Reed College Archives - Petaluma Historian

How to Read a Gary Snyder Poem

GThe poet Gary Snyder (photo courtesy of Counterpoint Press)

Good poetry is meant to be disruptive. Subversive and indigestible, it enters the cultural bloodstream as a corrosive irritant. Resistant to containment and mass assimilation, it endures on its own terms like the timeless verses of Shakespeare.

So declared Kenneth Rexroth, leader of the San Francisco Renaissance literary movement. In the early 1950s, he welcomed into his North Beach circle three aspiring poets fresh out of Reed College—Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, and Gary Snyder. Under Rexroth’s tutelage, the trio began waging their own poetic assaults on America’s post-war materialistic appetite.

Crossing paths with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, they found themselves earmarked as the Beat Movement’s west coast wing. It was a pigeonhole Snyder, for one, sought to evade. By the time the movement morphed into the innocuous Beatniks, he had embarked upon a ten-year sojourn to Japan, immersing himself in Zen Buddhism, haiku, and Chinese poetry.

Combining those Asian influences with his undergraduate studies in the classics, modern literature, anthropology, and Native American mythology, Snyder was able to forge a fresh and original way of looking at the world, one that fostered one of the most singular and distinctive voices in modern poetry.

*Collage of San Francisco Renaissance poets Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth (public domain)*

Last year, the 93-year old Snyder was honored by the Library of America, who published his collected poems in their preeminent book series of prominent poets and writers. In celebration, a tribute was held, featuring testimonies from various distinguished literati.

After expressing his gratitude for the accolades, Snyder pointed out that his social anarchism, which views liberty and social equality as interrelated, had been largely overlooked. Its influence on his work, he said, was “not quite unspoken but very subtle often, or simply assumed in directions and spirits.”

It was a gentle reminder that there is nothing safe about a Gary Snyder poem.

Beneath the common speech-patterns and close, intimate attention to natural imagery, his poems elicit a complex interaction, resonating with the reader, consciously or unconsciously, on multiple levels. That Coyote—the slippery, wily trickster who warily keeps his distance from civilization—was a favorite Native American archetype during his studies at Reed, should come as no surprise.

The allure of Snyder’s poetry begins with the language itself. He cites Ezra Pound, a strong lyricist with an ear for words, as the first poet to truly speak to him. Similarly, Snyder’s cadence is crisp and clear. He lays down familiar terms in unfamiliar juxtapositions with rhythms borrowed from hand work.

*Laying riprap trail in Grand Canyon (photo courtesy of the National Parks Service)*

The approach is spelled out in his poem “Riprap,” a term he defines as “a cobble of stone laid on steep, slick rock to make a trail.

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:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things

The “things” in a Snyder poem are largely drawn from the physical landscape. Finely distilled, they radiate a translucency easily mistaken for simplicity. But beneath their surface simplicity lies a terrain of unsettling depths, as in the poem “Piute Creek,” where a panorama suddenly coalesces with deep time:

Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers

*Gary Snyder’s library at his Kitkitdizze homestead in the Sierra Foothills (photo courtesy of Mark Gonnerman)*

After returning from Japan in the mid-sixties, Snyder settled with his wife and two children among a community of back-to-the-land, Zen aficionados in the Sierra Foothills. As his general focus shifted to being rooted in place, his poetry became stylistically more emotional, metaphoric, and lyrical. It also gained relevance among those increasingly concerned with the natural world.

Because Snyder’s views are often so nuanced, drawing from a wide range of references with a timescale extending back 10,000 years, it’s possible for various schools of thought to adopt him as their own. Hence, his popular designation as “poet laureate of deep ecology.” As an environmental movement, deep ecology seeks freedom from the dichotomy of human civilization and nature by viewing humans as equal and interconnected with all other forms of life.

But Snyder is not so easily packaged. The trail he lays out toward such freedom ultimately leads into the wilds of Zen impermanence and emptiness.

“To be truly free,” he writes, “one must take on the basic conditions as they are—painful, impermanent, open, imperfect—and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us . . . The world is nature, and in the long runs inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence.”

His poem “Ripples on the Surface” points to the trail’s end.

The vast wild
the house, alone.

The little house in the wild,
the wild in the house.

Both forgotten.
No nature
Both together, one big, empty house.

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A version of this article appear in the Summer 2023 issue of Reed Magazine.

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For more on Snyder’s connection to Petaluma, see:

Gary Snyder’s Vision of Petaluma

Tribute to a Mentor—Ardie Fortier

*Ardie Fortier, 1924-2029 (photo courtesy of Brigham Denison)*

Today marks what would have been the 93^rd birthday of my mentor Ardie Fortier, who died last fall.

When we’re young, some of us have the good fortune of finding a mentor—someone who sees a potential in us others don’t, and who is willing to provide us with a guiding light toward helping us realize it.

