A Sense of the Whole: Reading Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End

A Sense of the Whole

Gary Snyder’s library on his Kitkitdizze homestead in the Sierra Nevada foothills

Copyright © Mark Gonnerman 2015

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

A sense of the whole : reading Gary Snyder’s Mountains and rivers without end / edited by Mark Gonnerman.

pagescm

1. Snyder, Gary, 1930– Mountains and rivers without end. I. Gonnerman, Mark, editor.

PS3569.N88M6237 2015

811'.54—dc 3

2014036209

Interior design by VJB/Scribe

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318, Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-502-8

For Christopher

and

Whole Earth Inhabitants — Past, Present, and Future

CONTENTS

Introduction

Cultivating a Sense of the Whole: Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End

MARK GONNERMAN

1.Opening Conversation

GARY SNYDER & JACK SHOEMAKER

Hearing Native Voices

2.The Other’s Voice: Cultural Imperialism and Poetic Impersonality in Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End

TIM DEAN

3.Dharma Shoot-out at the OK Dairy: Some Angles and Aspects of Imagination in Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End

JIM DODGE

4.Gary Snyder and the Renewal of Oral Culture

DAVID ABRAM

Making Pacific Rim Connections

5.Mountains and Rivers Without End and Japanese N Theater: A Quest for a New Humanity

KATSUNORI YAMAZATO

6.Mountains and Rivers and Japan

NANAO SAKAKI

Exploring Poetic Roots

7.Some Interim Thoughts about Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End

WENDELL BERRY

8.Proceeding by Clues: Reading Mountains and Rivers Without End

ROBERT HASS

9.Thoughts on Mountains and Rivers Without End

MICHAEL MCCLURE

Engaging Buddhist Perspectives

10.Buddhism in Mountains and Rivers Without End

CARL BIELEFELDT

11.Heart to Heart: Instructions in Nonduality

STEPHANIE KAZA

Interview

12.The Space Goes On: A Conversation about Mountains and Rivers Without End

GARY SNYDER WITH ERIC TODD SMITH

Appendices

1.Maha Prajñ P ramit H daya S tra Heart of the Gone-Beyond-Wisdom S tra

2.Mountains and Rivers Without End: Notes for Some of the Poems

GARY SNYDER

3.Fieldwork: Gary Snyder, Libraries, and Book Learning

MARK GONNERMAN

Bibliography of References Cited in Text and Notes

Contributors

Index

Note of Appreciation

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS FOR IN-TEXT CITATIONS FROM GARY SNYDER’S WRITINGS

Art takes nothing from the world; it is a gift and an exchange. It leaves the world nourished. The arts, learning grandmotherly wisdom, and practicing a heart of compassion, will confound markets, rattle empires, and open us up to the actually existing human and nonhuman world.

— Gary Snyder, Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder (2003)

INTRODUCTION

To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made up of parts, each of which is whole. You start with the part you are whole in.

— Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (1990)

Cultivating a Sense of the Whole

Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End

MARK GONNERMAN

Cultivating a sense of the whole functions to place each individual part in greater and more coherent perspective, and thus to transform one’s experience of what is present and at hand.

— Dale Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism (1998)

In the academic year 1997–98, I formed a yearlong research workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center to explore Gary Snyder’s long poem, Mountains and Rivers Without End.¹ Together we read, reread, and reflected on this work while enjoying its expansive, compelling vision. Our literary adventures concluded with a daylong symposium, Ethics & Aesthetics at the Turn of the Fiftieth Millennium.² This companion volume to the poem contains critical essays, discussions, interviews, and other fruits of what came to be known among students, faculty, and diverse community members as the Mountains & Rivers Workshop.³

I have gathered these materials here with two main objectives in mind. First, this book serves as an introduction to a complex, engaging, and, I presume, enduring work of art. Like many of Snyder’s readers, I long anticipated the completion of Mountains and Rivers, a work first imagined when the poet joined painter Saburo Hasegawa for tea and conversation at his San Francisco apartment on Shakyamuni Buddha’s birthday, 8 April 1956 (M&R 155).⁴ The poem was published in the spring of 1996, and, in December of that year, I heard Snyder read from it at Kepler’s, an independent bookstore just down the road from Stanford.⁵ Snyder began this reading with reference to whitewater rapids ratings, saying most of his work is like a Class III run where you can probably get through on your own, but that Mountains and Rivers is more like Class V: If you’re going to make it safely to take-out you will need a guide. As a collection of commentaries and other relevant readings, this book is one such guide.⁶

