Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community

4. Communing: Tribal Passions in the Late 1960s

Looking back on the first half of Snyder’s career, it is possible to view “Back,” the final section of The Back Country, as the initial stage of a cultural return that continued to unfold in the late 1960s. After six consecutive years in Asia, Snyder spent nine months in America from 1964 to 1965. During this time, he taught at UC–Berkeley, gave public readings and interviews, climbed mountains, and reconnected with old friends in the Beat movement , bringing his extensive knowledge of Pacific Rim traditions to bear on a counterculture that was making the transition to the hippie era. With increasing frequency, Snyder began to introduce ancient Asian customs to the Bay Area. Along with Phil Whalen, he formally circumambulated Mount Tamalpais. The two friends also protested the Vietnam War by sitting zazen in front of the Oakland Navy Terminal. In his poetry and prose, meanwhile, Snyder beat the drum for various primitive cultures around the Rim. Judging by the positive response he received after delivering a lecture entitled “Poetry and the Primitive” at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in July 1965, he continued to win the admiration of counterculture types seeking to replace cold war policies with a more peaceful and tribal worldview. Snyder’s emphasis on tribal values was especially cogent in the heady atmosphere of the late 1960s, when throngs of youth traveled to San Francisco in search of 4. C O M M U N I N G Tribal Passions in the Late 1960s alternative living arrangements, different models of political constituency, and ecstatic ways of being together. Two well-timed books cemented Snyder’s reputation as Pacific Rim spokesperson. In the prose writings collected in Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (1969), Snyder took what he knew of Asian traditions and molded them into a practical political program . Although this volume includes material composed as far back as 1952 (“Lookout’s Journal”), nearly half of it consists of essays that Snyder wrote or revised in 1967, the annus mirabilis of the hippie movement. Reflecting the anarcho-pacifist idealism coloring the hippie community’s visions of a utopian future, each of these 1967 essays contains serious discussion about how the counterculture can look back into history to recover the value systems of ancient mystics and primitives. As Michael Davidson reminds us, “it is difficult to think of the [San Francisco Renaissance] as ‘postmodernist’ when so much of it hearkens back to ‘premodern’ sources.”1 Snyder’s 1967 essays surely support Davidson’s point, for alongside peaceful prescriptions for the future they talk about older tribal models, some of them dating back to Paleolithic times. In another important stage of his cultural return, Snyder went back to the lyric mode, publishing Regarding Wave (1970), a volume of poetry he dedicated to his third wife, a young Japanese woman named Masa Uehara. In this book, Snyder offers crosscultural family units as a practical means to discovery , focusing upon the multicultural significance of his wife and son (Kai Snyder, born in 1968) in order to celebrate a Pacific Rim communion made flesh. Regarding Wave thus takes the human geography of The Back Country to a whole new level. Particularly noteworthy in this context are Snyder’s erotic descriptions of body and landscape, which he articulates ecstatically in a series of “songs” dedicated to Masa. Taking the tropes of the blason tradition a step further, these songs “orient” the traveling poet as he and his family prepare to settle permanently on the North American continent. Like the Beats, the hippies of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district took a vested interest in Snyder’s Pacific Rim adventures. In the travel journal he kept in India, Snyder defines culture as “a matter of style that pervades” (PTI 34). To my mind, this definition reveals quite a bit about Snyder’s unique role in twentieth-century poetry. He was absent from San Francisco for much of the 1950s and early 1960s, and yet his sense of style, his way of moving through Pacific Rim space, clearly pervaded that city’s countercul216 | COMMUNING tural circles. The same was true in the later years of the 1960s. The only difference was that the Beat Generation’s Dharma Bum, its inscrutable Hanshan figure, was now a “Dharma Revolutionary” using Buddhism and other religions to promote radical political...