The word “mentor” comes from the name of a character in Homer’s book The Odyssey. Mentor was the person entrusted with the education of Odysseus’ son while Odysseus went off to fight the Trojan War, and then spent 10 years wandering the world before making it back home.

In my case, the roles were somewhat reversed—I left home shortly after graduating from high school, and set off for Europe with a backpack for four years. Along the way, I took as my mentor an incarnation of Odysseus in the lovely form of a woman named Ardie Fortier.

I had a passing acquaintance with Ardie growing up in my hometown of Petaluma, as she was the mother of one of my classmates, Carrie Steere. But when I first encountered her and her husband Joe during my travels in their little cottage overlooking the Shannon River in West County Clare, our connection as kindred souls was instantaneous.

*View of the Shannon River from Joe and Ardie’s cottage in Knock, Ireland, 1974 (photo courtesy of Brigham Denison)*

We spent hours in the kitchen—the only warm room in an Irish cottage—talking about everything under the sun—history, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and psychology—all infused with Ardie’s contagious enthusiasm, curiosity, and good humor.

For an aspiring autodidact like myself, out to study the world first hand and not on some college assembly line, it was pure heaven.

Not long after that visit, Ardie and Joe moved to Munich, where Joe took a teaching position at an extension of the University of Maryland, and Ardie took a job at the nearby headquarters of the company that ran the PXs on American military bases in Europe.

Their Munich apartment became my refuge from the road, where I could recharge and reengage with Ardie and Joe in far-reaching discussions around the kitchen table. Some evenings, Joe’s faculty colleagues—an eclectic group of intellectuals from around the globe—would join us, and we’d have a literary salon of sorts with Ardie as host, employing her gracious humor and infectious laughter to keep things from going off the rails.

*Ardie (right) with friend at Bavarian farmhouse, 1977 (photo John Sheehy)*

After a couple years of hitchhiking around Europe, working odd jobs, studying history, literature, and culture, I hit a wall, both broke and burned out. I made my way back to Munich, where Ardie helped me find a place to live and a clerical job at the PX headquarters where she worked. In a weird twist of fate, some months later, I was made an office supervisor, managing a group of people twice my age, including Ardie.

Now, for most people, having to report to a scruffy 21-year old road bum you’ve just helped scrape off the streets, would be awkward, to say the least. But not Ardie.

She stepped in as a mentor, sharing her incredible wealth of emotional intelligence in coaching me on how to manage the crazy bunch of Germans and American expatriates in the office. Because she had a master’s degree in psychology and Joe was a psychology professor, that included a deep dive into the study the Myers-Briggs typology to understand how to work with others.

Ardie’s type was INFP—introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceptive. Mine type was similar—except I was typed as a thinker instead of a feeler, meaning that, while Ardie relied upon feelings to sort out the value of what she was intuitively taking in, I turned to analysis.

*Joe and Ardie walking in Munich’s Englischer Garten , 1976 (photo John Sheehy)*

Joe also conducted tests to determine which professions Ardie and I were best suited for. In Ardie’s case, I believe it was nursing, which she eventually gravitated to later in life. For me, it waswriting and reporting. My least suitable occupation was business management.

When I finally did get around to pursuing a career, it was indeed as an editor at a literary magazine in New York City. But within a couple of years, I gravitated to the least of my talents in becoming the magazine’s publisher. I went on to spend the next 35 years running media companies, with no business management training whatsoever aside from those tutorials with Joe and Ardie, and Ardie’s on-the-job coaching at the office in Munich.

*The author riding the rails in Europe, 1974 (photo courtesy of Brigham Denison)*

It was same with education. I hated the idea of going to college, but as an aspiring autodidact, I was a complete failure, overwhelmed with information. Ardie and Joe helped me to see that the “T” for thinker in my Myers-Briggs profile meant I needed some formal training in critical thinking to make sense what I was taking in.

Once again, Ardie was there as a mentor. She had attended Pomona College for two years before marrying her first husband. After her first two children were born, the family moved to Oregon and Ardie enrolled at Reed College in Portland. There she found her intellectual home, and absolutely thrived. She thought I would too.

*Ardie, second from left, as a student at Reed College, 1955 (photo Reed Griffin yearbook)*

As fate would have it, Reed had only one study-abroad program, and it was at the University of Munich. After hanging out with the Reed students there, I realized Ardie was right—I had found my people.

With Ardie’s help, I applied to Reed—it was the only college I ever applied to—and was surprisingly accepted. While Reed accepted me, they would not provide me with any financial aid, as they considered me a “spice student,” there to add a different life experience to the student body, but not expected to last long. I continued working in Munich for another year to save up the money for my first year of tuition.

Today, thanks to Ardie, I am not only a Reed graduate, but a long-serving member of the college’s board of trustees.

Ardie and Joe eventually returned to the states. After Joe passed away, Ardie joined the Peace Corps in Costa Rica at age 60. Upon her return, we found ourselves near neighbors in San Francisco.