Second, this book aims to inspire others to organize learning communities around poetic and allied arts. Our Mountains & Rivers Workshop began in an effort to turn the contemporary research multi-versity into a university once again, if only for a moment. One of the most pressing problems in American education and society at large is a breakdown of community owing to specialization, a trend that has infected even undergraduate life. As biologist David Orr of Oberlin College writes, We have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines, hermetically sealed from other such disciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad, integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large.⁷ If one does not cultivate a sense of the ways various parts of the whole are connected to each other in spite of bureaucratic, disciplinary demarcations, one will not likely understand one’s own place within, connections to, and responsibility toward that whole. Such understanding is an exercise of imagination, and promotion of this exercise is an intention in Snyder’s work.

I. EATING PAINTED RICE CAKES

The imagination is not only holy, it is precise

it is not only fierce, it is practical

men die everyday for the lack of it,

it is vast & elegant.

— Diane di Prima, Rant (1985)

Mountains and Rivers Without End evades simple classificatory schemes. Is it an American epic poem (M&R dust jacket)? A multimedia poem cycle? A contribution to American mythology?⁸ A collection of poems depicting major ecosystem types?⁹ Is it a spiritual autobiography — a pilgrim’s progress — aimed at effecting some kind of religious conversion? Is this a sort of s tra — an extended poetic, philosophic, and mythic narrative of the female Buddha T r (M&R 158)? Or is this book a score for the kind of live performance the poet has envisioned and experimented with since 1957?¹⁰ Is the work a thought experiment — a creative, critical Buddhist commentary — on the place of art in human religious life? Though I will concentrate on the last of these possibilities here, the attentive reader will discover that Snyder’s creative effort entails all of the above and more.

Mountains and Rivers is richly intermedial, and readers will find — or lose — themselves amidst various types, levels, and layers of representation. Reproductions of two visual artworks are part and parcel of this complex work. First, the book’s cover is graced by Evening Glow at Yosemite Falls, a woodcut by Chiura Obata completed in 1930, the same year Snyder was born in San Francisco.¹¹ Chosen by Snyder for the cover after the writing was done, Obata’s print both honors a teacher and introduces the reader to four key images: mountains, waters, pines, and skies. Second, this book’s endpapers present a Sung period landscape painting, Ch’i Shan Wu Chin, described in the opening eponymous, ekphrastic poem, Endless Streams and Mountains.¹² Ekphrasis — a term from Greek rhetoric meaning to tell in full — is the verbal representation of a visual representation, and the genre has received much critical attention in recent years.¹³ An ekphrastic poem takes its inspiration from one of the visual arts, usually painting. In his note on Endless Streams and Mountains, Snyder mentions that East Asian landscape paintings invite commentary. In a way the painting is not fully realized until several centuries of poems have been added (M&R 159). Ch’i Shan Wu Chin has been enjoyed this way for centuries, and Mountains and Rivers is yet another commentary that again brings this painting — its words and images — to life.

That Mountains and Rivers is in large part commentary on the place of art in the cultivation of humane sensibilities is indicated by the work’s second epigraph from the Painting of a Rice Cake fascicle of Zen Master D gen’s Sh b genz (The Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma). Here Snyder presents an elliptical summation of a translation of statements from this 1243 lecture on the saying of an ancient Buddha: A painted rice cake does not satisfy hunger. Typically, this was taken to mean that the study of texts — s tras, commentaries, and other secondhand offerings — has little or no relation to the work of becoming truly human. In characteristic fashion, D gen reverses the common meaning and says so-called secondhand offerings are themselves a necessary kind of firsthand experience and are to be appreciated as such: Since this is so, there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake. Without painted hunger you never become a true person.¹⁴ To think otherwise is to remain in the grip of the dualistic thinking D gen’s work aims to correct. D gen thus makes real the products of imagination, and so does Snyder:

At a moment of climax,

The Mountain Spirit whispers back:

"All art and song

is sacred to the real.

