and Kerouac became friends. This period inspired Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, and Snyder was the model for the novel’s main character, Japhy Ryder, just as Neal Cassady inspired Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Many people in the Beat movement had city backgrounds, so writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac found Snyder’s experience with rural life and manual labor refreshing and unusual. Lawrence Ferlinghetti later called Snyder "the Thoreau of the Beat Generation."

Snyder read his poem "A Berry Feast" at a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. This event also featured the first public reading of Ginsberg’s poem "Howl" and marked the rise of the Beat movement. This was Snyder’s first involvement with the Beats, even though he was not part of the original New York group. He joined the movement through his friends Whalen and Welch. As described in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, Snyder believed at age 25 that he could help bring Western and Eastern cultures together. His first book, Riprap, was published in 1959. It included poems based on his experiences as a forest lookout and trail crew member in Yosemite.

Some Beats, like Whalen, were interested in Zen, but Snyder studied it more seriously. He prepared for study in Japan in every way he could. In 1955, the First Zen Institute of America offered him a scholarship to train in Japan for a year. However, the U.S. State Department refused to give him a passport, claiming "it has been alleged you are a Communist." A court ruling later changed this policy, and Snyder received his passport. His expenses were paid by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, who expected him to work for her. Initially, he served as a personal attendant and English tutor to Zen abbot Miura Isshu at Rinko-in, a temple in Kyoto. After morning meditation, chanting, and chores, he took Japanese classes to improve his language skills enough to study kōans. He became friends with Philip Yampolsky, a Zen scholar, who showed him around Kyoto. In early July 1955, he took refuge in Buddhism and asked to become Miura’s disciple, officially becoming a Buddhist.

In 1958, he returned to California via…

Work

Gary Snyder writes poems that mostly use everyday speech, but his style is known for being flexible and taking many different forms. He usually does not follow traditional rhythm patterns or use rhymes on purpose. According to Glyn Maxwell, Snyder’s poems often show respect for Native American tribes, a deep care for the Earth, a desire to move away from busy cities and back to the past or future, and a focus on shared experiences and reflection.

Stewart Brand, an author and editor, once said that Gary Snyder’s poetry connects people with the planet in a simple way but creates complex effects. Jody Norton explained that this happens because Snyder uses natural images, like mountains, plants, and animals, in his poems. These images can feel personal and sensory, but they also have a wide, universal meaning. In his 1968 poem "Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills, Your Body," Snyder compares the gentle touch of a lover to the natural features of the Uintah Mountains. This helps readers explore both personal and grand experiences at the same time. Snyder wanted his poems to show how simple ideas can lead to complex feelings and thoughts. In an interview, he said, "There is a beautiful direction where living things become less focused on themselves and more open to sharing with others."

Snyder has always said his interest in Native American cultures and their deep understanding of nature shaped his views. He also found similar ideas in Buddhist practices, Yamabushi traditions, and other experiences. Even though he grew up reading and admiring writers like D. H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, and ancient Chinese poets, he was especially influenced by William Carlos Williams early in his career. He also loved the work of Robinson Jeffers, who wrote about the American West. However, while Jeffers saw nature as more important than people, Snyder believed humans are part of nature. Snyder once said in interviews that he is interested in connecting ideas about biology, mysticism, ancient times, and theories about how systems work. He believes humans need to think about long-term effects of their actions. His poetry shows the differences between nature and human culture and suggests ways to bring them together.

In 2004, when Snyder won the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Awards Grand Prize, he said that traditional songs, Native American poetry, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Noh drama, Zen sayings, Federico García Lorca, and Robert Duncan influenced his work. He added that the influence of haiku and Chinese poetry was the strongest.

Snyder is one of the writers who has tried to change how people think about Native American cultures, which have often been seen as simple or violent. In the 1960s, he developed a "neo-tribalist" view, similar to the ideas of French sociologist Michel Maffesoli. He disagreed with the idea that modern society will become more tribal in a negative way, as some thinkers like Marshall McLuhan suggested. Instead, Snyder believes in a positive future where tribal traditions, nature, and politics can work together. Todd Ensign said Snyder’s work combines old tribal beliefs, philosophy, the physical world, and nature with political ideas to create a new kind of environmentalism. Snyder believes humans and nature are not enemies. He writes from many different perspectives to highlight environmental issues and encourage change on emotional, physical, and political levels.

Snyder is often seen as part of the Beat Generation, a group of writers known for their unique style. He was one of the poets who read at the famous Six Gallery event and was written about in Kerouac’s book The Dharma Bums. Some critics say his connection to the Beats is overemphasized and that he belongs more to the San Francisco Renaissance, a separate literary movement. Snyder himself is not sure about the "Beat" label but does not mind being part of the group. He often refers to the Beats using "we" and "us" when talking about them.

In a 1974 interview, Snyder said, "The term Beat is better used for a smaller group of writers—those around Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, plus Gregory Corso and a few others. Many of us belong to the San Francisco Renaissance. Still, ‘Beat’ can also mean a certain way of thinking, and I was part of that for a while."

General sources

• Charters, Ann (Editor). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hardcover); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (paperback)
• Hunt, Anthony. "Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End." University of Nevada Press. 2004. ISBN 0-87417-545-3
• Knight, Arthur Winfield. Editor. The Beat Vision (1987). Paragon House. ISBN 0-913729-40-X; ISBN 0-913729-41-8 (paperback)
• Kyger, Joanne. Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals: 1960–1964 (2000). North Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-55643-337-5
• Smith, Eric Todd. Reading Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End (1999). Boise State University. ISBN 978-0-88430-141-7
• Snyder, Gary. The Politics of Ethnopoetics (1975). Snyder essay A Place in Space
• Snyder, Gary. 1980. The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964–1979. New Directions, New York. ISBN 0-8112-0761-7 (hardcover); ISBN 0-8112-0760-9 (paperback)
• Stirling, Isabel. Zen Pioneer: The Life & Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki (2006). Shoemaker & Hoard. ISBN 978-1-59376-110-3
• Suiter, John. Poets on the Peaks (2002). Counterpoint. ISBN 1-58243-148-5; ISBN 1-58243-294-5 (paperback)
• Western Literature Association. Updating the Literary West (1997). Texas Christian University Press. ISBN 978-0-87565-175-0