Poem As Work-Place: Gary Snyder’s Ecological Poetics Essay, Research Paper
Nick Selby
For
the American poet Gary Snyder the poem is a work-place. The idea of work, I shall argue
throughout this paper, is central to Snyder’s ecological poetics because it allows him to
throw explicit attention on to the act of ‘writing the land’. This is clear from his
well- known environmental concerns, and his work with various ecological projects in
America since the sixties. Critics have thus tended to see his poetics as an assertion of
the interconnectedness of all things that is both Buddhist and ecological. According to
Helen Vendler Snyder is better known as an ‘ecological activist’ than poet, but I
shall argue that his poetics is an ecological poetics: it is the site for acts of reading
that are ecological in their attempt to read land and poem as one. I want to suggest,
however, that Snyder’s ecological poetics discovers dualities — land versus poem, human
versus nature, self versus other — even as it seeks to overwrite them in what Snyder
terms the ‘real work’ of integrating self, society and, most crucially, environment.
Whilst this marks his challenge to the ideology of mainstream America, it also marks the
extent to which his poetry is a product of deeply ingrained patterns of American culture.
Snyder’s poetic work ethic, this paper argues, is the ground upon which anxieties about
the annihilation of personal and cultural identities, anxieties at the heart of American
thought, are worked through. This is because the dualities which Snyder’s work expose
indicate a troubled relationship to the land, they discover faultlines that are deeply
ingrained in American culture. Snyder’s ecological poetics recognises that these can no
longer be sublimated into romantic myths of the land, but must be seen as the traces of
divisive self-division at the heart of the American psyche.
The poem ‘I went into the Maverick Bar’ from
Snyder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Turtle Island (1974) bears the traces of such
anxieties in its nostalgic recollection of fifties America. To read the poem’s opening
lines is to enter an apparently hostile environment, a working-class bar in
‘Farmington, New Mexico’. Not only does the poem’s first-person narrator tell us that
his ‘long hair was tucked under a cap / [and] I’d left the earring in the car’ (lines
5-6) as a measure of his sense of alienation from the other people in the bar, but the
waitress’ question ‘where are you from?’ (line 10) is eerily ambiguous, made more
threatening by its being set against the syntactically strange ‘Two cowboys did
horseplay / by the pool tables’ (lines 7-8). Interestingly, such anxiousness results from
the fact that the bar is seen as a place of leisure, not work. The cowboys ‘play’, as
does a country-and-western band, and a couple get up to dance. Against (or within) this
setting the narrator remembers working in Oregon in the fifties:
They [the dancing couple] held each other like in
High School dances
in
the fifties
I recalled when I worked in the woods
and
the bars of Madras, Orgeon.
That short-haried joy and roughness —
America
— your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.
(lines 15-21)
The narrator’s sense of his relationship to
America, though fraught and ambiguous like the syntax of these lines, is one which he
seeks to clarify through his relationship to the work he once did in the woods and bars of
Oregon. If his alienation seems to frame a challenge to the complacent America portrayed
in this bar, it is also seen to be the product of imagery traditionally thought of as
‘deeply’ American. Thus, although the poem specifically recalls the fifties — itself
a period fraught by questions of Americanness — 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 identity that the poem is able to play with
various American personae. In the space of these few lines, and because of their
indeterminacy of reference, we encounter the Beat outsider of the fifties (the apostrophe
to America’s ‘stupidity’ leads to a declaration of allegiance that sounds strikingly
similar to the Allen Ginsberg of Howl and Other Poems); a ‘joy and roughness’ which
recalls Walt Whitman as ‘one of the roughs’; and a romanticising of work in America’s
Northwest that recalls a mythology of rugged frontiersmen who see the land as a space for
the testing of individual and national identities.
The variety and complexity of such personae mean
that the poem does not express Snyder’s ‘unbecoming egotism’ as David A. Carpenter
claims, nor does it fully manage to accomplish, as Bert Almon believes, the ‘real
work’ of turning America back into ‘"Turtle Island," the aboriginal name
for the continent’. What we do encounter, though, is a poem that works by turning back
(seemingly without irony) to a ‘real’ experience of America as that which ultimately
validates identity. Thus, in the final lines of the poem, we witness a re-inscription of
founding ideological assumptions about America, ones that write of the American land as a
place for a mythical regeneration of self:
under
the tough old stars —
In the shadow of the bluffs
I
came back to myself
To the real work, to
"What
is to be done."