As such."

(M&R 146)

The real as such exists in multiple modalities, and Snyder puts it this way: I don’t invent things out of my head unless it is an actual experience — like seeing a bear in a dream, this is a true mode of seeing a bear (TRW 20). At the same time, not everything is delivered in a dream: there is a fundamental world of matter sensed as such.¹⁵ Here we begin to discern the ends of a continuum that meet in the work of art. On the one hand, there are worlds of matter; on the other hand, there are worlds of mind, dream, and imagination. Emphasis on one end of the spectrum at the expense of the other presents an imbalance. As a way of integrating matter and mind, art — interweaving physical life and inward realms (M&R 154) — affirms a Middle Way.

Mountains and Rivers, then, is literally and figuratively framed by a meditative approach to a painting that in its own production was an artist’s meditative exercise (M&R 154). Snyder reports that Saburo Hasegawa thought the landscape paintings were for Zen as instructively deeply Buddhist as the tankas and mandalas are for Tibetan Buddhism (M&R 154). I take this to mean they were instructive because they realized and engaged the realm of imagination. If, as Diane di Prima shouts in Rant, THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION / ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT, we cannot avoid knowing that the work of art is intensely political: the war of the worlds hangs right here, right now, in the balance / it is a war for this world, to keep it / a vale of soul-making.¹⁶

II. ARTICULATING AN AVATA SAKA VISION

So, Zen being founded on Avata saka, and the net-network of things; and Tantra being the application of the interaction with no obstacles vision on a personal-human level — the other becomes the lover, through whom the various links in the net can be perceived. As Zen goes to anything direct — rocks or bushes or people — the Zen Master’s presence is to help one keep attention undivided, to always look one step farther along, to simplify the mind: like a blade which sharpens to nothing.

— Gary Snyder, Japan First Time Around (1956)

The teachings of the Hua-yen (Flower Garland) school of Buddhism are gathered in the Avata saka-s tra. The version of this s tra in eighty scrolls, first translated into Chinese between 695 and 699, breaks into thirty-nine sections that form, in Luis Gómez’s words, an unwieldy compilation of disparate texts held together by a thin narrative thread.¹⁷ The final section of this long discourse, extant in Sanskrit as the Ga avy ha-s tra (Entering the Realm of Enlightenment S tra), tells the story of Kumara Sudhana, the son of a merchant who stands at the beginning of the Buddhist Path and seeks to understand that Path in relation to his day-to-day concerns. His helpers as he proceeds — all regarded as advanced bodhisattvas — include laymen, laywomen, Brahmins, and female night-spirits. Sudhana begins his quest at the behest of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, and ends it in the realm of Samantabhadra, a bodhisattva of boundless goodwill, thus showing that the pilgrim has come to realize both wisdom and compassion in his everyday life.¹⁸

The Avata saka-s tra is said to represent Shakyamuni Buddha’s state of mind in the long meditation that followed immediately upon his great awakening at the base of the bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya before he was persuaded by Indra to share his hard-won insights with others. The s tra is thus regarded as a direct expression of Truth without concession to the limitations of ordinary human understanding.¹⁹ This text offers, then, an imagined expression of the flowing, interpenetrating, unified world as comprehended by a fully enlightened being.

In his explication of the Buddha’s Avata saka vision, Tu Shun (557–640), the first ancestor of the Hua-yen School, introduces the bejeweled net-network of Indra. Here the universe is imagined as a vast net with a jewel at each node: This jewel can show the reflections of all the jewels at once — and just as this is so of this jewel, so it is of every other jewel: the reflection is multiplied and remultiplied over and over endlessly.²⁰ In this realm, things arise out of ongoing, dynamic interactions where everything is distinct without being separate. This vision, which is now often employed to link Buddhism and ecological thinking, has numerous theoretical and practical implications, all of which discourage dogmatic attachment to any one point of view. From this perspective, each viewpoint reveals just one facet of a whole available in its totality only to a Buddha.

