Poem As Work-Place: Gary Snyder & # 8217 ; s Ecological Poeticss Essay, Research Paper
Nick Selby
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the American poet Gary Snyder the verse form is a work-place. The thought of work, I shall reason
throughout this paper, is cardinal to Snyder & # 8217 ; s ecological poetics because it allows him to
throw expressed attending on to the act of & # 8216 ; composing the land & # 8217 ; . This is clear from his
well- known environmental concerns, and his work with assorted ecological undertakings in
America since the 1960ss. Critics have therefore tended to see his poetics as an averment of
the interconnection of all things that is both Buddhist and ecological. Harmonizing to
Helen Vendler Snyder is better known as an & # 8216 ; ecological militant & # 8217 ; than poet, but I
shall reason that his poetics is an ecological poetics: it is the site for Acts of the Apostless of reading
that are ecological in their effort to read land and verse form as one. I want to propose,
nevertheless, that Snyder & # 8217 ; s ecological poetics discovers dichotomies & # 8212 ; land versus verse form, human
versus nature, self versus other & # 8212 ; even as it seeks to overwrite them in what Snyder
footings the & # 8216 ; existent work & # 8217 ; of incorporating ego, society and, most crucially, environment.
Whilst this marks his challenge to the political orientation of mainstream America, it besides marks the
extent to which his poesy is a merchandise of deeply ingrained forms of American civilization.
Snyder & # 8217 ; s poetic work ethic, this paper argues, is the land upon which anxiousnesss about
the obliteration of personal and cultural individualities, anxiousnesss at the bosom of American
idea, are worked through. This is because the dichotomies which Snyder & # 8217 ; s work expose
bespeak a troubled relationship to the land, they discover faultlines that are profoundly
ingrained in American civilization. Snyder & # 8217 ; s ecological poetics recognises that these can no
longer be sublimated into romantic myths of the land, but must be seen as the hints of
dissentious self-division at the bosom of the American mind.
The verse form & # 8216 ; I went into the Maverick Bar & # 8217 ; from
Snyder & # 8217 ; s Pulitzer Prize-winning aggregation Turtle Island ( 1974 ) bears the hints of such
anxiousnesss in its nostalgic remembrance of 1950ss America. To read the verse form & # 8217 ; s gap
lines is to come in an seemingly hostile environment, a propertyless saloon in
& # 8216 ; Farmington, New Mexico & # 8217 ; . Not merely does the verse form & # 8217 ; s first-person storyteller tell us that
his & # 8216 ; long hair was tucked under a cap / [ and ] I & # 8217 ; vitamin D left the earring in the auto & # 8217 ; ( lines
5-6 ) as a step of his sense of disaffection from the other people in the saloon, but the
waitress & # 8217 ; inquiry & # 8216 ; where are you from? & # 8217 ; ( line 10 ) is spookily equivocal, made more
threatening by its being set against the syntactically unusual & # 8216 ; Two cowpunchers did
horseplay / by the pool tables & # 8217 ; ( lines 7-8 ) . Interestingly, such anxiousness consequences from
the fact that the saloon is seen as a topographic point of leisure, non work. The cowpuncher & # 8216 ; play & # 8217 ; , as
does a country-and-western set, and a twosome acquire up to dance. Against ( or within ) this
puting the storyteller remembers working in Oregon in the 1950ss:
They [ the dancing twosome ] held each other like in
High School dances
in
the 1950ss
I recalled when I worked in the forests
and
the bars of Madras, Orgeon.
That short-haried joy and raggedness & # 8212 ;
America
& # 8212 ; your stupidity.
I could about love you once more.
( lines 15-21 )
The storyteller & # 8217 ; s sense of his relationship to
America, though fraught and equivocal like the sentence structure of these lines, is one which he
seeks to clear up through his relationship to the work he one time did in the forests and bars of
Oregon. If his disaffection seems to border a challenge to the complacent America portrayed
in this saloon, it is besides seen to be the merchandise of imagination traditionally thought of as
& # 8216 ; deeply & # 8217 ; American. Therefore, although the verse form specifically recalls the 1950ss & # 8212 ; itself
a period fraught by inquiries of Americanness & # 8212 ; its nostalgia is a complex site that
brings together a series of typically American readings of the land as a work-place. It is
in this relationship between work, land and individuality that the verse form is able to play with
assorted American character. In the infinite of these few lines, and because of their
indefiniteness of mention, we encounter the Beat foreigner of the 1950ss ( the apostrophe
to America & # 8217 ; s & # 8216 ; stupidity & # 8217 ; leads to a declaration of commitment that sounds strikingly
similar to the Allen Ginsberg of Howl and Other Poems ) ; a & # 8216 ; joy and raggedness & # 8217 ; which
callbacks Walt Whitman as & # 8216 ; one of the roughs & # 8217 ; ; and a romanticising of work in America & # 8217 ; s
Northwest that recalls a mythology of rugged backwoodsmans who see the land as a infinite for
the testing of single and national individualities.
