all you can know about animals as persons. the names of trees and flowers and weeds. the names of stars and the movements of planets and the moon.
—“What You Should Know To Be A Poet”
Introduction
The position of the animal in Snyder’s work is highly interwoven with the position in his work of nature in general, and with mans, nature and animals altogether. Snyder’s poetic universe is characterized by a holistic perspective of earth and life that has attracted many readers from the deep ecology and environmentalist movements. His poetics of mountains and myths combined with his extensive essays on similar and related topics have made him the bard and mascot of the deep ecology movement, expressing lyrically and evocatively the basic tenets of the
movement, such as ecological egalitarianism and the deeply held belief that the human species is an integral element of nature rather than something outside or above it. However, this
environmentalist association with the messages and convictions in Snyder’s work, important and justified as it is, at times tends to overshadow the value and significance of questions of style, form, and poetic tradition. This chapter will be concerned with a combination of the two. We will discuss how Snyder represents animals in his work, how he positions them in the universe and how he deals with questions of real and mythological animals, nature and culture, kinship and otherness, metaphor and representation. We will also carefully explore Snyder’s stylistic treatment of animals in relation to the literary traditions of American poetry and American nature writing, and trace the formal influences of modernism, Imagism, Chinese and Japanese poetry and Native American mythology on his poetic representation of animals.
Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco, California on May 8, 1930, and grew up in Kitsap County, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, on the American Northwest coast. He studied anthropology and literature at Reed College, Portland on a scholarship, while working summers as a logger and a seaman, and obtained his BA degree in 1951. After a semester studying linguistics at graduate level at Indiana University, Snyder returned to San Francisco to study Asian culture and languages at Berkeley and the American Academy of Asian Studies. In 1956, Snyder travelled to Japan to study Zen Buddhism and until 1969 lived and worked alternately in Japan and California with intermittent periods of travelling in India and working as a seaman. He returned to the United States in 1969 and built a house in the Sierra Nevada Mountains which he called Kitkitdizze, the Wintu name for a local plant also known as bear clover.
Snyder has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work including the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his volume Turtle Island in 1975, the American Book Award for
Axe Handles in 1983, and the 1997 Bollingen Prize for Poetry for Mountains and Rivers Without End. He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and in 2003 Snyder was elected Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. In 2008 Snyder was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis, and still lives at Kitkitdizze in northern California. His main volumes of poetry include
Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1959), Myths and Texts (1960), Regarding Wave (1970),
Turtle Island (1974), Axe Handles (1983), No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1994),
Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) and Danger On Peaks (2004). His equally prolific
prose writings have been published in Earth House Hold (1969), The Old Ways (1977), He
Through India (1984), The Practice of the Wild (1990) and A Place in Space (1995). In 1999,
Counterpoint published The Gary Snyder Reader, bringing together an extensive selection of
essays, journal entries, interviews, letters, poetry and translations.
Snyder’s use of animals in his poetry is a unique blend of real and mythological animals, and includes poems devoted to individual animals (“Jackrabbit,” “Sus”) and poems dedicated to
types of animals (“this poem is for birds,” “this poem is for bear,” “this poem is for deer”), as
well as many poems featuring animals and animal imagery to a larger and lesser extent. Throughout Snyder’s career, animals have consistently been an important part of his poetic
world, from his earliest work in Myths & Texts to his most recent collection Dangers on Peaks.
Both his stylistic development and his subject matter reflect the impact of studies in
anthropology, linguistics, Asian languages and literatures and Buddhism, of his experiences with physical work, and of his many travels. The dualism in Snyder’s work reaches deep, engaging with binary oppositions such as East and West, primitive and modern, environment and society, physical work and intellectual pursuits, in both his poetry and prose. Rather than maintaining those oppositions, however, Snyder’s writing is aimed at an integration of them, and they are often presented as gradations on a scale rather than as opposites. Having said that, it is important to have a sense of the intellectual, ideological and practical dichotomies that he attempts to integrate in his poetry before proceeding to a discussion of the poems themselves, and we will look at them more closely below.
Snyder’s distinctive stylistic approach to the representation of animals can be elucidated by tracing two main areas of influence that have both formed significant and lasting sources of inspiration for Snyder’s poetics in terms of style, content and ideology. One has its origins in high modernism, with Ezra Pound’s theories of Imagism and the ideogrammic method, and travels via Chinese languages and literature to Zen Buddhism and its origins in shamanism. The other is located in Native American culture and the contemporary use of ancient characters, stories and images that are directly related to shamanistic practices and primitive cultures. As I will argue, these two sources of inspiration are of particular relevance to Snyder’s stylistic approach to the representation of both real, living animals and to his views on the role of the poet as mediator between humans, animals and nature. Furthermore, Snyder’s poetic engagement with animals addresses both physical and spiritual facets of human-animal relationships through poetic explorations of hunting and mythology. The former explores and portrays hunting as a primordial and ultimate means of communing with and relating to animals,
and we will look closely at the poems from the “Hunting” section of Myths & Texts as well as
on poems from later volumes. The latter engages with world mythology as a means of knowing
and understanding animals and human-animal relationships, and our discussion will pay specific attention to Snyder’s engagement with animal-marriage mythology and with the Native
American mythological figure Coyote.