As Zen Buddhism developed in China alongside the Hua-yen School, teachers borrowed from Avata saka imagery to articulate their insights. As D. T. Suzuki put it, When it [Zen] had to have recourse to intellection, it was a good friend of the Hua-yen philosophy.²¹ That philosophy enabled comprehension of a worldview where direct experience of rocks or bushes or people could intimate awareness of the Whole — one node in the net-network was said to contain universes. In Old Woodrat’s Stinky House (M&R 119–21), for example, the whole universe appears in a grain of scat.

In Mountains and Rivers, the Avata saka-s tra is quoted but once, though Hua-yen images and ideas are woven throughout. At the start of With This Flesh we read:

"Why should we cherish all sentient beings?

Because sentient beings

are the roots of the tree-of-awakening.

The Bodhisattvas and the Buddhas are the flowers and fruits.

Compassion is the water for the roots."

(M&R 75)²²

These words — appearing just before Señor Francisco de Ulloa arrives to conquer new Spain . . . cutting trees with his sword,/ uprooting grass,/ removing rocks from one place to another (M&R 75) — are spoken by Samantabhadra to Sudhana at the end of his aforementioned spiritual quest. Samantabhadra’s statement reminds the reader of the first epigraph in Mountains and Rivers, words from Tibet’s Saint Milarepa (1025–1135), another re-mover of rocks (see M&R 107–08, 128): The notion of Emptiness engenders Compassion (M&R n.p., 149).²³

The vision of both the Avata saka-s tra and Mountains and Rivers is predicated on this very notion of Emptiness ( nyat ), the keynote of all Buddhist understanding.²⁴ In public readings, Snyder has recited the Heart S tra in Sino-Japanese before reading and chanting through The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais (M&R 85–89, 161). The Heart S tra — the one-page condensation of the whole philosophy of transcendent wisdom (M&R 160–61 [see Appendix 1]) — reiterates the teaching that no thing has its own being but exists in an interdependent, interconnected constellation that causes phenomena to appear as they appear from moment to moment. Recurrent and various images of water in Mountains and Rivers offer one good example of this, for water’s form depends on the surrounding elements and conditions: Mist, clouds, rain, snow, glaciers, and flowing H2O all express the nature of water.

From the standpoint of Emptiness, everything flows: Streams and mountains never stay the same (M&R passim). Wood shifts shape: & make of sand a tree / of tree a board, of board (ideas!) / somebody’s rocking chair (M&R 36), just as in The Flowing where a cedar log . . . hopes / to . . . be / a great canoe (M&R 70). As Snyder writes in The Practice of the Wild:

Even a place has a kind of fluidity: it passes through space and time — ceremonial time in John Hanson Mitchell’s phrase. A place will have been conifers, then beech and elm. It will have been half riverbed, it will have been scratched and plowed by ice. And then it will be cultivated, paved, sprayed, dammed, graded, built up. But each is only for a while, and that will be just another set of lines on the palimpsest.

(PW 27)

Much of Mountains and Rivers is a hymn to Sarasvati, The Flowing One, Indian goddess of music, poetry, and intellectual pursuits.²⁵

Other images of Emptiness appear in references to dancing and coupling, especially in Cross-Legg’d (M&R 128–29), an echo of Snyder’s recognition of Tantra in the epigraph for this section as the application of the ‘interaction with no obstacles’ vision on a personal-human level. With the double mirrors in Bubbs Creek Haircut (M&R 33), the equivalence of items in The Market (M&R 47–51), and an homage to the sun in The Boat of a Million Years (M&R 39), Mountains and Rivers articulates a Hua-yen Buddhist’s vision. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith has observed, In order to understand Buddhists, one must look not at something called Buddhism, but at the universe, so far as possible through Buddhist eyes.²⁶ Mountains and Rivers invites us to do just that!