The assortment and complexness of such characters mean
that the verse form does non show Snyder & # 8217 ; s & # 8216 ; unbecoming self-importance & # 8217 ; as David A. Carpenter
claims, nor does it to the full pull off to carry through, as Bert Almon believes, the & # 8216 ; existent
work & # 8217 ; of turning America back into & # 8216 ; ” Turtle Island, ” the Aboriginal name
for the continent & # 8217 ; . What we do encounter, though, is a verse form that works by turning back
( apparently without sarcasm ) to a & # 8216 ; existent & # 8217 ; experience of America as that which finally
validates individuality. Therefore, in the concluding lines of the verse form, we witness a re-inscription of
establishing ideological premises about America, 1s that write of the American land as a
topographic point for a fabulous regeneration of ego:
under
the tough old stars & # 8212 ;
In the shadow of the bluffs
I
came back to myself
To the existent work, to
“ What
is to be done. ”
{ lines 23-27 )
Myths of the New World as Eden, or as God & # 8217 ; s
plantation, as a virgin land, or the land of chance have all sought ( paradoxically,
possibly ) a manner of composing America into world. In merely such a mythic infinite we see
Snyder & # 8217 ; s storyteller & # 8216 ; rediscovering & # 8217 ; his & # 8216 ; existent ego & # 8217 ; . The & # 8216 ; existent work & # 8217 ; of this
verse form, so, involves acknowledging the forms of traditional imagination that bend America as
workplace into America as verse form.
The form of designation between verse form, land
and work is already good established in Snyder & # 8217 ; s foremost two published aggregations, Riprap
( 1959 ) and Myths and Texts ( 1960 ) . His & # 8216 ; Statement on Poetics & # 8217 ; for Donald
Allen & # 8217 ; s influential anthology The New American Poetry ( 1960 ) makes this clear:
I & # 8217 ; ve merely late come to gain that the
beat of my verse forms follow the beat of the physical work I & # 8217 ; m making and life I & # 8217 ; m taking
at any given clip & # 8211 ; – which makes the music in my caput which creates the line.
However, it is in the really accent upon the
physical, upon the effort to land poesy in the & # 8216 ; existent work & # 8217 ; of the universe, that
Snyder & # 8217 ; s texts show a deep anxiousness about seeing the land as verse form. This is non merely an
anxiousness of American poetics, but one which lies at the bosom of American idea because
it is coupled with anxiousnesss about the effacement of individuality within, and by, the land.
Such anxiousnesss unwrap typically American concerns in the manner in which their focal point is
transferred on to inquiries of the textual. I disagree, hence, with Lawrence Buell who
contends that an attending to the textual in American civilization leads to a dissociation from
the land. Whereas Buell argues that the marker of the spread between universe and text
efficaciously silences any environmental concerns, my point is that the anxiousness American
civilization shows in its marker of this spread is declarative of the anxiety of its
environmental imaginativeness. The & # 8216 ; existent work & # 8217 ; of Snyder & # 8217 ; s ecological poetics, so,
involves the self-contradictory acknowledgment that reading the land and verse form as one is to asseverate
their discontinuity, it is to recognize the spread between civilization and nature that any
representation of the land as a work-place implies. To see American Literature generated
from a & # 8216 ; sequence of religious appropriations of, and by, the land & # 8217 ; , as Marshall
Walker claims, is to tag how concern for the American land has ever, in American
thought from colonial times onwards, been marked by the turning of that land into a scene
of authorship. The considerable anxiousnesss about selfhood and individuality that are evidenced in
American texts by and large, and in Snyder & # 8217 ; s poesy peculiarly, therefore unwrap and compose
over anxiousnesss about the land as the cultural determiner of American individuality.
