by David Rivard

from American Poetry Review, July / August 2009

A bit of echolocation first: Riprap, Gary Snyder's first book, came to be published in 1959, the same year as Robert Lowell's Life Studies. The first, by Cid Corman's Origins Press in Kyoto, was a 500-copy edition with blue rice paper wrappers sewn in open navy-blue threadwork at the spine; the latter, a winner of the National Book Award, appeared in a cloth binding bearing the colophon of Farrar Straus and Cudahy, one of the most storied of American literary publishers. These books, as different in impulse and focus as two books could be, suggest in some sense the largeness Charles Olson referred to when he said, "The first fact of America is space." A space having as much to do with forces in flux—spiritual, psychological, economic forces—as with geography.

The conventional wisdom, a "cowboys vs. Indians" view that imagines Lowell as Cotton Mather and Snyder as Huck Finn, tends to overlook the fact that a primary influence on both writers at this moment was William Carlos Williams. Still, you might say that in Riprap Snyder offers a cultural alternative to the moral despair of Lowell's Brahmin, psycho-existential Puritanism, replacing it with an image of mystical anarchism already thriving on the West Coast by 1959. Lowell's descriptions of a fallen world would be unrecognizable in the hitchhiker's paradise of Snyder's hipsters, hobos, workers and wisdom-seekers, a republic that might have been imagined by a Wobblie's reading of Han Shan's Cold Mountain poems and Dogen's Zen precepts.

The self, for Lowell, may be a fractured thing, but it begins as something singular as it approaches that history and autobiography of which it is a depository. Beyond his Protean skill as a maker, Lowell’s authenticity rests on an existentialist view of the self at risk—he is always approaching, in Kenneth Rexroth's words, "'the anguish of the abyss'... as totally realized spiritual experience." For Snyder, the self is illusory, a mirrored bubble constantly forming, bursting, and re-forming. Delight, spontaneity, human resourcefulness, erotic desire, and respectful consciousness are its virtues; in lieu of the tragic, Snyder offers a view of loss as cyclical, as inevitable but acceptable (even if saddening and lonely-making at times). Snyder sees loss as a necessity for renewal in the natural world, part of the changefulness of being in time. Emptiness, for him, is transforming. Reading Riprap again for the first time in several years, I thought of the ending of Tomas Tranströmer's great poem, "Vermeer," in which the sky that has just been described as empty replies by saying, "I am not empty, I'm open." For Snyder, openness is bound up with mindfulness. And the mind need not be the controlling source of identity and meaning.

A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
                ("Piute Creek")

All this makes Riprap sound quite abstract—and beneath its straightforward surface it can be—but as a young poet in the early 1970s I was first attracted to its vitality and its richly precise descriptions of both wilderness and human life. And, I suspect now, for that vision of cultural and personal possibility it put within reach. That vision isn't the naïve thing a skeptic might like to think. What I felt re-reading the book was the freshness of its appeal, and a sense that Snyder's view took in a much longer perspective than the one implied by the passage of a mere fifty years. Anyway, unlike some of Snyder's later writings, the book isn't hortatory and doesn't suggest a program. It offers a life in particular, one man's life, and a sincerely American one at that, searching, funny, brilliantly clear-headed.

Rereading Riprap, I also saw how its original appeal might have had something to do with the childhood summers I spent at a beach shack on the south coast of Massachusetts, along Buzzard's Bay. The place was owned by my grandfather, a beach bum passing as sport fisherman, a former detective and Navy Seabee and union leader who in retrospect seems much like the working men and roamers—oil tanker sailors, loggers, trail builders—to whom Snyder dedicates Riprap. You might say Riprap is a miniature epic of wanderers; it can be read as a quest book—except Snyder is adamant that the trip is its own goal. In any case, the sort of freedom I had as a child and young teen, a permission to stay out all day on the beach and to roam the trails that led through beach plum bushes and piney scrub to the tidal ponds and woods, and the world of trawler wharves, auto repair shops, lumber yards and barrooms my grandfather took me into, and the characters who inhabited that world—all that must have echoed unconsciously for me when I found the book as a 20-year-old who had just begun to write poetry. The fact that Snyder had been an anthropology major at college, as I was at the time, probably gave the book a talisman-like quality—it made it seem you could actually have a serious life as an adult that didn't mean leaving pleasure and freedom behind.
 