It is not surprising that Hua-yen images and ideas run throughout Snyder’s work, especially when one remembers that his formal Buddhist education took place in a Rinzai Zen seminary in Kyoto and that the founder of that order, Rinzai (Lin-chi [d. 867]), was indebted to this school.²⁷ Consider also that the Avata saka-s tra is a meditation on the Buddha Vairocana (Great Sun Buddha), who represents a cosmic source of light and life.²⁸ Vairocana and the universe are one:

Clearly know that all dharmas

Are without any self-essence at all;

To understand the nature of dharmas in this way

Is to see Vairocana.²⁹

Consider, further, that T r is Vairocana’s consort, and that Snyder is a devotee of Fud -my , a tough manifestation of the Vairocana Buddha incarnate in North America as Smokey the Bear.³⁰ Unlike Fud , Vairocana holds no sword, for, as D. T. Suzuki notes, he is the sword itself, sitting alone with all the worlds within himself.³¹ As a manifestation of Mind, Vairocana is that blade which sharpens to nothing.³²

III. FRAMING PARTS AND WHOLES

I will not repeat myself now, except to remind you that my theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

— Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925)

In Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen, Alan Watts explores the art of life as he plays with the idea of framing: Every framework sets up a restricted field of relationships. . . . A frame outlines a universe, a microcosm, and if the contents of the frame are to rank as art they must have the same quality of relationship to the whole and to each other as events in the great universe, the macrocosm of nature.³³ To make art, then, is to recognize and represent a certain quality of relationship between and within described parts and wholes. Watts considers the maker of photographs:

Now a skilled photographer can point his camera at almost any scene or object and create a marvelous composition by the way in which he frames and lights it. An unskilled photographer attempting the same thing creates only messes, for he does not know how to place the frame, the border of the picture, where it will be in relation to the contents. How eloquently this demonstrates that as soon as we introduce a frame anything does not go.³⁴

Art is an expression of that judgment or skill — intuition born of discipline, craft — which freezes the flow of ongoing activity and exposes an order that lingers in chaos.

Each of the thirty-nine poems in Mountains and Rivers presents a snapshot or set of snapshots, slices of the real from a particular point of view. Each poem arrests a pattern suggested by a title that enjoins a theme. Consider, for example, Macaques in the Sky:

Then — wha! — she leaps out in the air

the baby dangling from her belly,

they float there,

— she fetches up along another limb —

and settles in.

(M&R 114)³⁵

The poem — which poet Michael McClure thinks perfect (see his contribution to this volume) — goes on to make the analogy that we, like the dangling baby, hang on beneath the Milky Way, / mother of the heavens,/ crossing realm to realm / full of stars (M&R 115).

Macaques in the Sky is one of many reminders that Mountains and Rivers — all poetry and language itself, in fact — is an exercise of an analogical imagination that proceeds by way of metaphors. In Philosophy in a New Key, a book Snyder read carefully at Reed College while completing his 1951 bachelor’s thesis on a Haida myth, Susanne Langer, building on Philip Wegener’s observation that common-sense language is a repository of ‘faded metaphors,’ states: "If ritual is the cradle of language, metaphor is the law of its life. It is the force that makes it essentially relational, intellectual, forever showing up new, abstractable forms in reality, forever laying down a deposit of old, abstracted concepts in an increasing treasure of general words."³⁶ Langer’s thesis coincides nicely with the notion of Emptiness, for a word’s meaning will depend on its place in a changing, interdependent lexical network. Analogously, the meaning of any one part of Mountains and Rivers (including the visual art, epigraphs, end matter, and margins) will depend on its place in the interdependent network of the bounded whole.

In the net-network of this poem cycle, no one snapshot is necessarily more or less important than any other, though everything may be said to revolve around The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais (M&R 85–89), with Mt. Tam an analog of Mt. Meru at the center of Buddhist cosmology. As various parts of the book are encountered and compared over time (as one reads and rereads), their meaning and significance change. To juxtapose Old Bones (M&R 10) and Old Woodrat’s Stinky House (M&R 119–21), for example, enables insights that do not surface when Old Bones is set beside, say, Under the Hills Near the Morava River (M&R 96). The interplay of framed parts (and parts of parts) in view of the whole is endlessly illuminating.

IV. EXPLORING THIS VOLUME

Thus the movement of understanding is constantly from the whole to the part and back to the whole. Our task is to expand the unity of the understood meaning centrifugally. The harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding. The failure to achieve this harmony means that understanding has failed.

