Gary Snyder
"Reflections from Mt. Saint Helens...A Quarter Century Later"
Wednesday, May 18, 2005, 12:30 AM
GARY SNYDER, one of greatest poets of our time, continues to captivate
audiences with his Buddhist and nature-inspired prose. On the twenty-fifth
anniversary of Mt. Saint Helens' eruption, Snyder will share reflections on
his deep connection to this special place where he came of age. Gary Snyder
will also be reading from his most recent book - Danger on Peaks
(2004).Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930. As a youth in the Pacific Northwest he worked on the family farm and seasonally in the woods. He graduated from Reed college in Portland, Oregon in 1951. After a semester of graduate school in Linguistics at Indiana University he returned west to attend Graduate School at U.C. Berkeley in the Department of East Asian Languages. In the Bay Area Snyder associated with Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and others who were part of the remarkable flowering of west coast poetry during the fifties. In 1956 he moved to Kyoto Japan to study Zen Buddhism and East Asian culture. During his Japan years he travelled six months through India and Nepal, visiting ashrams, shrines and temples, together with Allen Ginsberg and Joanne Kyger.
In 1969 he returned to North America. For the last thirty-two years he has been living in the northern Sierra Nevada. He is married to Carole Koda, and has two sons and two step-daughters. From 1986 until 2002 he taught part time at the University of California at Davis, in the Creative Writing and the Nature and Culture programs. He travels occasionally and widely. His book of essays The Practice of the Wild is widely used as a philosophical challenge to the understanding of the meaning of 'wild.'
Snyder has 18 books of poetry and prose in print. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letter and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Turtle Island won the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1975, and his selected poems No Nature was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992. Mountains and Rivers Without End (a book length poem) won the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1997. His most recent prose book is The High Sierra of California, in collaboration with print artist Tom Killion. Danger on Peaks, new poems, was published in 2004. His books have been translated into a number of languages.
LECTURE SUMMARY
Twenty-five years ago Mount Saint Helens blew 1.4 billion cubic yards of debris up into the air and another 2.3 billion cubic yards sideways, and into Spirit Lake and the North Fork of the Toutle River. Two hundred and thirty square miles of forest were knocked flat by the force of the explosion. Fifty seven people were killed, suffocated by searing hot ash in their lungs. Cities to the northeast of the mountain were covered in an ash twilight.
To mark the anniversary, poet Gary Snyder and ecologist Jerry Franklin shared some of the lessons they each have learned in their combined 100-plus-year relationship with the mountain. The evening was really the culmination of two days that Snyder and Franklin spent with a few scientists and writers on Mount Saint Helens and in Portland, organized by Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project and their Long Term Ecological Reflections program.
Snyder began by reading selections of his prose and poetry from his latest book, Danger on Peaks. It’s always illuminating to hear poetry the way it sounds to its author. But Snyder revealed earlier that it’s illuminating to him as well. He often uncovers new meaning in his work when he reads it aloud. Danger on Peaks itself had to be a learning experience for him, as he wrote it after being invited by USFS geologist Fred Swanson to visit Mount Saint Helens 56 years after he last stood on its snowy summit as a teenager. Snyder accepted the offer, got reacquainted with the mountain, and wrote Danger on Peaks. The book and his readings arched from the perfect cone of the mountain sixty years ago to the 1980 cataclysm, which delighted him (finally, it’s done it!) and saddened him (America’s Fuji-san is gone). And then, of course, to its surprising transformation today. These changes mirror Snyder’s geographic and personal peregrinations, always informed by lucid observations, whether he’s watching a bunch of kids wash a truck or recounting his sister being killed by one.
Jerry Franklin picked up the theme of transformations and cataclysms with a blunt statement: the 1980 eruption was not a catastrophe! It was business as usual. The natural world does this stuff all the time. Just not on our puny time scale. And another surprise: the hoards of environmental scientists who rushed up to Mount Saint Helens started out with the wrong assumptions.
They assumed the apparent devastation meant they wouldn’t see significant recovery for decades. Instead, when they stepped out of the helicopter onto the mudflows and pumice plains ten days after the eruption, residual plants had already poked up through the ash. Invasive species soon followed. Moreover, the recovery of plant life did not just work its way from the edges, but from thousands of remnant refuges that had escaped the full force of the blast – places that had been covered by snow patches, underground burrows, nurse logs riding the debris flow. And today it’s a riot of recovery: patchy, messy, diverse, teeming with life. Franklin’s take-home lesson from his Mount St. Helens experience: humility. He and the best ecologists in the region got their scientific butts kicked by this mountain. He suggested we take this lesson to heart in how we approach the natural world, as scientists, managers and citizens. Don’t be so sure you know what you’re talking about. Shut up and observe. (Sound like a poet?)
Gary Snyder then rejoined Franklin on stage and they talked for half an hour, starting with Snyder asking the scientist questions about the mountain, about old-growth forests, about what he’s learned in the last forty years. Again, the big lesson was humility, and an insatiable curiosity and delight in discovery – as Franklin said of Saint Helens “we were like kids in a candy store.” The media didn’t quite get it at first. It was a catastrophe story to them. It was a recovery story to ecologists. Franklin also emphasized the importance of legacies, the things left behind – logs, snags, seeds, burrowing mammals and insects. What lessons apply from Mount Saint Helens to other landscapes? Sometimes the best management option is to leave it alone.
Franklin then asked Snyder his impressions and observations from walking around the mountain the previous day. Snyder replied with a word-picture of a landscape bursting with life: hundreds of little pools and ponds on the ash plains, amphibians, grasses, sedges, ferns, birds from the east-side and Puget Sound, beaver, deer, elk, predators, forty-foot-tall alder forests pushing up against gravel and ash plains.
Then came questions from the audience, some quick and pithy, with long, thoughtful answers, some long manifestos with appropriately abrupt answers. Both Franklin and Snyder seemed to arrive at a consensus that “leave it alone” was not the only answer to managing natural resources. For example, east-side pine forests carry huge fuel loads, and need to be thinned or they risk un-characteristically severe fire.
One question alluded to how one reacts to “natural” catastrophe (volcanic eruption, tsunami, fire) versus human-caused catastrophe (Hiroshima, 911, Rwanda). Snyder’s observations on his reaction to Hiroshima and the current political scene clearly drew a line between the two.
Franklin emphasized that forestry – and by extension all resource management – is a social science. His job is to make sure that decision makers are well enough informed that they know when they’re making a decision that bucks the science. Both were asked about the effect of global warming on Mount Saint Helens, and both poet and scientist circled back to humility: “We don’t know."
Snyder's Brief Bibliography
Books in print:
Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems 1959 (1990)
Myths and Texts 1960 (1978)
The Back Country (1968)
Regarding Wave (1970)
Turtle Island (1974) Pulitzer Prize
Axe Handles (1983)
Left Out in the Rain (1986)
No Nature "New and Selected Poems" (1992)
Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996)
Danger on Peaks (2004)
Prose:
Earth House Hold (1969)
He Who Hunted Birds in his Father's Village. "The Dimensions of a Haida Myth" (1979)
The Real Work 'Interviews and Talks' (1980)
Passage Through India (1984)
The Practice of the Wild (1990)
A Place in Space (1995)
The High Sierra of California (2002)
Other works:
The Gary Snyder Reader 'Prose, Poetry & Translations' (1999)
Look Out: 'A Selection of Writings' (2002)
Read Gary Snyder's Online:
Poems
Essays