This may make Snyder sound, again, like that cliché of the counterculture renegade he has often been labeled as: the "Beat" poet, either footloose in the forest and writing about bear scat on the trail or sleeping off a red-wine hangover in a North Beach crash pad or cultivating his solitude in some Kyoto zendo or Cascade Mountains fire tower. Like Lowell "the confessional" and Rich "the feminist," Snyder "the Beat" is an intellectually lazy creation of anthologists and critics. To read Riprap, or Snyder's journals from the early 1950s for that matter, is to encounter a writer of wide-ranging ambition. You feel that ambition as much as anything in his enormous focus. As fresh as they are, the poems and journal entries do not sound like the "jottings" of a beginner who was then in his early to mid-20s. Improvised they may be, incidental they are not.

As Rexroth would have it, Snyder's arrival in San Francisco in the early 50s, at about the same time as Ginsberg and Kerouac, "ten years after the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance had thoroughly consolidated itself," was merely fortuitous. His point: don't think Snyder is a Beat simply because he mingled with the group for awhile. One effect of Rexroth's sense of the evolution of Bay Area literary culture, with its roots in a homegrown kind of "anarchist-pacifism," is to make Snyder a distinctive, original figure. It also helps make clear what city-dwelling Kerouac and Ginsberg might have been so strongly attracted to: "The dead society was urban, its culture the pleasure of a clerkly caste. Allen Ginsberg cries, 'Woe, woe to the bloody city of Jerusalem!' Snyder, like Benedict of Nursia, or the yamabushi of Japan, goes to the wilderness. His values are those of the wilderness, of the lynx on the branch, the deer in the meadow."

But this simplifies things, too. It makes Snyder out to be Han Shan Jr., a hermit saint. Elsewhere, Rexroth describes him as "one of the most remarkable young men to show up American literature. A Buddhologist, a professed monk, not a Zennik. He reads Chinese, Japanese and Sanskrit.... He also reads several other languages and has absorbed influence from all the vital poets of the  twentieth century, transmuted them into an idiom which resembles Pound's Cantos, William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Mallarmé's Un coup de dés, but which is inescapably Gary Snyder." Snyder was attractive for his complexity of mind and open character, as Kerouac makes clear in The Dharma Bums, with its thinly veiled portrait of Snyder in the form of Japhy Ryder, the novel's central character. He wasn't a "Smoky the Bear Bodhisattva" any more than he was a member "of the bear-shit-on-the-trail school of poetry" that was mocked by the Partisan Review crowd. He was and is a cosmopolite, at home in many traditions and landscapes, and conversant with a wide range of cultural and scientific fields.

In the poems, this cosmopolitan nature is less visible in allusiveness than it is in a particularly alert spirit, alert and at ease.

... White crowned sparrows
Make tremendous singings in the trees
The rooster down the valley crows and crows.
Jack Kerouac outside, behind my back
Reads the Diamond Sutra in the sun.
Yesterday I read Migration of Birds;
The Golden Plover and the Arctic Tern.
Today that big abstraction's at our door
For juncoes and the robins all have left,
Broody scrabblers pick up bits of string
And in this hazy day
Of April summer heat
Across the hill the seabirds
Chase Spring north along the coast:
Nesting in Alaska
In six weeks.

The mildly collaged syntax of the last part of "Migration of Birds" wants to get the migratory movement of the birds into a music in the poem. The "big abstraction's at our door," and it has motion, and it leaves that motion in the mind of the poem, along with the silence that will inevitably trail in its wake. It's so undramatic, notational, observed; the self seems to dissolve in it—you can see how it might have bugged those East Coast sensibilities raised on the Metaphysicals and the seven types of ambiguity. In lieu of climax and resolution, refreshment.

Refreshment manifests itself in Riprap as a rapidity of feeling and thought. But Snyder's mobility is distinctive for how stable and calm he makes it sound, solid without being stolid. Snyder wants the "is-ness" of life, the flow of appearance and disappearance. It's probable that some of this has to do with his practice as a Buddhist. A disciplined practitioner of koan study and sitting zazen, by the time Riprap came out in 1959 he had already studied under teachers like Miura Isshu and Oda Sesso Roshi in Japan. Even in this early work, a Snyder poem is a way of experiencing the impermanence of all things and thoughts.