This helps to explicate why Snyder & # 8217 ; s poesy is
normally read as a reasonably untroubled speculation on the airy relationship between
environments of work, head and land. Typically, his poesy is described as one that
& # 8216 ; integrat [ Es ] & # 8216 ; , in the words of Patrick Murphy, & # 8216 ; the modus operandis of physical work
with the life of the head & # 8217 ; . What this paper seeks to dispute is the false easiness with
which such integrating takes topographic point. I shall reason, by looking at Riprap and Myths
and Texts, that Snyder & # 8217 ; s poesy works to do troubled those impressions of lyrical
voice, imagist lucidity and the verse form as environment that are assumed & # 8216 ; natural & # 8217 ; to his
airy poetics. Indeed, it will be seen that the classs of & # 8216 ; the natural & # 8217 ; and
& # 8216 ; the airy & # 8217 ; which have troubled Anglocentric American idea since the Puritans,
and were the peculiar focal point of concern for the romanticism of Emerson and Thoreau,
stay troublesome to Snyder.
The gap verse form of Riprap,
& # 8216 ; Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout & # 8217 ; , clearly announces the book & # 8217 ; s major subject:
an geographic expedition of the relationship between land ( flower stalk ) and ego that is established
through work. The poem derives from Snyder & # 8217 ; s experience working as a fire-watcher at
Sourdough mountain in Washington State during the summer of 1953. Critics have tended to
read it as a verse form of airy experience in imitation of the classical Chinese poesy
that Snyder was analyzing at this clip. What these readings forget is that it is a
work-poem. Work as a sentinel depends upon ocular experience, on the act of looking. The
storyteller is therefore defined by his relationship to the landscape because of his work of
reading it for marks of fire. This relationship is embodied in the verse form & # 8217 ; s construction, with
its first half depicting the landscape and its 2nd half the & # 8216 ; I & # 8217 ; within that
landscape. The work of the verse form lies, hence, in its conveying together of land and
ego:
Down valley a fume haze
Three yearss heat, after five yearss rain
Pitch freshnesss on the fir-cones
Across stones and hayfields
Droves of new flies.
I can non retrieve things I one time read
A few friends, but they are in metropoliss.
Drinking cold snow-water from a Sn cup
Looking down for stat mis
Through high still air
The verse form & # 8217 ; s attending is upon the work of mediation, or as I shall develop subsequently, upon
an thought of exchange. Not merely is this implicit in the verse form & # 8217 ; s signifier but in its imagination. And
in both instances the repetitive demand of reading the verse form is that we see it as a work-place.
In formal footings the verse form works because of the manner
in which the seemingly direct description of the landscape in its first half
( & # 8216 ; Down valley & # 8230 ; & # 8217 ; ) mediates and is mediated by the regard of the storyteller ( who is
& # 8216 ; Looking down for stat mis & # 8217 ; ) in the verse form & # 8217 ; s 2nd half. But that regard, his reading of
the landscape, is the sentinel & # 8217 ; s work. And in footings of imagination the fume haze, heat haze,
and teeming flies in the verse form & # 8217 ; s first half alert the attending because they look like
marks of fire, like fume. The work of reading these marks is hence important, and
determines the procedure of reading the verse form. This is seen both in the manner that & # 8216 ; smoke
haze & # 8217 ; is, upon farther reading, shown to be the consequence, non of a wood fire, but of
& # 8216 ; Three yearss heat, after five yearss rain & # 8217 ; , and besides in the fact that the concluding
smoke-like image of the stanza turns out to be & # 8216 ; Swarms of new flies & # 8217 ; . Our work of
reading the verse form is therefore correspondent to the work it describes.
This is besides apparent in the line & # 8216 ; Flip
freshnesss on the fir-cones & # 8217 ; . The line is non merely at the physical Centre of the stanza. It
balances & # 8212 ; mediates between & # 8212 ; the two fume images because it discovers the verse form & # 8217 ; s
cardinal form of imagination. The line & # 8217 ; s image, in which the natural is closely accompanied to,
or read, is besides an image that depicts such an act of reading as, ineluctably, an act of
mediation. The & # 8216 ; fir-cones & # 8217 ; are non seen straight, but through the medium of glowing
pitch. This, in bend, alerts the reader to the work of the verse form itself whereby the
landscape is ever mediated through Acts of the Apostless of reading. The vale is seen through haze ;
& # 8216 ; stones and hayfields & # 8217 ; are seen trough droves of flies ; and, significantly, the verse form & # 8217 ; s
concluding image looks down at the environment environing Sourdough mountain & # 8216 ; Through
high still air & # 8217 ; . Clear as this air may look, it is still a medium through which the
landscape must be read. Even the storyteller & # 8217 ; s seemingly clear vision of the landscape is a
affair of mediation between the human and the natural. Thus the work of the verse form agencies
that we see the landscape through the verse form merely as the storyteller sees the landscape through
the & # 8216 ; high still air & # 8217 ; .
