In Search of the Primitive: Rereading David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg and Gary Snyder by Sherman Paul (review)

Reviews 217 “Elk Trails,” is mature in matter if not in manner. It provides us with a text (the intricate patterns of nature revealed by following elk trails) and a myth, the “thin-flanked God” who laughs at mere human trails. And the second poem, “Out of the soil and rock,” written in New York City, contemplates cycles of nature from which cities emerge and into which they will vanish. A fruitful quarrel with civilization recurs in Snyder’s work. While he knows that the city has much to offer, he also believes that the city represents a wrong turning in human development: the city states of Sumeria gave us buildings (temples) and autocracy (kings). In a later poem, “The Other Side of Each Coin,” he sums up this pattern: “The head of a man of the ruling elite/And a very large building. One on each side of the coin.” There are some fine things in Snyder’s underbrush. Each of the eight sections has fine poems. The animal poems are among the delights: bear, bison and bobcat are celebrated. Snyder’s long-term readers will be interested to read more about the Sappa Creek, that notorious cranky tanker, not to mention Genji, his cat. Bits of the Snyder legend are filled in. We learn more about his friends, his marriages, his life in Japan, his return to the USA, his routine at Kitkitdizze. I wish that more of the poems had dates and places given. Many of them have a spare, journal-entry quality, and we might as well have the apparatus of a journal. One really new thing we learn from the book is the persistence of the formal impulse—the impulse toward traditional forms—in Snyder’s work. He has long been interested, it is clear, in the song­ like qualities of poetry, and has often toyed with rhyme. There is a villanelle in the book, and even a sestina. Snyder’slove of patterns would explain his use of these intricate forms. More surprising are his efforts in rhymed couplets with a distinct 18th-century flavor. In Left Out in the Rain, Snyder has given us an interesting variety of work; some of it quite minor, some of it superb. T. S. Eliot has said that a major poet is one whose work must be read in entirety, while a minor poet’s can be read for its high points alone. Snyder’s stature makes this collection essential as well as a pleasure. BERT ALMON The University of Alberta In Search of the Primitive: Rereading David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg and Gary Snyder. By Sherman Paul. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. 301 pages, $27.50.) Of the three poets under consideration, probably only Snyder will be known to most of the readers of WAL. The poets share certain core beliefs contained in Snyder’s notion of “Turtle Island,” the real homeland to be 218 Western American Literature discovered beneath the superficialities of American civilization. They seek to restore the role of poet as performer and bard, and to live in harmony with enduring human values. All have been influenced by the anthropologist Stanley Diamond, and have been associated with the journal Alcheringa. This volume, added to The Lost America of Love and Olson’s Push, com­ pletes a trilogy on contemporary poetry. Paul refuses to treat avant-garde artists, by definition explorers and frontiersmen, as museum specimens to be left fixed and wriggling on a pin. He will be a frontiersman himself, dedicated to openness and exploration. In Search of the Primitive is written as dated journal entries, evolving meditations on his subjects. As another strategy for “the thwarting of ends,” each section ends with a letter from the poet in response to Paul. (The Antin chapter also has a note from critic Marjorie Perloff, with whom Paul had differed.) Gary Snyder has the last word in the book, and provides an accurate summary of Paul’s method. Sherman Paul is working on himself in these meditations more than on me. Isn’t this what it isall about? So I’ll say he’sdoing a new kind of literary interpretation and explication here...