Pulitzer-Winning Counterculture Poet to Make His Way to CalArts

Poets, as few others, must live close to the world that primitive men are in: the world in its nakedness, which is fundamental for all of us--birth, love, death, the sheer fact of being alive.

--Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder is tolerant of many things--but cities are not one of them. “I think New York should be leveled and made into a buffalo pasture,” he once told the Village Voice.

This week, however, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet will make his way down from his remote home in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada to the outer limits of Los Angeles (Langley Hall at CalArts in Valencia). Today, he’ll read a selection of his works and then lead a workshop on Zen Buddhism and its relation to the arts.

Snyder has worked as a carpenter, a logger, a seaman, a fire lookout, even a burglar alarm installer--all jobs that somehow inspired his work. But Snyder’s most significant life/work change occurred when he dropped out of the Beat poetry scene in 1956 (he was part of the legendary poetry reading at San Francisco’s Six Gallery that started the Beat era) to study Zen Buddhism in Japan. When he returned to the United States in the late 1960s, he spoke out on ecological and environmental issues and was dubbed a counterculture hero for his views. In 1975, he was awarded the Pulitzer for his book of poems “Turtle Island.”

For all his awards and firmly held convictions, most of his poems are not confrontational--they emphasize the oneness of the world over the separateness of individuals. (Some notable exceptions are his poems that rage against the California government for its environmental policies.) “I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind,” Snyder has written, “that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”

Poet Gary Snyder reads from his works and lectures on Zen Buddhist practice and its relation to the arts today in CalArts’ Langley Hall, 24700 W. McBean Parkway, Valencia. The reading begins at 12:30 p.m., lecture at 3 p.m. Admission is free. Call (818) 367-5507 or (805) 253-7832.