Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community

Preface: The Geographic Impulse

For several years now, I have been interested in the crosscultural energies that circulate in avant-garde literary communities. I have therefore found myself turning time and again to The New American Poetry 1945–1960, a landmark collection of early postmodern verse edited by Donald Allen and published by Grove Press in 1960. As Allen hints in the preface to this anthology, it was not just aesthetic experimentation that made the New American Poets so daring and intriguing, but also the fundamental groupishness these writers advocated during a period when individualism was the predominant focus of both cold war political discourse and literary analysis. Displaying an impulse that is communitarian and geographic by turns, Allen divides fortyfour American poets into five distinct groups: those associated with Black Mountain College, those who were a part of the San Francisco Renaissance, those affiliated with the Beat Generation, those belonging to the New York School, and lastly, those with no geographical definition. Allen explains that he employs the unusual device of geographical division “in order to give the reader some sense of the history of the period and the primary alignment of the writers” as well as “some sense of milieu.” While Allen admits that his divisions “are somewhat arbitrary and cannot be taken as rigid categories ,” these delineations continue to influence scholars in the field. By P R E F A C E The Geographic Impulse acknowledging five bohemian collectives situated on the margins of society —mysterious locations from which there arose articulate rebuttals to the geopolitical doctrines put forth by cold war ideologues and the normative cultural practices sanctioned by business leaders on Wall Street—Allen implored readers to draw a new map of America at midcentury. Putting a slightly different spin on the geographic impulse spelled out in The New American Poetry, my study of Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim regional idea operates under the assumption that place-based does not necessarily mean place-bound. The more I study avant-garde literary communities, the more I realize that they depend upon travels, traversals, and transports— both real and imagined—that take writers far beyond the physical boundaries traditionally ascribed to place. For this reason, I prefer to regard Allen’s avant-garde milieus as affective sites rather than fixed spots on the map. Accordingly, my analysis of Snyder’s role in the San Francisco Renaissance does not stop at the borders of that West Coast city, but pushes further westward to consider various nodal locations along the Pacific Rim where movements or spacings complicate notions of local place. As Michel de Certeau points out in The Practice of Everyday Life, “space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it” (p. 117). By the same token, our appreciation of postmodern localities requires an understanding of larger geographic realms, which contain increasingly mobile populations, who in turn facilitate a constant exchange of cultures and the transnational phenomenon Aiha Ong has dubbed “flexible citizenship .” Such an understanding does not always come easily. Sorting through the global/local dialectics at play in the San Francisco Renaissance, though, I have come to realize that literary communities are better able to know their place in the world if they have among their ranks a mobile leader willing to trace the contours of a larger domain, make contact with a wide array of its citizens, and return home with this new knowledge in tow. Gary Snyder ful- filled this role in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s. Hewing to an extremely fluid exchange pattern, this adventurous poet traveled extensively around the Pacific Rim, updating an old-fashioned quest romance motif and nurturing an incipient global consciousness while committing his experiences to the page. On the West Coast of America, Snyder’s movements across vast stretches of space have inspired comment ever since Jack Kerouac cast him as Japhy x | P R E FA C E Ryder, the mountain-climbing hero of The Dharma Bums (1958). At midcentury , this serene yet relentlessly mobile poet made San Francisco seem like a countercultural utopia, a launching pad to a new and better world, which was often thought to be located somewhere beyond California’s shores. For westward-trekking members of the Beat Generation in the 1950s, Snyder signi fied the calm detachment they regularly associated with Zen...