Because the animal population of Snyder’s oeuvre is too large to be able to discuss all animal poems, we will have to limit ourselves in this chapter to a discussion of the main themes in Snyder’s poetic engagement with animals and the animal poems that form the best examples or the most relevant illustrations of those themes. In the light of the abundance of animals in Snyder’s poems, that means that there are many poems equally valuable for in-depth discussion and close reading that are left out of this study. Omitted are for example a great many shorter poems that I can best describe as ‘vignettes,’ poems that form observations on a single scene containing animals undisturbed in their natural environment, such as “Hear bucks skirmishing in the night,” “Steep cliff ledge, a couple of young raptors,” “Ripples on the surface” “Lines on a Carp,” “The Rabbit,” “Jackrabbit,” “Cool Clay,” “Sus,” “Gray Squirrels,” and a number of sections of “Target Practice.” These small-scale celebrations and venerations of natural life are wonderful illustrations of Snyder’s personalised form of Imagism. Also omitted are poems that explore the universal, all pervading sensuality and sexuality of the natural world, such as “Song of the Taste,” “Sea lion, salmon, offshore – ,” “Kyoto Born in Spring Song,” “Seed Pods,” “The Egg,” and “It Was When.” Although animals feature significantly in these poems, they invariably do so in the wider context of all nature, and they exemplify Snyder’s holistic, erotic vision of nature in general, including the human, the animal, the vegetable and the mineral, rather than Snyder’s treatment of the animal or the human-animal relationship. However, the theme of natural sexuality in Snyder’s poetry will certainly merit further study of its own. Though it may at times be difficult to separate Snyder’s poems into ones that deal predominantly with animals or the human-animal relationship and those that have a wider focus on nature in general, and though a poet’s perspective on nature is invariably relevant to their poetic treatment of animals, for our present study we will nonetheless try to make that distinction. This chapter, then, is
divided into three main sections, in which I discuss the stylistic and thematic aspects that are key
to Snyder’s poetic engagement with animal subjects and images: (i) Imagism, shamanism, and
Native American culture, (ii) Hunting, and (iii) Mythology.
Imagism, shamanism, and Native American culture
This section focuses on the poetic influences of Imagism and the ‘oriental’ elements of high modernism as well as the influences of Native American mythology and shamanism on Snyder’s animal poems. Firstly, I argue that Snyder’s understanding of Imagism and his own experience with Asian languages and literatures has provided him with a methodology for conveying a sense of the unknowable, non- or extra- linguistic side of animals and nature in general in his poetry. Through an exploration of Snyder’s individual poetic strategy in relation to his animal poems I will show how Snyder attempts to stretch conventional limitations of poetic representation of animals, in the imagination or the suggestion of the rationally unknowable and extra-linguistic essence of animality. Secondly, I examine how Snyder’s fascination with Native American mythology and its relationship to the North American continent has provided him with numerous mythological and real animal subjects and images that populate his poems, and how this Native American influence has shaped his ideas on the role of the poet as akin to the mediating role of shamanism between human beings, their natural environment, and their animal relatives.
Imagism
When Ezra Pound took on the task of editing the manuscripts and notes of Ernest Fenollosa, an American Orientalist who had a great passion for Chinese and Japanese literature, in September 1913, he was already planning to compile an anthology of Imagist poetry that would be loosely based on the three Imagist poetic principles which he had formulated together with poets H.D. and Richard Aldington “in the spring or early summer of 1912”:
Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
“Upon many points of taste and of predilection we differed, but agreeing upon these three positions,” Pound recollects, “we thought we had as much right to a group name” as certain
other ‘schools’ of literature that had been proclaimed around that time.The Imagist movement
had until that point been influenced mainly by Greek and French models. When Pound
encountered Chinese literature via the manuscripts of Fenollosa, however, he was introduced to a way of writing poetry which he felt could be of great importance to the development of a
literary revolution in the West, and his own poems in Des Imagistes: An Anthology reflect this
new influence. Fenollosa’s long essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,
edited by Pound, as well as Pound’s own translations of Chinese poetry based on the notes of
Fenollosa and published in Cathay in 1915, provided him with new perspectives on the poetics
of Imagism. It was especially this influence of oriental languages and literatures on the Imagist movement that attracted the interest of Snyder when he began reading and writing poetry, and the Imagist poetics of Pound, William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth were an important
influence on his early poetry in Myths & Texts and Riprap.