The verse form suggests, hence, that an seemingly
airy experience of the land is marked, in fact, non by lucidity and transparence in
the relation between the human and the natural, but instead by a sense of that relationship
as one of ineluctable mediation. Always, the verse form suggests, the land must be worked upon,
it must be read. Snyder & # 8217 ; s poetics of the existent, so, both throws attending upon the spread
between text and universe, and seeks to get rid of that spread through the work of reading. Therefore,
although the act of reading is the verse form & # 8217 ; s commanding figure of speech, its existent work, such an act
does non signal a coming back to oneself so much as an dying acknowledgment that selfhood
and individuality are continually effaced by the land. At the minute of its realization in the
verse form, the storyteller & # 8217 ; s & # 8216 ; I & # 8217 ; is obliterated, forgotten, even as it reads itself into the
land and the text: & # 8216 ; I can non retrieve things I one time read / A few friends, but they
are in metropoliss & # 8217 ; .
Such minutes, in which the speech production topic is
obliterated even as it speaks, have normally been read in American Literature ( and in
Snyder ) as minutes of airy transcendency. This consequences from the romantic bequest of
Emerson, and has meant that the relationship between the human and the natural is seen as
airy, direct, a crystalline integrating of ego and existence. Famously this discoveries
look in the transition & # 8212 ; harmonizing to Harold Bloom & # 8216 ; the most American transition
that will of all time be written & # 8212 ; from Emerson & # 8217 ; s essay & # 8216 ; Nature & # 8217 ; ( 1836 ) when, for a minute
on Boston Common, the ego becomes all-seeing:
Standing on the bare land, & # 8212 ; my caput bathed by
the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite infinite, & # 8212 ; all mean self-importance vanishes. I become a
transparent orb ; I am nil ; I see all ; the currents of the Universal Being
circulate through me & # 8230 ;
Cary Wolfe points to the paradox at the bosom of
this transition, observing that here the & # 8216 ; pinnacle of selfhood & # 8230 ; disappear [ s ] at the really
minute of its attainment & # 8217 ; . Indicatively American, such a self-contradictory economic system of the ego
may look, ab initio, to run likewise in Snyder & # 8217 ; s poesy. Histories that situate
Snyder & # 8217 ; s poesy, for illustration, in the post-Poundian objectivist & # 8216 ; school & # 8217 ; emphasis that
its lyrical consequence is powerful exactly because, paradoxically, it witnesses an
Emersonian annihilation of & # 8216 ; all mean self-importance & # 8217 ; . It therefore seems to ordain the
& # 8216 ; acquiring rid of the lyrical intervention of the person as self-importance & # 8217 ; by which Charles
Olson characterises nonsubjective poetry. However, the airy minute for Emerson & # 8217 ; s
& # 8216 ; I/Eye & # 8217 ; works through an annihilation of any sense of the land itself as existent. This
is clearly in blunt contrast to Snyder & # 8217 ; s poetics of the land as work-place.
If Emerson & # 8217 ; s vision seems & # 8216 ; most American & # 8217 ; it
is because the relationship to the land it describes is one of direct exchange
between ego and other, interior and outer natures. The image of the & # 8216 ; transparent
eyeball & # 8217 ; does non depict a working of the land but a transcending of it. Emerson & # 8217 ; s
symptomatically American minute hence portrays a refusal, or at least an inability, to
read the land: Boston Common becomes an indecipherable space page, & # 8216 ; bare land & # 8217 ; . Thus,
whereas Snyder & # 8217 ; s poetics of work Markss a troubled exchange between land and text,
Emerson & # 8217 ; s minute of airy transcendency signals a religious appropriation of the land
that turns its regard off from that really land. What seems quintessentially American about
this is the manner in which anxiousnesss about America & # 8217 ; s ideological foundation, the colonial
appropriation of the land, are expressed as anxiousnesss about the annihilation of the ego.