*Ardie in Costa Rica with the Peace Corps, 1990* (photo Steere family)

Ardie and I started volunteering together at a local food bank, making monthly food deliveries to people in need, mostly in the projects. I carried in the food, while Ardie greeted everyone with her generous smile and upbeat manner, mentoring me once again in the characteristics that opened doors wherever she went—courage, curiosity, and compassion.

“On the path laid out before you,” wrote the poet Gary Snyder, another Reed alum, “others have already been that way and picked all the berries. In order to get your own berries, you need to leave the path and make your own trail.”

On her personal odyssey in this life, Ardie not only carved out her own trail, and got her own berries, she inspired me, and I’m sure countless others, to do the same, for which I am eternally grateful.

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A link to Ardie’s obituary in Reed College alumni magazine:

https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/2022/ardeth-owen-steere-fortier-1955.html

Gary Snyder’s Vision of Petaluma

I first became acquainted with Gary Snyder like millions of others—through a novel written by Jack Kerouac called Dharma Bums, which features a thinly fictionalized snapshot of Gary in the 1950s, five years out of Reed College, whole-heartedly engaged in many of the pursuits that he had cultivated while a student here—poetry, mountaineering, countercultural politics, Native American animism, and Zen Buddhism.

We also see a young man on the quest for self-authenticity, involved in what Gary has described as a process of “de-educating” himself after descending from the pinnacle of elite education at Reed College:

Hanging out in the bohemias and underworlds of San Francisco, returning to his working-class roots as a lumberjack, trail maker, and fire lookout in the Cascades, preparing for a sojourn to Japan, where he would spend 12 years studying Zen and writing poetry, returning home to the States to establish a farmstead with a community of family and friends on the San Juan Ridge of the Sierras foothills.

We also get a glimpse in the novel of Gary’s knack for combining the intellectual and the experiential; a knack that, through exploration of a wide range of social, ecological, and spiritual matters in both poetry and prose, he would weave into a new social mythology, one grounded in the most archaic values on earth, and shaped by his literary talent for synthesizing precise observations of nature with a deep insight of reality.

Of course, as a 17-year old reading Dharma Bums, I knew little of this. Sitting out on the porch of the house my great-grandmother built in my hometown of Petaluma, California, renowned as the one-time chicken Egg Basket of the World, I only knew that wherever Gary Snyder was, had to be better than the hell hole I was stuck in.

Gary’s message was simple: On the trail laid out before us, others have already picked all the berries. If you want your own berries, you have to carve out your own trail.

And so, a few months after finishing high school, I pulled together my meager savings and bought a one-way ticket to Europe—my first time on an airplane—and like millions before me joined the so-called “rucksack revolution” that had been inspired by Gary’s character in Dharma Bums.

I spent the next four years hitchhiking the world, working odd jobs, and, in what I took to be the Snyder model, studying everything that crossed my path.

Then I came to Reed. It was the only college I applied to. I wanted training in the skills Gary said that he had received there—the independent thinking, the rigorous discipline, the fearlessness required for holding your ground in any territory you choose to enter.

Reed College Library (Reed College Special Collections Library)

In the classical hero’s journey, after venturing out in search of adventure and self-exploration, the hero returns back home with what Joseph Campbell called the “boons” of his or her travels.

I wasn’t sure what boons I had acquired, but twenty-five years after leaving my hometown of Petaluma, I returned, seeking to recapture something of my roots in a place my family had resided for 150 years. About six months into my return, I was having a difficult time of it, wondering if it was in fact possible to go home again.

Then one evening I went to a book signing by a local author who had written a book entitled Empty Shells: The Story of Petaluma, America’s Chicken City. There were a number of old chicken ranchers I recognized there, sitting around with their prized hens on their laps. As the author signed my book, I noticed that she used a calligraphic style of writing.

“That’s Chancery Cursive,” I said.

“Yes, it is.” she said, “Where I went to school we all had to learn it.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Reed College?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, if you went to Reed, you must know my brother,” she said. “We called him ‘Mr. Reed College,’ and he’s standing right behind you.”

I turned around, and lo and behold, there was Gary Snyder, standing amidst the ranchers and their chickens . . . in my hometown.

The book author turned out to be Thea Snyder Lowry, Reed class of ‘53. Gary explained to me that their father had retired to Petaluma for a spell, and that, at about the time I was in high school, sitting out on the family porch reading Dharma Bums and thinking I was stuck in a hell hole, Gary was riding up to town on his motorcycle on the weekends to visit with his father.

He told me that sitting out on his old man’s front porch—a mere few blocks away from my family’s house—he would think to himself that he had found a bit of heaven.

Which goes to show that sometimes, a turning word from a poet is all it takes to bring us home.

The Snyder family home, 6 Sixth Street, Petaluma, built 1865 (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

A version of this story was first delivered as an introduction for Gary Snyder at a ceremony held on the Reed College campus in which Snyder was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the college.