Snyder makes a shape out of transience through more or less associative structures. As a matter of influence and style, the method is one he learned from Pound and Williams: the rapid juxtaposition of sculpted fragments, and the use of a line based on what Pound called "abbreviated picture writing," or ideograms. Snyder's metaphor for the process was "Riprap"—cobbling together a trail of stones for traveling in the mountains—"poetry a Riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics." It's the organizing principle of this first book; and an image that echoes throughout, in poems that are often about work in the mountains and forests of the Northwest. If Snyder frequently models Pound here, he has little of the aesthete about him, none of Pound's distance from life as it's lived on the ground. He returns insistently to work as an activity in both the world and the mind—Milton and "an old singlejack miner" and a "chainsaw boy" and a pack mule have a simultaneous existence in both.

MILTON BY FIRELIGHT

           Piute Creek, August 1955

"Oh hell, what do mine eyes with grief behold?"
Working with an old
Singlejack miner, who can sense
The vein and cleavage
In the very guts of rock, can
Blast granite, build
Switchbacks that last for years
Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves.
What use, Milton, a silly story
Of our lost general parents, eaters of fruit?
 
The Indian, the chainsaw boy
And a string of six mules
Came riding down to camp
Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.
Sleeping in saddle-blankets
Under a bright red night-sky
Han River slantwise by morning.
Jays squall
Coffee boils

In ten thousand years the Sierra
Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.
Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees.
No paradise, no fall,
Only the weathering land
The wheeling sky,
Man, with his Satan
Scouring the chaos of the mind.
Oh Hell!

Fire down
Too dark to read, miles from a road
The bell-mare clangs in the meadow
That packed dirt for a fill-in
Scrambling through loose rocks
On an old trail
All of a summer's day.

Time—the ten thousand years of geologic time, or "the million summers" of the wandering mind—is something that Snyder seems peculiarly sensitive to in Riprap. I think that for Snyder—at this point in his life anyway—time has no meaning beyond presence. If you're the product of a Western education, you might feel he's suggesting in "Milton by Firelight" that time creates perspective—seen from a distance of ten thousand years (or from the point of view of the Han River/Milky Way) the present world of illusions, of grief at loss, will have vanished. At least I read it that way initially. But now I think it's more subtle than that, closer to Zen master Dogen's notion of "being-time" or "lived-time." For Dogen, there would be no such thing as "perspective," because time in his view does not exist as a series of successive moments adding up on top of each other. In Zen and Western Thought, Masao Abe explains Dogen this way: "At the very moment we realize the beginninglessness and endlessness of history, we transcend its boundlessness and find the whole process of history from beginningless beginning to endless end intensively concentrated within the here and now." So it's not so much that loss and grief are illusory as that they aren't tragic. "No paradise, no fall."

I don't mean to suggest that Snyder is unaffected by sorrow or regrets. But his main reaction to memory seems largely to involve a kind of curiosity and wonder.

"For a Far-out Friend" starts off as the most self-consciously "Beat" poem in the book—though fifty years later it might seem to fit just as easily into the category of "confessional" poetry.

Because I once beat you up
Drunk, stung with weeks of torment
And saw you no more,
And you had calm talk for me today
         I now suppose
I was less sane than you,
You hung on dago red,
         me hooked on books.

But a kind of phantasmagorical remembering begins to take over. There's an erotic awe in this; it comes across as a tone, and as a physicality in the shifting scale of perception. Even at its most mythical-sounding, the poem takes a delight in the richly minimalist precision of its "visions."

On a tricky beach between two
           pounding seastacks
I saw you as a Hindu Deva-girl
Light legs dancing in the waves,
Breasts like dream-breasts
Of sea, and child, and astral
           Venus-spurting milk.
And traded our salt lips.

Visions of your body
Kept me high for weeks, I even had
           a sort of trance for you
A day in a dentist's chair.

I like how the jump to the dentist's chair grounds the vision, and by deflating it a bit saves the passage from whatever preciousness or grandiosity it might have had. And I can't think of another male poet of the last fifty years as attuned to the physical body as Snyder. It's a sensitivity that would amplify in his later work, in well-known poems like "The Bath" and many others. In that regard, the clear-headed simplicity of "Light legs dancing" and "traded our salt lips" is deceiving—it feels effortless, and may have seemed merely journalistic to critics oriented to the descriptive density of poems influenced by Eliot and the New Criticism. It must have sounded lazy, or barely like poetry.