From its very beginnings, the authorship of America has sought to reassign issues of the
working of the land onto issues of selfhood. An early illustration of this is John Smith & # 8217 ; s
pronouncement of 1608, directed to the firs
Ts Jamestown colonists, ‘he who doesn’t work,
doesn & # 8217 ; t eat & # 8217 ; . The existent procedure of the colonial working of the land is here disguised, in
Smith & # 8217 ; s work ethic, as a discourse of matter-of-fact self-preservation. For both Smith and
Emerson the land is non existent, it is a clean mythic infinite, a tabula rasa, upon which are
written the battles of American selfhood. The typically American, and romantic, gesture
encoded in their work, so, seems to be the turning of the land into a text, furthermore an
American text.
Emerson makes this explicit in his 1844 essay
& # 8216 ; The Poet & # 8217 ; . Once once more the exchange between verse form and land is airy, a affair of
visual perception: & # 8216 ; America & # 8217 ; , he writes, & # 8216 ; is a verse form in our eyes ; its ample geographics
dazzles the imaginativeness & # 8217 ; ( emphases mine ) . This vision of America, its geographics, is
dazing to the imaginativeness because any existent sense of the land is subsumed by the desire
to see that land as a site of cultural exchange, as the land upon which the work of
literary patriotism can take topographic point. But such a transmutation of the natural environment
into a cultural and textual one efficaciously displaces the sort of troubled concern with
linguistic communication & # 8217 ; s representative power that, as I shall reason, becomes apparent in the work of
reading Snyder & # 8217 ; s poesy. For this ground, reading Snyder through Emersonian theoretical accounts of
airy transcendency, theoretical accounts that finally fail to read the land, is to unread him,
to presume the verse form is the land and non a site for a working of the land.
A more utile theoretical account for reading Snyder & # 8217 ; s poesy
is Henry David Thoreau & # 8217 ; s Walden ( 1854 ) , a text, furthermore, that Snyder read during
his clip as firewatcher at Sourdough mountain in 1953. Both Snyder and Thoreau trace the
working of the land in an effort to review American political orientation, to reground its work
ethic. I shall reason, nevertheless, that, in the instance of Snyder, to see the verse form as a
work-place is to unwrap the extent to which his poetics is every bit much a merchandise of deeply
deep-rooted American concerns as it is a challenge to them. In fact, it is as a work-place
that the verse form becomes a site for the production of a specifically American & # 8212 ; though non
Emersonian & # 8212 ; reading of & # 8216 ; the natural & # 8217 ; . What Thoreau and Snyder portion, in such an act
of reading, is a troubled sense of the spread between word and universe that stems from deep
seated anxiousnesss about the turning of the American land into a text.
For Thoreau such anxiousnesss are expressed in his
misgiving of the procedure of exchange by which American civilization of the mid-nineteenth
century was progressively implicated in the demands of the market-place. His ill will to
the discourses of capital emerging at this clip consequences from his romantic sense that any
true and meaningful relationship to the natural is obliterated by an economic system of symbolic
representation:
I have & # 8230 ; learned that trade expletives everything
it handles ; and though you trade in messages from Eden, the whole expletive of trade
attaches to the concern.
The & # 8216 ; expletive of trade & # 8217 ; is that it mediates the
existent, replacing it with a system of exchange that clouds our vision of the land we
inhabit:
I perceive that we dwellers of New England
populate this average life that we do because our vision does non perforate the surface of
things. We think that that is which appears to be. If a adult male should walk through this town
and see merely the world, where, believe you, would the “ Mill-Dam ” travel to?
The cardinal concern subdivision of Concord, the
Mill-dam, is therefore, harmonizing to Thoreau, a fiction of exchange that displaces the existent by
the symbolic. Though Thoreau may try to & # 8216 ; live intentionally & # 8217 ; at Walden Pond in
order & # 8216 ; to look merely the indispensable facts of life & # 8217 ; , this effort is underscored by an
anxiousness that arises from the acknowledgment that such & # 8216 ; facts & # 8217 ; are accessible merely
through the system of symbolic representation that is linguistic communication. Thus the subsiding of the
land becomes, itself, a figure of speech for the battle to grok world. & # 8216 ; Let us settle
ourselves, & # 8217 ; Thoreau writes
and work and lodge our pess downward through the
clay and slush of sentiment & # 8230 ; till we come to a difficult underside and stones in topographic point, which we
can name world, and state, This is, and no error.