{lines 23-27)
Myths of the New World as Eden, or as God’s
plantation, as a virgin land, or the land of opportunity have all sought (paradoxically,
perhaps) a way of writing America into reality. In just such a mythic space we see
Snyder’s narrator ‘rediscovering’ his ‘real self’. The ‘real work’ of this
poem, then, involves recognizing the patterns of traditional imagery that turn America as
workplace into America as poem.
The pattern of identification between poem, land
and work is already well established in Snyder’s first two published collections, Riprap
(1959) and Myths and Texts (1960). His ‘Statement on Poetics’ for Donald
Allen’s influential anthology The New American Poetry (1960) makes this clear:
I’ve just recently come to realise that the
rhythms of my poems follow the rhythm of the physical work I’m doing and life I’m leading
at any given time – - which makes the music in my head which creates the line.
However, it is in the very emphasis upon the
physical, upon the attempt to ground poetry in the ‘real work’ of the world, that
Snyder’s texts display a deep anxiety about seeing the land as poem. This is not just an
anxiety of American poetics, but one which lies at the heart of American thought because
it is coupled with anxieties about the effacement of identity within, and by, the land.
Such anxieties disclose typically American concerns in the way in which their focus is
transferred on to questions of the textual. I disagree, therefore, with Lawrence Buell who
contends that an attention to the textual in American culture leads to a dissociation from
the land. Whereas Buell argues that the marking of the gap between world and text
effectively silences any environmental concerns, my point is that the anxiousness American
culture displays in its marking of this gap is indicative of the anxiousness of its
environmental imagination. The ‘real work’ of Snyder’s ecological poetics, then,
involves the paradoxical recognition that reading the land and poem as one is to assert
their discontinuity, it is to recognise the gap between culture and nature that any
representation of the land as a work-place implies. To see American Literature generated
from a ‘sequence of spiritual appropriations of, and by, the land’, as Marshall
Walker claims, is to mark how concern for the American land has always, in American
thought from colonial times onwards, been marked by the turning of that land into a scene
of writing. The considerable anxieties about selfhood and identity that are evidenced in
American texts generally, and in Snyder’s poetry particularly, thus disclose and write
over anxieties about the land as the cultural determinant of American identity.
This helps to explain why Snyder’s poetry is
usually read as a fairly untroubled meditation on the visionary relationship between
environments of work, mind and land. Typically, his poetry is described as one that
‘integrat[es]‘, in the words of Patrick Murphy, ‘the routines of physical work
with the life of the mind’. What this paper seeks to challenge is the assumed ease with
which such integration takes place. I shall argue, by looking at Riprap and Myths
and Texts, that Snyder’s poetry works to make troubled those notions of lyrical
voice, imagist clarity and the poem as environment that are assumed ‘natural’ to his
visionary poetics. Indeed, it will be seen that the categories of ‘the natural’ and
‘the visionary’ which have troubled Anglocentric American thought since the Puritans,
and were the particular focus of concern for the romanticism of Emerson and Thoreau,
remain troublesome to Snyder.
The opening poem of Riprap,
‘Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout’, clearly announces the book’s major theme:
an exploration of the relationship between land(scape) and self that is established
through work. The poem derives from Snyder’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 poem of visionary experience in imitation of the classical Chinese poetry
that Snyder was studying at this time. What these readings forget is that it is a
work-poem. Work as a lookout depends upon visual experience, on the act of looking. The
narrator is thus defined by his relationship to the landscape because of his work of
reading it for signs of fire. This relationship is embodied in the poem’s structure, with
its first half describing the landscape and its second half the ‘I’ within that
landscape. The work of the poem lies, therefore, in its bringing together of land and
self:
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 poem’s attention is upon the work of mediation, or as I shall develop later, upon
an idea of exchange. Not only is this implicit in the poem’s form but in its imagery. And
in both cases the insistent demand of reading the poem is that we see it as a work-place.