It probably goes without saying that Riprap was written under the influence, not only of Williams and Pound and Rexroth, but also of the classical Chinese poets and Japanese haiku masters. Translating Han Shan's "Cold Mountain" poems may have helped Snyder develop a relaxed, mildly elliptical voice. The colloquial T'ang Chinese of those poems, he reports, is "rough and fresh." Han Shan may have been a madman hermit, but Snyder makes him sound loose-limbed, and poised in imbalance. The influence of haiku (and Japanese poetry in general) gives the poems in Riprap some of their descriptive precision, some of their clipped phrasings, and maybe their occasional moments of heightened solitude. Not loneliness exactly, but a sense of emptiness. On August 15, 1952, on Crater Mountain in the Skagit District of Washington state, at the age of twenty-two, Snyder had written these entries in his notebook:

Almost had it last night: no identity. One thinks: "I emerged from some general, non-differentiated thing, I return to it." One has in reality never left it; there is no return.

———

"If a Bodhisattva retains the thought of an ego, a person, a being, or a soul, he is no more a Bodhisattva."

   You be Bosatsu,
   I'll be the taxi-driver
   Driving you home.

... Sabi: One does not have a great deal to give. That which one does give has been polished and perfected into a spontaneous emptiness; sterility made creative, it has no pretensions, and encompasses everything.
                                                             Zen view, o.k.?

This is a curious definition of sabi. Japanese for the feeling of loneliness in haikai. But then the word seems to invite speculative explanations. It's hard to pin down. Basho describes sabi (in Donald Keene's translation) this way: "Sabi is the color of the poem. It does not necessarily refer to the poem that describes a lonely scene. If a man goes to war wearing stout armor or to a party dressed up in gay clothes, and if this man happens to be an old man, there is something lonely about him. Sabi is something like that." But Snyder's words suggest a rubbing away that leaves the ego erased, or nearly so.

Oddly enough, in Riprap, as the self erases itself, it feels all the more present, at least indirectly. The poems have this "color" that Basho speaks of, and it makes the voice seem personal somehow. Robert Hass might as well be talking of Snyder in this passage on the connection between haiku and Zen:

Zen provided people training in how to stand aside and leave the meaning-making activity of the ego to its own devices. Not resisting it, but seeing it as another phenomenal thing, like bush warblers and snow fall, though more intimate to us. Trying to find this quality in every haiku, however, romanticizes them and the culture they came from. It tends to make one rush to their final mysteriousness and silence. I know that for years I didn't see how deeply personal these poems were or, to say it another way, how much they have the flavor—Basho might have said the "scent"—of a particular human life, because I had been told and wanted to believe that haiku were never subjective.

Snyder's "Nooksack Valley" gives a deep sense of how personal his poems can sound, even as the "I" recedes:

NOOKSACK VALLEY
       February 1956

At the far end of a trip north
In a berry-pickers cabin
At the edge of a wide muddy field
Stretching to the woods and cloudy mountains,
Feeding the stove all afternoon with cedar,
Watching the dark sky darken, a heron flap by,
A huge setter pup nap on the dusty cot.
High rotten stumps in the second-growth woods
Flat scattered farms in the bends of the Nooksack
River. Steel head run now
                 a week and I go back
Down 99, through towns, to San Francisco
                                  and Japan.
All America south and east,
Twenty-five years in it brought to a trip-stop
Mind-point, where I turn
Caught more on this land—rock tree and man,
Awake, than ever before, yet ready to leave.
              damned memories,
Whole wasted theories, failures, and worse success,
Schools, girls, deals, try to get in
To make this poem a froth, a pity,
A dead fiddle for lost good jobs
               the cedar walls
Smell of our farmhouse, half-built in '35.
Clouds sink down the hills
Coffee is hot again. The dog
Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.