Snyder & # 8217 ; s try to render the ( work ) environment
as a fabulous infinite means that his poetic attending is likewise cast onto the
problematics of textual representation. This can be seen in the undermentioned transition from
& # 8216 ; Piute Creek & # 8217 ; , another verse form from the Riprap aggregation. Though this verse form offers an
seemingly direct description of the landscape, it is controlled by a sense of the spread
between word and universe. The verse form is therefore haunted by loss, by the manner in which the existent
land is obliterated by the text that seeks to stand for it:
All the debris that goes with being human Drops
off, difficult stone wavers Even the heavy nowadays seems to neglect This bubble of a bosom. Wordss
and books Like a little brook off a high shelf Gone in the dry air. ( Riprap, p. 8 )
As the verse form continues, it envisages such a
dropping off of human debris to be portion of the procedure described by Thoreau of puting
& # 8216 ; stones in topographic point & # 8217 ; , of fighting towards a sense of grounded world. But the lucidity
of selfhood and the heed of head that seem to be produced by this procedure are,
nevertheless, less the consequence of an apprehensiveness of world, than the merchandise of a
bewilderment of the relationship between the human and the natural. The verse form nowadayss
this relationship as portion of a common and airy system of exchange whereby the ego
and the land read each other
A clear, attentive head Has no significance but that
Which sees is genuinely seen. No 1 loves stone, yet we are here. ( Riprap, p. 8 )
The trouble of these lines prevarications in their
dramatising of the problematics of stand foring the land in/as a verse form. Just where
& # 8216 ; here & # 8217 ; may be is capable to the slickness of a poetic linguistic communication that struggles to
negotiate between the actual and the metaphorical. Here, in this poetic landscape that is
besides a topographic point of the head, where even & # 8216 ; difficult stone wavers & # 8217 ; , the trouble of settling
ourselves and non misidentifying world becomes unsurmountable.
Myths and Texts is generated from a
similar sense of the abruptness of lingual exchange, wherein & # 8216 ; words and
books & # 8217 ; become symbolic items of an object universe of & # 8216 ; little brook [ s ] & # 8216 ; and & # 8216 ; high
shelf [ s ] & # 8216 ; . Its opening line & # 8212 ; & # 8216 ; The forenoon star is non a star & # 8217 ; & # 8212 ; is troubled by the
same disjuncture between visual aspect and world that troubled Thoreau & # 8217 ; s try to see
beneath the surface of Concord & # 8217 ; s concern Centre. As an expressed mention to Walden & # 8217 ; s
shuting sentence & # 8216 ; The Sun is but a morning-star & # 8217 ; , the line introduces a text that,
like Thoreau & # 8217 ; s, mythicises the American land as a workplace. Whilst, in so making, Myths
and Texts describes how the work of logging destroys the land, it besides effaces that
really land by interchanging it for the symbolic economic system of a text. The text has no significance but
that which is generated from its relationship, non to the land, but to other texts. Therefore,
in & # 8216 ; Logging & # 8217 ; , the first subdivision of Myths and Texts, the devastation of the
& # 8216 ; forests around Seattle & # 8217 ; by & # 8216 ; San Francisco 2? 4s & # 8217 ; ( Myths and Texts, p. 4 )
comes to mean a wider anxiousness about American civilization itself as destructive because it
is framed by two other histories of how development of the land leads to cultural
obliteration.
The first of these texts, a scriptural citation
from the book of Exodus 34:13, seems here to picture the devastation of the wood as an
act of profanation: & # 8216 ; But ye shall destruct their communion tables, / break their images, and cut
down their Grovess & # 8217 ; ( Myths and Texts, p. 3 ) . Snyder & # 8217 ; s sarcasm, though, is acute. In
its original context the words are an injunction organizing portion of God & # 8217 ; s compact with Moses
and His chosen people: if the land is to be a promised land so its original dwellers,
their rites, and their civilization must be destroyed. This formative myth of the West, which
resonates so strongly with Anglocentric myths of America as the promised land, is followed
in the verse form by a description of the destructive effects of working the land in the antediluvian
East: & # 8216 ; The ancient woods of China logged / and the hills slipped into the Yellow
Sea & # 8217 ; ( Myths and Texts, p. 3 ) . The work of logging therefore becomes important, an
image for the precariousness of American civilization as a whole, because through it the land
is mythicised as a text of loss:
San Francisco 2? 4s
were the forests around
Seattle:
Person killed and person built, a house,
a wood, wrecked or raised
All America hung on a hook
& A ; burned by work forces, in their
ain congratulations.