— H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960)

The transcribed talks, discussions, and essays that follow present a variety of ways to enter into Mountains and Rivers Without End. They are intended to inspire each reader’s own engagement, critical reflection, commentary on, and conversation with and about Snyder’s work. Some authors represented here were present throughout the course of our Mountains & Rivers Workshop meetings, some appeared once at the Stanford Humanities Center and made a presentation, and some traveled to campus from afar for the May 1998 Ethics & Aesthetics symposium and related events. Two of the contributors to this volume, Wendell Berry and Julia Martin, did not join us on campus.

Our book proper begins in the next chapter with a transcript of the 8 October 1997 public conversation with Gary Snyder, writer Carole Koda, and Jack Shoemaker, Snyder’s editor, publisher, and longtime friend. Carole Koda (1947–2006), Snyder’s wife (see Cross-Legg’d [M&R 128–29]), spoke briefly about the process of assembling her family history, published in a limited edition as Homegrown: Thirteen Brothers and Sisters, a Century in America.³⁷ Koda’s remarks were not recorded, but I hope her model presentation of one Japanese-American family story might become more readily available and widely read. With Snyder and Shoemaker’s discussion of the production of Mountains and Rivers, along with their responses to questions from those who assembled at East House that evening, our workshop was underway!

As a pioneer in the field of ethnopoetics, Snyder knows poetry lives through the spoken word.³⁸ With this in mind, the poet performed a major portion of Mountains and Rivers before a full house in Kresge Auditorium on the Stanford campus the following night. In his introduction to this 9 October reading he remarked: The one complaint one hears from students most about poetry is, ‘I don’t understand it.’ Well, who ever said you have to understand it? Only the high school teachers say that. [Audience laughter.] What a mistake in teaching poetry. You don’t have to understand it, you just have to listen to it, let it sink in, come back to it, come back to it again — forget it if it doesn’t do anything for you — but taste the flavors. This reading (the program notes for which are available as Appendix 2 of this volume) was, then, for many, a first taste of what would become an ongoing painted-rice-cake feast.

On Saturday, 11 October, everyone was invited to join a ritual circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais, a practice encouraged by the poem and its refrain: Walking on walking,/ under foot earth turns./ Streams and mountains never stay the same (M&R passim). While following the route around the mountain and reciting chants found in the poem at the very center of Mountains and Rivers (M&R 85–89), workshoppers began to get acquainted. While walking, members set a foundation for exploring interconnections between bodily senses, poetics, and place.³⁹

Then, over the course of three academic quarters, we convened for fifteen workshop presentations and discussions with scholars from a variety of fields, including Japanese N drama, Chinese poetics, Buddhist studies, art history, hydrology, and American literature. We also met regularly to read and discuss parts of the poem line by line. This simple exercise yielded startling insights as our colleagues illuminated obscure passages with reference to their own knowledge and experience, often surprising even themselves! In May 1998, the Department of Art hosted a fine-art photography exhibition in the Nathan Cummings Art Gallery by David Robertson, Mattering Without End: For Gary Snyder and the Community on the San Juan Ridge. Nanao Sakaki arrived from Japan for a Friday poetry reading with Gary at the Stanford Bookstore, and the Ethics & Aesthetics symposium convened on Saturday, 16 May. The workshop concluded with another circumTam (as it is often called) with about eighty people on the trail, including Gary Snyder. We enjoyed steady participation throughout the year with members of the local community and students and faculty from Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Davis in attendance. In addition, we offered a five-week course on Mountains and Rivers through Stanford Continuing Studies.

In the first section of what follows, Hearing Native Voices, three essays touch upon the theme of the vocation of the poet as someone who works with and represents the range of voices that resonate upon the land. As a residential faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center for the duration of our Mountains & Rivers Workshop, Tim Dean (chapter 2) composed an essay showing how the poem’s creation of an impersonal voice enables the work of art to engage ethical questions concerning nonhuman nature and our relation with it. With reference to shamanism as a model for understanding impersonalist poetics, Professor Dean makes a distinction between speaking on behalf of and speaking through and investigates implications of his observation that "more than one third of the poems in Mountains and Rivers Without End close with somebody else’s [not the poet’s] voice."