If Riprap can be said to have a plot, it has largely to do with cycles of journeying out and returning; "Nooksack Valley" feels like a still point in these motions, not so much a moment of summary as of reflections let go. The language here feels cleansed—not of impurities, but of noise. Maybe it's better to say it enacts that cleansing. It's not so much a report on a ritual solitude as it is the ritual itself. Like much of Snyder's work here and elsewhere, there's no true metaphor-making in the poem, except for "a froth, a pity / A dead fiddle for lost jobs." The language is basic but exact, filled with a Williamsesque "thinginess." Speaking, in a recent New Yorker article, of his first encounter with the book, Seamus Heaney described his reaction to that language like this: "I felt absolutely at home with the colloquial voice and the honest-to-god, honest-to-earth elemental content.... The elements of the poems are trustworthy, and you feel there's a real coherence in the sensibility that's transmitting them to you. And in the primal, mythic-poetry sense, he's back on the Hill of Parnassus."

The interrupted syntax and sentence fragments in the poem give it an idiomatic terseness meant to convey immediacy without drama. At the poem's end, Snyder substitutes simultaneity for resolution, and a creaturely identification with the dog coming to rest on the cot. The dog's movement isn't an emblem/gesture of coming to rest, it's a piece—like memory, sight, taste—in the experience of impermanence triggered by the place.

Place being one of Snyder's great concerns in Riprap and elsewhere, the location of "Nooksack Valley" gives it some of its emotional flavor. The cedar walls of the cabin, and the farms backed up on the river's edge but not far from "high rotten stumps in the second-growth woods," are similar to the place where Snyder's family lived outside of Seattle in the 1930s, But the poem's not a coming-of-age poem. It's not about a loss of childhood or the end of innocence. Again, Snyder's sense of transience is not tragic. If anything, the setting of the "berry-pickers cabin," and the regret about "lost good jobs," are part of a continuity that centers around the importance of "work." (You could make the argument that all of Snyder's poetry is concerned with work, with "what is to be done"—in the many different senses of that phrase.) Snyder's poems in Riprap are not about working-class experience—not in the sense that, say, some of Philip Levine's are. They're about work as one of the bedrock ways in which people inhabit and experience a place, and how being alive is bound up with livelihood.

Early on, in a statement for Donald Allen's seminal anthology The New American Poetry, Snyder wrote of how his poems had been composed to the rhythms of physical labor, an idea whose value on the level of prosody seems vague at best. It's clear that work—the demanding work of logging, ship tending, fire spotting, trail building, etc.—is the focus of many of the poems. And it may very well be that Snyder's famously honed-down, colloquial language, his clipped phrasings and matter-of-fact precision, owes as much to the speech of those men he worked with as it does to the influence of Pound or Williams, or the lessons of the haiku masters and T'ang dynasty poets. There is that appreciation here of speech as a tool grown more intimate and effective with handling, touched by one's karma—like the arrowheads, blasting caps, picks, shovels, chainsaws, cold-drills, singlejacks, winches, wrenches, and choke-sets that are everywhere in the poems. Snyder helps you hear the similarity of thing, think, and thanks. "A leap of words to things and there it stops," he writes in "A Stone Garden."

One of the most famous of all Snyder poems, the rhythmically flawless "Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout" opens Riprap with an act of spontaneous attention tinged with both pleasure and loneliness. It's a poem that wants to prove Thoreau wrong for having said, "We are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor." In his journals of the time, Snyder writes of wanting to get down the kind of poem that leaves one "with a sense of gratitude and wonder, and no sense of "I did it...." In that sense, "Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout" is more of an encounter than a poem. And that encounter is scored by an enormously subtle ear for how a precise but buoyant free verse might be made out of the play of beats shifting from line to line.

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.

The question implicit in this poem is one that Han Shan himself asked: "who knows that I am out of the dusky world?" The first stanza signals not simply loneliness and the speaker's absence from the world—an "I" wavering invisibly in mid-air—it also signals a kind of power in the solitude of being perched on that mountain peak.

The sound of that power comes across in the way strong beats are grouped at the beginnings and ends of lines in the first stanza. In the first three lines, these stress groupings occur in a pattern of 2/2, 3/3, 2/2; and they're reinforced by an echoing of internal rhyme where the stresses fall. You might say the presence of the speaker, his subjectivity, is all in the manipulation of beats and sonic effects. When you reach the fourth line, which is a hinge for the visual perceptions in the stanza, the rhythm releases a bit; the beats spread across the line in a suggestion of trimeter. Which allows the 1/2 imbalance in the fifth line to sound like a surprise, sprung and fresh. Rocks, pine pitch, smoke, humidity, flies—they all seem to flow through each other. As does the poet.