In The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, Fenollosa argues (among other things) that the unique qualities of the Chinese language lie in the fact that its written characters contain both a pictorial and a verbal element, combining the representative effect of an image with that of a word in calling up a mental concept in the reader. Fenollosa points out the temporal nature of language, which is naturally successive in its basic structure: subject – verb – object, or rather agent – action – object. This temporal quality of language follows the movement of thought and nature, and is therefore more truthful as a reproduction than a visual image. Thus, because a picture can be more concrete in its representation than a word but lacks the temporal quality of language, the Chinese written character combines the strengths of pictorial and verbal representation:
The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the element of natural succession. […] One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its betting back to the fundamental reality of time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage
(i)
1. 2. 3.
of combining both elements. It speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate.
Although the English written language lacks this visual quality, the stress on temporality and mobility of sounds and the natural succession of thought-images have influenced Pound’s
poetics significantly in his translations in Cathay as well as in his ideas about Imagism and in
TheCantos. As we will see in our discussion of Snyder’s poems, his poetry also reverberates this movement of sound and the temporal, successive qualities of language and thought. The oft-
quoted phrase ‘watching things work out their fate’ brings attention to two important aspects of
the Chinese written character, or ideogram, for Imagist poetry: the focus on things, and the
activity that is always implied in the noun.
In discussions of Pound’s translations, T.S. Eliot’s claim that “Pound is the inventor of
Chinese poetry for our time” is often quoted.With this remark, and his subsequent comments
on the temporality of translations, Eliot sought to make clear that, first, Pound’s translations are so excellent that they seem like “translucencies” that show us the true spirit of Chinese poetry, and, second, that this can only be a brilliant illusion and that each generation must make their own translations which will in turn become outdated:
This is as much as to say that Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound. It is not to say that there is a Chinese-poetry-in-itself, waiting for some ideal translator who shall be only translator.
Although Pound’s excellent translations are so clear that they seem to convey the essence of Chinese poetry to the reader, his poems say, in fact, as much about the developments of poetry
in English as they do about Chinese poetry. In his groundbreaking study Orientalism,
Modernism, and the American Poem, Robert Kern argues that because Pound’s experiences with the Chinese language tapped into a mode of writing that he had already developed and worked with, they influenced his poetics far beyond his translations and his strictly Imagist phase, and he identifies Snyder’s work as “arguably the premier example in post-Poundian American poetry of an orientalised verse in the modernist tradition and of English-as-Chinese.”
In a review of Myths and Texts, James Dickey observes that
What you see about [Snyder] immediately is his debt to the Pound of the Cantos: Pound’s fragmented, juxtaposing method, his quotations (with and without quotations marks), and even his irritating use of the ampersand. But what you also see is that this is unmistakably the right technique for Snyder to use. The Pound style, at the same time so style-conscious and so styleless, can be very bad: disorganized, flat, pretentious, obscure, bookish, and dull. But in Mr. Snyder’s work it is none of these. It is, instead, close to what Pound probably thinks it should be: sharp-edged, vivid, detached, concentrated both on the thing shown (the image) and on bringing it into a field of interpretation not explicitly given but formulated by the various quotations woven into the writing.
Kern in turn points to Snyder’s extensive use of ‘oriental’ features that are clearly derived from Pound’s imagistic or ideogrammic style: “its impersonality, its concise, monosyllabic diction, its short, end-stopped, accentual line, and its tightness of structure.” Snyder himself has said about these influences that
I grew up with the poetry of twentieth-century coolness, its hard edges and resilient elitism. Ezra Pound introduced me to Chinese poetry, and I began to study classical Chinese. When it came to writing out of my own experience, most of modernism didn’t fit, except for the steer toward Chinese and Japanese.
The earlier works Riprap and Myths & Texts, especially, show this influence most clearly.
Snyder’s purposes in his use of Pound’s English-as-Chinese and the imagistic or ideogrammic style appear to be closely related to his intended representation of the natural
world. He states in his “Afterword” to the 1990 edition of Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems:
There are poets who claim that their poems are made to show the world through the prism of language. Their project is worthy. There is also the work of seeing the world without any prism of language, and to bring that seeing into language. The latter has been the direction of most Chinese and Japanese poetry.
poetry and the role of the poet in society. These ideas are similar to the argument that Emerson makes in his essay “The Poet,” when he argues that an important function of the poet is to be an