Such an lettering of the land betrays the
desire to turn the land into that which it is non, a text. Therefore, the saving of the
land as a text, as a review of an economic system based on the commodification of that
land, means that the land itself is obliterated within the text & # 8217 ; s ain symbolic economic system.
The ecological catastrophe upon which all America bents like a hook, and out of which
Snyder & # 8217 ; s poetics is generated, is, paradoxically, one that can be apprehended merely through
metaphor, the exchange of text for land, word for universe. Here, so, Snyder & # 8217 ; s poetics
forces a confrontation with loss as the status of linguistic communication itself whereby the mark is
substituted, exchanged, for an object already lost.
That Myths and Texts is acutely cognizant of
linguistic communication & # 8217 ; s lateness, of what Jacques Derrida has described as the manner in which & # 8216 ; the
mark is & # 8230 ; put in topographic point of the thing itself & # 8217 ; , is evident in the shutting transition of the
& # 8216 ; Logging & # 8217 ; subdivision. The spread, Derrida & # 8217 ; s l & # 8217 ; ? cart, between the universe and its
representation is here anticipated by an imagination of splitting and rupture in which the
bifurcation of the natural and the manufactured is predicated upon loss, a loss of the
land that besides witnesses the loss of an imperium:
Pine slumbers, cedar splits straight
Flowers crack the paving.
Pa-ta Shan-jen
( A painter who watched the Ming autumn )
Lived in a tree:
“ The coppice
May paint the mountains and watercourses
Though the district is lost ”
( & # 8216 ; Loging 15, & # 8217 ; Myths and
Texts, p. 16 )
The verse form & # 8217 ; s acknowledgment of this spread leads to the
effort, in its 2nd subdivision & # 8216 ; Hunting & # 8217 ; , to reconnect with the Earth through the
description and poetic passage of the ritualized observations of the huntsman and the
priest-doctor. Though this recalls Thoreau & # 8217 ; s description of huntsmans as exposing a
& # 8216 ; peculiar sense [ of being ] a portion of Nature themselves & # 8217 ; , it besides envisages the
integrating of ego and other, the homo within Nature, through a shamanistic
reinhabitation of the land which the verse form describes as the & # 8216 ; Hatching [ of ] a new myth & # 8217 ;
( Myths and Texts, p. 19 ) . Again, the land is mythicised as a text of distinctness
and loss, a site in which the colonial imperative underpinning American civilization is played
out. This is felt starkly in the undermentioned transition with the verse form & # 8217 ; s try to call, and
thereby consume, the things of the land:
Now I & # 8217 ; ll besides state what nutrient
we lived on so:
Mescal, yucca fruit, pinon, acorns,
prickly pear, sumac berry, cactus,
spurge, drop-seed, lip fern, maize,
mountain workss, wild murphies, mesquite,
roots of yucca, tree-yucca flowers, chokecherries,
Acanthocereus tetragonus cactus, honey of the ground-bee,
honey, honey of the humblebee,
mulberries, angle-pod, salt, berries,
berries of the single-seeded retem,
berries of the alligator-bark retem,
wild cowss, mule cervid, antelopes,
white-tailed cervid, wild Meleagris gallopavos, doves, quail,
squirrels, redbreasts, slate-colored juncoes,
vocal sparrows, wood rats, prairie Canis familiariss,
coneies, musk hogs, burros, mules, Equus caballuss,
American bisons, mountain sheep, and polo-necks.