Because four of the five lines in the first stanza start with a strong beat, "I cannot remember things I once read" forces you to stress that first "I," even if lightly. Which might make for a line composed predominantly of trochees—except that, somehow, you hear it as an iambic line with its first syllable dropped, perhaps because of the interplay of the fourth line of the first stanza with those others. It's a rather cunning but unpremeditated effect. It gives the line its tone of acceptance. It's not a lament; it's a recognition, a thought that passes in motion like the ephemera of the first stanza. And it makes the last three lines of the poem feel like a resting place, a sense that composed astonishment is the reward of solitude. It doesn't answer Han Shan's question, it dissolves it.

It's astounding that Snyder's mastery of free verse forms alone hasn't made him a larger influence on the work of succeeding generations. Of major American poets now living, only Robert Hass has been significantly influenced by him;
even then, the influence had been more in terms of sensibility than form. Maybe, to many younger poets, Snyder’s poetry has seemed too iconoclastic to be of use? Maybe he is one of those poets easy to imitate, but hard to absorb?

In any case, the work of making involved in Snyder's free verse prosody is of a piece with the work that is the subject of so much of Riprap. And Snyder's poetry—from its very beginning—has linked that work to pleasure, to the satisfactions of doing something humanly useful and the accomplishment of being in tune with those forces that surround us (our natural, cultural and spiritual environment, if you will). The work is the reader's, too. Snyder suggests that at the beginning of the title poem, in his address to a listener:

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
          placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
          in space and time

Care and caring. The care in the making of these poems is rather contagious, and it seems to translate into a feeling that caring matters in a much wider sense, a creaturely sense that only grows stronger in Snyder's later work. This alone would have marked Snyder as an utterly distinctive voice in American poetry of the second half of the 20th century. It's hard to think of anyone else who has made pleasure and unalienated work so central a concern in his or her poetry during this time.

There is something profoundly humane in all this, insistently so. We live in the body, in a world that cannot be transcended. Who would want to?

                  ... the eye that sees all
space is socketed in this one human skull. Transformed. The source of the sun's heat is the mind, I will not cry Inhuman & think that makes us small and nature great, we are, enough, and as we are—

You feel as if he's speaking back to both Emerson and Robinson Jeffers in this passage; arguing in particular with Jeffers (what state's two greatest poets have been as different as Jeffers and Snyder?). In one of his journal entries of the early 50s, Snyder speaks of nature as "a vast set of conventions, totally arbitrary, patterns and stresses that come into being each instant; could disappear totally any time;... a form of play." Changefulness in both the world and its people; and everyone and everything in its proper scale; changefulness ritualized, "the worlds like an endless / four-dimensional / Game of go." And this, three years later:

Comes a time when the poet must choose: either to step deep in the stream of his people, history, tradition, folding and folding himself in wealth of persons and pasts; philosophy, humanity, to become richly foundationed and great and sane and ordered. Or to step beyond the bound onto the way out, into horrors and angels....

It doesn't seem like that was a difficult choice for Snyder—from the perspective of fifty years later—but who knows? Maybe he would just say that he was only trying to understand and accept his karma. What has come from this effort—and what is so present in Riprap—is an abiding sense of delight in both wilderness and human community. And Snyder's contribution to some of the most essential and progressive changes in American life over the last fifty years has been large, probably far beyond the imaginings of the young man who wrote Riprap.

If you're looking for an image of that young man as he was in 1959, there's considerable charm in this one by—in his own way—another of the avatars of cultural change, a poet on the opposite coast, the Deep Ecologist of mid-town Manhattan, Frank O'Hara:

somewhere beyond this roof a jet is making a
   sketch of the sky
where is Gary Snyder I wonder if he's reading under
   a dwarf pine
stretched out so his book and his head fit under
   the lowest branch
while the sun of the Orient rolls calmly not getting
   through to him
not caring particularly because the light in Japan
   respects poets.

About the Author
David Rivard is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Sugartown (Graywolf, 2006), He is on the faculty of the MFA program at the University of  New Hampshire.

American Poetry Review
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Editors: Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, Elizabeth Scanlon