A Language for Vast Space

The American long poem, once it departs from straightforward narrative, tends to fall into two categories. One is structured around and contained by myth, whether received myth or the mythologizing of a particular place or totemic object (The Waste Land, The Bridge, Paterson). The other begins with a voice, a particular way of looking at the world, and then can go almost anywhere (Song of Myself, The Cantos, The Dream Songs).

I’ve been inclined to put Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End in the latter category. But A Sense of the Whole impels me to reconsider. It’s an extraordinary book, edited by Mark Gonnerman out of a yearlong interdisciplinary seminar at Stanford University on the poem. There are interviews with Snyder; tributes by distinguished old friends, including Wendell Berry, Michael Mc-Clure, and Nanao Sakaki; and essays by professors of environmental and religious studies as well as literature. I’d now agree, at the very least, that the particular way of looking at the world in the poem amounts to an instruction manual, as Robert Hass suggests, in how to reenter a mythic imagination in postmodern times.

Of the many fine pieces in the book, I’m going to focus on the four that particularly address the question of the poem’s unity. Katsunori Yamazato helps us understand Snyder’s hints that Mountains and Rivers follows the structure of a Noh play, not only in “The Mountain Spirit,” a Western rewriting of the Japanese play Yamamba, but in the structure of the sequence as a whole and of each of its four sections. David Abram starts by connecting Snyder’s specificity about the places where his poems are set with the ineluctable connection between places and stories in oral cultures, the subject of Abram’s famous book The Spell of the Sensuous (1996). But he goes on to suggest that much of Mountains and Rivers takes place in what the Aborigines call the “dreamtime,” where human, animal, and even mineral identities interpenetrate.

Robert Hass seems to concur on this dreamtime theme. But the great achievement of his essay, the longest in the book, is the way it charts the creation of unity through repeated imagistic motifs. Hass concentrates on two, both set forth in the initial description of the Chinese landscape painting from which the poem takes its title. One is the contrast between the upward motion of mountains, associated with (masculine) spiritual striving, and the downward flow of water, associated with Kuan Yin, the feminine, compassion. The other is the image of travel, the road, the boat, as a way of experiencing Buddhist impermanence; and the temple or hermitage beside the road as an emblem of how one can step aside, by meditation in the Buddhist tradition, by opting out of the mainstream economy, part of Snyder’s Beat heritage. Hass goes on to show how these motifs perform a subtle but pervasive binding function in the many sections that follow.

One particularly charming aspect of Hass’s essay is his willingness to admit to mixed feelings in his responses to Snyder. He says, for instance, “When I first read ‘Jackrabbit,’ I thought, ‘Well, this is not a very good poem. It’s one of his mediocre middle-period animal poems’”— and then goes on not entirely to retract this judgment but to qualify it in terms of the poem’s placement in Mountains and Rivers as a whole (197– 98). Hass can also praise unequivocally: “Snyder’s music is so wonderful to me and he often begins with a kind of iambic music: ‘a trail of climbing’ and then he just piles up the strong stresses: ‘stairsteps forks upstream’” (165).

Finally, Stephanie Kaza, in a truly eye-opening piece, reads the whole poem as an account of a Zen student’s progress toward enlightenment. The dream of dying in...