( & # 8216 ; Hunting 13 & # 8242 ; , Myths and
Texts, p. 31 )
Not merely does this push Snyder & # 8217 ; s poetics to the
bounds of its metonymic economic system, its representative power, but it besides engages an Adamic
myth of naming, the kind of myth that has normally been seen as cardinal to American
cultural individuality. This textual working of the land, reminiscent of colonial descriptions
of the New World, therefore struggles to shut the spread between myth and text in an effort to
integrate ego and land, to see them in a relationship of productive exchange. Rather than
supplying a poetics of integrating, the concluding verse form of the sequence really marks the
crevice between myth and text, word and universe. With its two subdivisions entitled,
severally, & # 8216 ; the text & # 8217 ; and & # 8216 ; the myth & # 8217 ; , this verse form sees the individuality of the land
as something that can ne’er come back to itself, something that is ever capable to
disfiguration, even as it is traced in the text. Therefore, in the verse form & # 8217 ; s first subdivision, the
land as text is a workplace, and the poet ( once more ) a firewatcher: & # 8216 ; Sourdough mountain
called a fire in: / Up Thunder Creek, high on a ridge & # 8217 ; ( & # 8216 ; Burning 17, & # 8217 ; Myths and
Texts, p. 53 ) . In the verse form & # 8217 ; s 2nd subdivision the reading of that land appropriates it
to myth, and it is therefore disfigured, going a belongings of head, and non of solid world:
& # 8216 ; Fire up Thunder Creek and the mountain & # 8212 ; troy & # 8217 ; s firing! / The cloud murmurs / The
mountains are your mind. & # 8217 ; ( & # 8216 ; Burning 17, & # 8217 ; Myths and Texts, p. 53 ) .
To reason I want to return, briefly, to the Riprap
aggregation, and, eventually, to its rubric verse form. Throughout this paper I have been proposing
that to read Snyder & # 8217 ; s poetics as one nisus for a airy integrating with the land
is, needfully, to tag the divorce between nature and civilization, land and text and therefore to
expose a faultline in American civilization. Riprapcannot merely be read ( as it frequently is ) as a
text of cosmopolitan interconnection. It is a text shooting through with a sense of crevice,
and breakage, of the act of sundering that is at the bosom of the act of working the land,
whether that be in the cleavage between land and ego from which the construction and imagination
of & # 8216 ; Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout & # 8217 ; is generated ; or in the figure of the
& # 8216 ; single-jack mineworker, who can feel / The vena and cleavage / In the really backbones of stone & # 8217 ;
in the verse form & # 8216 ; Milton by Firelight & # 8217 ; ( Riprap, p. 9 ) ; or in the split between word and
universe that is exposed in our work of reading these verse forms, and which can be read as a
merchandise of a capitalist economic system of exchange.
In his & # 8216 ; Afterword & # 8217 ; to the North Point Press
edition of Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems Snyder explicitly aligns the work verse form
of Riprap with Chinese and Nipponese poetic theoretical accounts by observing how they strive to
read the universe without being affected by linguistic communication & # 8217 ; s mediation. The verse form in Riprap perform,
he asserts, & # 8216 ; & # 8230 ; the work of seeing the universe withoutany prism of linguistic communication, and convey
that seeing into linguistic communication & # 8217 ; . In its & # 8216 ; work of seeing the universe & # 8217 ; the rubric verse form of the
aggregation, I would reason, confirms an anxiousness at the bosom of American civilization, one non
so easy dismissed as the book & # 8217 ; s & # 8216 ; Afterword & # 8217 ; implies, viz. , that the land is
unknowable except through the prism of linguistic communication, but to convey the land into linguistic communication, is
to kill it.
This verse form ( & # 8216 ; Riprap & # 8217 ; ) opens with this
paradox, with its puting down of words before us going a metaphorical way for a
detection of the vena and cleavage between word and stone, thought and thing, America and its
land:
Lay down these words
Before your head like stones.
placed solid, by custodies
In pick of topographic point, put
Before the organic structure of the head
in infinite and clip:
Solidity of bark, foliage, or wall
riprap of things:
The work of the verse form is non, hence, its overt
effort to incorporate the environments of land and verse form. Rather, the verse form asserts that
& # 8216 ; stones & # 8217 ; are non & # 8216 ; words & # 8217 ; , merely & # 8216 ; like & # 8217 ; one another, and that romantic
transcendency, that which sees the verse form as a riprap, a cobbled way taking up a mountain,
is merely a metaphor, furthermore a metaphor of working the land. To see the verse form as work-place
is to expose the workings of linguistic communication, and to do fraught our relationship to the object
universe. The ecological lesson of Snyder & # 8217 ; s poetics lies, eventually, in an attention to the
break in the really backbones of the existent:
In the thin loam, each stone a word
a creek-washed rock
Granite: ingrained
with torture of fire and
weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all alteration, in ideas,
Equally good as things.
It is in acknowledging the deeply ingrained
forms of America & # 8217 ; s socialization of the land that the existent work of ecological reading
can get down.
From Sycamore 1:4 ( Winter 1997 ) . Copyright? 1997 by Sycamore. Online Beginning
