A conversation with Gary Snyder on how work, folk music and poetry communities influenced his poetry, and how poetry kept him going as a survival source. Steve Dickison, director of Poetry Center from SFSU also joined this conversation.
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤ Who was Jack Kerouac? At a poetry reading not a hand raised except the Hot Springs Poet Laureate Kai Coggin said she knew When I was boy, I asked a boy named David, “How do you become a beatnik?” The next day, he handed me a small book - ON THE ROAD. I never met Jack Kerouac but his books gave me a zest for life! His interest in zen led me to a Zendo in Hawaii. Forever in my heart there is an altar for a boy from Lowell, Massachusetts. ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
So much richness in this conversation. Especially if Snyder doesn't write essays on his life work, these will provide an important cultural archive. Thanks, Ping, for keeping him talking.
Thanks immensely for this interview Ping. Going to listen now and listen to your other interviews. In the mid to late 70's I was living in Tahoma on the West Shore of Lake Tahoe and drove to Nevada City there to listen to a benefit poetry reading, "TRUE GOLD IS OF THE HEART" BENEFIT POETRY READING -WITH GARY SNYDER, ALLEN GINSBERG, PETER ORLOVSKY, AND NANAO SAKAKI". Just a wonderful night. This was to raise funds to thwart the world's largest gold mining company's intentions of coming into the area to hydrolically blast the hell out of the creeks to mine the gold there. Eventually they did obtain the rights to do it, but there were so many restrictions placed on how they could do it, and the price of gold had dropped, that they just gave it up and left. Gary of course lived in the area for quite some time and Allen and Peter owned land there too. This was almost 50 years ago. I just turned 75 a couple of weeks ago. Always loved Gary's poetry. And felt a kindship with him. When I was younger I spent lots and lots of time out in different wilderness areas.
The elephant in the room here is the influence of the Beats on Bob Dylan ...stream of consciousness set to music , and its impact world wide still reverberates .
thank you very much. i hope you both continue with those conversations. it would be wonderful to hear from Gary more about zen buddhism and his time in Japan. but thank you for the videos.
Thank you for this, a very valuable discussion and document. I am writing from Italy where the Beats had a lot of influence but the dynamics and the framing is not always understood.
Gary’s love of the outdoors has no doubt contributed to his longevity. Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore in North Beach has been something of the epicenter for west coast so called “beat” poetry.
A wonderful, inspriring missive from Kitkitdizze. A community not only holds and sustains tradition, it guides cultural innovation and evolution, too. As Snyder alludes, no folk protest songs, no Beats. No Beats, less fuel in the civil rights and anti-war fire. No Beats, no hippies. No hippies, less rights for women, people of color, gay and transgendered people.... No hippies, more US war abroad. In the book written by his friends in honor of, I believe, Gary Snyder's 65th birthday ("Dimensions of a Life"--the title is a rif on the subtitle of Snyder's senior thesis at Reed College ("He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth"), Daniel Ellsberg tells about a conversation he had in bar with Snyder in Kyoto Japan, when Ellsburg was enroute from DC to Vietnam, or viceversa, in which Snyder planted the seed which gave Ellsburg the moral and ethical courage to relase the Pentagon Papers. So poet, anthropologist, Zen student and backwoodsman Gary Snyder is naturally one of the cultural guides in perhaps the most significant acts of political civil disobediance within American history, in that it revealed the folly, deception and insane wanton waste of life from American neo-colonial endeavors and thereby indicted all such imperial quests for social, economic, and political domination, just like Putin's in Ukraine right this moment. Gary Snyder, my personal down-to-earth hero--who like me builds his own fire in his woodstove-- and for me the greatest living American, has been a spreader of seeds--poetry, buddhism, enlightenment, environmentalism, social change, politically engaged buddhism, civil rights, anti-war, respect for other cultures, re-inhabitation, east-meets-west..... for longer than the 44 years that the cherry plum tree outside the window in this delightful conversation has been blooming. Jack Kerouac may have turned Gary into the cultural icon of Japhy Ryder in "The Dharma Bums." But Gary Snyder--the poet, the meditator, the activist, the thinker, the artist, the essayist, the San Juan community member, the Zen Buddhist, the teacher, the engaged local and global citizen: he made himself into one of the most important cultural shaman's of the 20th and 21st century. Gary was amazingly relevant when he helped get the West Coast poetry scene popping in the 50's; he was already a world teacher when he met Ellsberg in that Kyoto bar in 1960; he was a global cultural shaman when got the Pullitzer price in 1975 for "Turtle Island" and served around that time as head of the Cal Arts Commission Governer Jerry Brown and informally as an advisor to Governor Brown. His work alongside Aitken Roshi and Sulak Savaraksa and others to ignite "engaged Buddhsim" through the "Why Survive?" response to the threat of global destruction through nuclear arms was and is vital to the survival of mammalian life and other precious species diversity on earth. Down-to-Earth Gary Snyder: relavant then. Sadly, even more relevant now. A world teacher. A shamanic voice for global awakening who is a national and world treasure. Gary Snyder's poetry community is but the splash in the middle of ever reverberating concentric circles. Poetry, anthropology, and Buddhsim may be some of the root communities of this living treasure. But his community is truly planetary. Thank you Ping Wang and Steve Dickison for lofting this precious video gem into the global pond, and thereby inviting others to jump into this community, too. As Snyder said in his last line of "Axe Handles": this is "How we go on."
Yeah, I’m rereading it again now. Wondering how much of Japhy is really Gary Snyder, and how much was Kerouac’s fiction. Kerouac was over-the-top admirer of Snyder in the 50s, ( although I’m pretty sure that changed in the 60s)
Would have like to hear mention of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who just passed away in 2021 at 101) and City Lights (who actually published Howl in 1956) Was there a reason it was missed in this kind of discussion?
@@wangping2857 According to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, a nomination is considered valid if it is submitted by a person who falls within one of the following categories: Members of national assemblies and national governments (cabinet members/ministers) of sovereign states as well as current heads of states Members of The International Court of Justice in The Hague and The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague Members of l’Institut de Droit International Members of the international board of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom University professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion; university rectors and university directors (or their equivalents); directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize Members of the main board of directors or its equivalent of organisations that have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize Current and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee (proposals by current members of the Committee to be submitted no later than at the first meeting of the Committee after 1 February) Former advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Committee
@@finfinPortfolio very interesting. I wonder why they limit professor nomination to history only, otherwise I could nominate Gary, as prof. emerita of poetry. I guess poetry professor doesn't count, or qualify, to nominate a poet. funny.
@@wangping2857 I think you can still nominate Gary. You nominate while they decide your qualification - two different things. Plus, your nomination will catch more interested people who might continue to nominate. It does not hurt to try.
I have never been a fan of his poetry. I saw him reading at UC Berkeley in 1970 and a street protest broke out with police sirens, and Snyder cut his reading short without a Q&A session. I remember that at the time I thought he was a coward and not showing solidarity with the protesters.
