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The Critter Poet h Gary Snyder was a character in a novel before he published his own ‹rst book. In Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, that vivid account of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance and the Beat movement, there is a biographical sketch of Japhy Ryder, “the number one Dharma Bum of them all”: Japhy Ryder was a kid from eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the woods with his father and mother and sister, from the beginning a woods boy, an axman, farmer, interested in animals and Indian lore so that when he ‹nally got to college by hook or crook he was already well equipped for his early studies in anthropology and later in Indian myth and in the actual texts of Indian mythology. Finally he learned Chinese and Japanese and became an Oriental scholar and discovered the greatest Dharma Bums of them all, the Zen Lunatics of China and Japan. At the same time, being a Northwest boy with idealistic tendencies, he got interested in oldfashioned I.W.W. anarchism and learned to play the guitar and sing old worker songs to go with his Indian songs and general folksong interests. This is the beginning of the Snyder myth. For all I know, and for all that I can glean from Snyder’s autobiographical writings, it is entirely true. What makes The Dharma Bums a pleasure to read, forty years after its publication, is the way Kerouac, in the guise of his ordinary -Joe narrator, undercuts Japhy Ryder’s humorless, selfsatis ‹ed ethos. Ray, the writer’s stand-in, walks into Japhy’s 116 shack, and there is Japhy “sitting cross-legged on a Paisley pillow on a straw mat, with his spectacles on, making him look old and scholarly and wise, with book on lap and the little tin teapot and porcelain cup steaming at his side. He looked up very peacefully, saw who it was, said, ‘Ray come in,’ and bent his eyes again to the script.” “What you doing?” “Translating Han Shan’s great poem called ‘Cold Mountain’ written a thousand years ago some of it scribbled on the sides of cliffs hundreds of miles away from any other living beings.” “Wow.” Japhy proceeds to teach Ray all about Asian poetry and culture, including the proper way to have sex. When Ray walks in on Japhy, in the lotus position, making meditative love (“yabyum”) to a woman called Princess, Japhy explains that “this is what they do in the temples of Tibet. It’s a holy ceremony, it’s done just like this in front of chanting priests. People pray and recite Om Mani Pahdme Hum, which means Amen the Thunderbolt in the Dark Void. I’m the thunderbolt and Princess is the dark void, you see.” A part of Gary Snyder’s considerable prestige in the small world of American poetry is owed to the impression that he has put in the time and done the work: graduate study in anthropology at Berkeley; summers on lookout duty in national forests and parks (“The prolonged stay in mountain huts . . . gave me my ‹rst opportunity to seriously sit cross-legged”); ten years in Japan, mainly in the 1960s, doing Zen and studying Japanese aesthetics; his current rough-hewn life with his family on a hundred acres in the Sierra foothills, with a teaching appointment in English and ecology at the University of California at Davis. All this experience has gone into Snyder’s poetry, the best of which manages to suppress his didactic side. Snyder at his most moving is an elegiac poet, mourning the loss of forests, “critters” (as he calls animals), lovers, places. Snyder at his most annoying is the pedantic guy on the Paisley pillow who says, “I’m the thunderbolt and Princess is the dark void, you see.” To those of us in whose early intellectual lives Snyder was a signi‹cant chapter, a return to his work after long absence can have its own embarrassments. When I was seventeen, spending a year in Japan, Snyder’s The Back Country (1968) was one of the books that I carried everywhere with me. My favorite poem in it, 117 which I still know by heart, was “December at Yase,” the last of the “Four Poems for Robin.” It begins: You said, that October, In the tall dry grass by the orchard When you chose to be free, “Again someday, maybe ten years.” After college...

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