In formal terms the poem works because of the way
in which the apparently unmediated description of the landscape in its first half
(‘Down valley …’) mediates and is mediated by the gaze of the narrator (who is
‘Looking down for miles’) in the poem’s second half. But that gaze, his reading of
the landscape, is the lookout’s work. And in terms of imagery the smoke haze, heat haze,
and swarming flies in the poem’s first half alert the attention because they look like
signs of fire, like smoke. The work of reading these signs is therefore crucial, and
determines the process of reading the poem. This is seen both in the way that ‘smoke
haze’ is, upon further reading, shown to be the result, not of a forest fire, but of
‘Three days heat, after five days rain’, and also in the fact that the final
smoke-like image of the stanza turns out to be ‘Swarms of new flies’. Our work of
reading the poem is thus analogous to the work it describes.
This is also evident in the line ‘Pitch
glows on the fir-cones’. The line is not simply at the physical centre of the stanza. It
balances — mediates between — the two smoke images because it discovers the poem’s
central pattern of imagery. The line’s image, in which the natural is closely attended to,
or read, is also an image that depicts such an act of reading as, inescapably, an act of
mediation. The ‘fir-cones’ are not seen directly, but through the medium of glowing
pitch. This, in turn, alerts the reader to the work of the poem itself whereby the
landscape is always mediated through acts of reading. The valley is seen through haze;
‘rocks and meadows’ are seen trough swarms of flies; and, importantly, the poem’s
final image looks down at the environment surrounding Sourdough mountain ‘Through
high still air’. Clear as this air may seem, it is still a medium through which the
landscape must be read. Even the narrator’s apparently clear vision of the landscape is a
matter of mediation between the human and the natural. Thus the work of the poem means
that we see the landscape through the poem just as the narrator sees the landscape through
the ‘high still air’.
The poem suggests, therefore, that an apparently
visionary experience of the land is marked, in fact, not by clarity and transparency in
the relation between the human and the natural, but rather by a sense of that relationship
as one of inescapable mediation. Always, the poem suggests, the land must be worked upon,
it must be read. Snyder’s poetics of the real, then, both throws attention upon the gap
between text and world, and seeks to abolish that gap through the work of reading. Thus,
although the act of reading is the poem’s controlling trope, its real work, such an act
does not signal a coming back to oneself so much as an anxious recognition that selfhood
and identity are continually effaced by the land. At the moment of its realisation in the
poem, the narrator’s ‘I’ is obliterated, forgotten, even as it reads itself into the
land and the text: ‘I cannot remember things I once read / A few friends, but they
are in cities’.
Such moments, in which the speaking subject is
obliterated even as it speaks, have commonly been read in American Literature (and in
Snyder) as moments of visionary transcendence. This results from the romantic legacy of
Emerson, and has meant that the relationship between the human and the natural is seen as
visionary, unmediated, a transparent integration of self and universe. Famously this finds
expression in the passage — according to Harold Bloom ‘the most American passage
that will ever be written — from Emerson’s essay ‘Nature’ (1836) when, for a moment
on Boston Common, the self becomes all-seeing:
Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by
the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a
transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being
circulate through me …
Cary Wolfe points to the paradox at the heart of
this passage, noting that here the ‘pinnacle of selfhood … disappear[s] at the very
moment of its attainment’. Indicatively American, such a paradoxical economy of the self
may seem, initially, to operate similarly in Snyder’s poetry. Accounts that situate
Snyder’s poetry, for example, in the post-Poundian objectivist ‘school’ stress that
its lyrical effect is powerful precisely because, paradoxically, it witnesses an
Emersonian obliteration of ‘all mean egotism’. It thus seems to enact the
‘getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego’ by which Charles
Olson characterises objective verse. However, the visionary moment for Emerson’s
‘I/Eye’ works through an obliteration of any sense of the land itself as real. This
is clearly in stark contrast to Snyder’s poetics of the land as work-place.
If Emerson’s vision seems ‘most American’ it
is because the relationship to the ground it describes is one of unmediated exchange
between self and other, inner and outer natures. The image of the ‘transparent
eyeball’ does not describe a working of the land but a transcending of it. Emerson’s
symptomatically American moment therefore portrays a refusal, or at least an inability, to
read the land: Boston Common becomes an unreadable blank page, ‘bare ground’. Thus,
whereas Snyder’s poetics of work marks a troubled exchange between land and text,
Emerson’s moment of visionary transcendence signals a spiritual appropriation of the land
that turns its gaze away from that very land. What seems quintessentially American about
this is the way in which anxieties about America’s ideological foundation, the colonial