Gary Snyder and the Curve of Return
Robert Schultz
Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930. He grew up in Washington state and in Portland, hiking the woods and sometimes logging in them. After a brief early marriage, the Reed graduate interspersed work on a trail crew in Yosemite with study of Oriental languages at Berkeley. He was on hand the night in 1955 when Ginsberg first read "Howl" and later shared a cabin with Kerouac in Mill Valley. At 26 he left America for Japan, married again, and spent much of the next 13 years there, traveling and studying at its Zen monasteries. In 1967 he married his third wife—Masa Uehara—on the lip of an active volcano. They returned to California in 1968 and moved to San Juan Ridge in the hot, pine-studded foothills of the Sierra Nevada. There they continue to build their home, Kitkitdizze, and to raise two sons, Kai and Gen.
Snyder's career has been expressed through two motions at once unique and complementary: turning and returning. Turning emphasizes all that is unique, passing, lost; returning, all that is collective, located, able to be held. The choice is as simple as one between the road and home, though at its most exalted it becomes one between transcendence and a life lived in time. The strongest poem in Snyder's latest book, Axe Handles (1983), beautifully captures the tension between the urge out and away and the need to settle and stay. It is called "True Night."
As the poem begins, the sleeping poet is suddenly awakened by the clatter of racoons in the kitchen. He chases them outdoors only to find himself caught by the temptation of permanent escape:
