Beat hero, steward of the earth, Zen Buddhist—in his mid-eighties, poet Gary Snyder looks back on an honorable life at the leading edge. Shortly after his eighty-fifth birthday, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, naturalist, and all-around Renaissance man Gary Snyder read from his latest (and possibly last) collection of poems, This Present Moment, as part of the City Arts and [...]
“Mars” series author Kim Stanley Robinson on bringing science, Buddhism together
“Literature is my religion,” says Kim Stanley Robinson. “The novel is my way of making sense of things.” He doesn’t meditate, nor does he call himself a Buddhist. Nonetheless, he’s quick to acknowledge that Buddhism has had a profound impact on him and his writing. Zen philosophy, in particular, has taught him to stay in the moment, to pay attention to the natural world, and to [...]
Review: This Present Moment
This Present Moment Counterpoint, 88 pp., $22 (cloth) This is Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder’s first collection of new poems in ten years. In “Hai-en Temple South Korea Home of the Total Tripitaka Set of Printing Blocks,” he wakes us up with sound—the reverberations of a great drum, a bell, and sutra chanting. Then in “Mu Chi’s Persimmons,” he references the teachings [...]
Writers and the War Against Nature
Buddhism, art, and environmentalism—all honor the beauty and magic of the natural world. In a powerful autobiographical essay, the poet, sage, and Zen practitioner Gary Snyder traces his lifelong commitment to the environment and calls on all creative people to rise in its defense. I grew up in the maritime Pacific Northwest, on a farm north of Seattle where we kept a hen [...]
The Wild Mind of Gary Snyder
For the nineties, the celebrated Beat rebel advocates "wild mind," neighborhood values and watershed politics. "Wild mind," he says, "means elegantly self-disciplined, self-regulating. That's what wilderness is. Nobody has a management plan for it." Asked if he grows tired of talking about ecological stewardship, digging in, and coalition-building, the poet Gary Snyder [...]
Not Here Yet
Remarks by Gary Snyder on Buddhism, Ecology & the Poetics of Homelessness. The question of our ethical obligations and community with non-human creatures has been with me since childhood. It was the question which drove me out of Lutheran Sunday school at about the age of nine. My Sunday school teacher told me my dead heifer would not go to heaven; that was the end of [...]