|
|
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup.", Jun 20 2001
Amidst the poetry of the Sixties, Gary Snyder's early poems stood out as something very special, and are still very special. In contrast to the obscure and convoluted writings of an assortment of neurasthenic, super-sophisticated, and compulsive scribblers, types so totally and utterly wrapped up in themselves that they completely overlooked that insignificant thing hovering outside their window (ordinary folks call it the universe), and whose work goes unread because it is largely unreadable, Snyder's work came as a revelation.Here was a poet who was very, very different - a poet who, far from being totally wrapped up in himself, was instead wrapped up in the universe. He appeals to us because, being himself wholly in touch with reality, he helps us get back in touch with reality ourselves. Ego is put firmly in its place, opening up a space in which the myriad things can come forward and announce themselves. The secret of how Snyder was able to do this, of how he was able to bring us, not yet another of those obscure, tortured and anguished sensibilities who were and still are so thick on the ground, but who brought instead a sane and wholesome vision of the world, is all there in the very first poem of RIPRAP, 'Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout' : "Down valley a smoke haze / Three days heat, after five days rain / Pitch glows on the fir-cones / Across rocks and meadows / Swarms of new flies. // I cannot remember things I once read / A few friends, but they are in cities. / Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup / Looking down for miles / Through high still air" (p.9). Where did Snyder learn how to do this? The answer is that it could only have been in China. The poem is the perfect expression, in English, of that commonsensical attitude that grounds itself firmly in realities; that keeps ego firmly under control; that practises a reasonable, as opposed to an excessive, use of reason; and that is commonly found in the best Chinese and Zen poets. To translate Zen-man Han Shan, Snyder penetrated so deeply into the spirit of Han Shan that he succeeded in becoming a sort of American Han Shan himself. The result is a poetry not of coteries, of academic and intellectual circles, of super-sophisticated and pretentious Ivy League graduates, but poems that have real meaning and that can be read with understanding and enjoyment by anyone The poetry of RIPRAP and COLD MOUNTAIN, like the poetry of many Chinese and Japanese poets, is a wholesome poetry, a poetry that cleanses and refreshes the sensibility, and that transports us from the technoid madness of our own chaotic world to something more human and hence more meaningful. There's real sustenance for the spirit in these poems. They're like "drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup." Readers would be unwise to pass them by.
|