Jim Dodge (chapter 3) draws on Carl Jung’s scheme of modes of perception to appreciate how Snyder’s poem is a long meditation on the manifold possibilities of communion with the natural world and offers a ‘model of mind’ for such imaginative explorations. Dodge also touches upon Snyder’s ability to get past his self and evoke a shared identity with the landscape and other beings through the agency of poetic imagination. He also celebrates the ways Snyder’s encyclopedic mind informs a poem of complex philosophical and mythic intelligence. As for his Dharma shoot-out at the OK Dairy reference, each reader will have to determine for him- or herself what Dodge is really getting at here.

David Abram’s contribution (chapter 4) approaches the work as a long cycle of journey poems . . . primarily a bundle of . . . songlines, of dreaming tracks such as those of the central Australian aboriginal peoples who are in touch with the Dreamtime where "the land itself dreams, continually. In this record of his spoken presentation, Abram claims that for all of the rich scholarship and the density of literary allusions in Mountains and Rivers, one of the things this poem cycle is doing is renewing oral culture." Abram recommends that we learn from the page in order to leave it behind and inhabit more responsibly an unmediated, more-than-human world.

In the next section, Making Pacific Rim Connections, we learn from Katsunori Yamazato (chapter 5), the doyen of Snyder studies in Japan, and Nanao Sakaki (chapter 6), whose poetry has, as Snyder observes, the flavor of oral literature with its riddles, sayings, fables, and formulaic devices; little ways of unfolding narrative that go back millennia.⁴⁰ In a beautifully crafted paper, Professor Yamazato presents his research on ways Snyder’s study of Japanese N theater informs both Mountains and Rivers and his search on a planetary scale for myths and wisdom traditions that will bring about a new humanistic vision. Nanao’s contribution frames his reading of three poignant and playful poems with parts of his life story relevant to the theme of "Mountains and Rivers and Japan." This chapter concludes with comments by Snyder on how his experience in Japan and with Nanao has inspired and enriched the quest for a new humanity that, as Yamazato points out, is a keynote of his life and art.

In the third section, Exploring Poetic Roots, we are treated to presentations by three eminent American scholar-poets: Wendell Berry, Robert Hass, and Michael McClure. Here we publish Mr. Berry’s interim thoughts on Mountains and Rivers, written soon after he received it from the poet late in 1996.⁴¹ Berry (chapter 7) is especially interested in ways the poem puts everything in motion: Travel, in fact and metaphor, is its formal principle. He compares Snyder’s perspective with John Milton’s, whose world was created at the beginning, once and for all: In Mr. Snyder’s version, we are living in a world that is still and always being made; human history is not being made ‘on’ or ‘in’ the world, but is involved by intricate patterns of influence and causation in the continuous making of the world. This is an extremely important difference — morally, practically, and prosodically.

On 2 February 1998, Professor Robert Hass (chapter 8) drove from Berkeley to Stanford amidst a raging storm. When the former U.S. Poet Laureate’s talk began at 4:15, lights in the Humanities Center Annex were strangely dim. With blinds wide open, we proceeded until it became too dark to read. Following Hass’s capsule history of the American long poem, we walked in the downpour to Mariposa House where, in a well-lit setting, he explicated passages from Mountains and Rivers, illuminating aspects of Snyder’s creative process and demonstrating how to read and proceed by clues. Hass shared that as a graduate student at Stanford he arranged his own counter-university course on Snyder’s Myths & Texts, an occasion for Snyder’s first visit to Stanford in 1965. The storm continued during dinner with Hass that evening as Palo Alto streets turned into roily rivers. The license plate on the car ahead of me as I slowly headed home read: KP WLKNG. What a fitting way to end a most memorable day that produced an engaging and essential contribution to this volume!

When Michael McClure (chapter 9) came to visit on 9 February 1998, he related his reading and rereading of Snyder’s work to the many associations it conjures from the poet’s own life as a littérateur and student of Dharma. Here McClure suggests we approach Mountains and Rivers as "a medicine bundle in the guise of autobiography, with