Poetry for a New Year : Outside In : NO NATURE: New and Selected Poems, <i> By Gary Snyder (Pantheon: $25; 390 pp.)</i>

In 1955, fresh from his triumph at the Six Gallery in San Francisco where he recited “Howl” to a stunned audience for the first time, Allen Ginsberg showed up with his cohort, Gary Snyder, to read their poems at the University of Washington. They were dressed identically in black turtlenecks and jeans, with “Ez for Prez” buttons pinned to their sweaters (Ezra Pound, not Ezra Taft Benson, as the more conventional poet I was dating at the time observed sourly--Benson being the current secretary of agriculture under Eisenhower, not the famed poet who had been tried for treason). Ginsberg, fuzzy and hairy, read “Howl” to predictable gasps and a few walkouts. Snyder, fresh-faced, red-headed and neatly put together (as he still is), read a few poems in traditional meters (some of which can be found in the eighth section of “No Nature”), then announced dramatically, “Enough of this Yeatsean Eliotic stuff!” and launched into a few of the poems that are still characteristic of his work today: fresh, minutely observed evocations of the world of nature in which he had immersed himself, in free meters. Gary was 25.

A dozen years later, my young daughter was an exchange student in Japan. On a field trip, without a syllable of preparation, she was herded into the Hiroshima Museum. The horror and the shock of what she saw sent her fleeing from the museum, back on the train to Tokyo. She was huddled on a bench, weeping, when an attractive, kindly young redheaded man came down the aisle and tried to comfort the girl. Being a well-read child, she recognized his name when he mentioned it, and said shyly that her mother was a poet too. On hearing my name--far more obscure than his own--he at once embraced her.

In the middle of the next decade, Gary Snyder and John Hollander and I were sitting in the handsome office of the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Two poets more unlike could hardly be imagined: Hollander, formalist, academic, rather stuffy and shy, the archetypal Inside Man confronting Gary, the inimitable Outside Man, ardent and poised. How did they get along? Famously. Both men are etymology freaks; arcane word derivations were flying around the room like paper airplanes, buzzed by phrases from half a dozen arcane languages. They had such a good time! Stanley Kunitz, the poetry consultant, and I turned from one man to the other as if we were watching a particularly inspired badminton match between two champions.

Interviewed during the ‘70s, Snyder said that poetry comes to him from the outside, not from the inside. In a new poem, “How Poetry Comes to Me,” near the end of this collection, he writes:

It comes blundering over the

Boulders at night, it stays

Frightened outside the

Range of my campfire

I go to meet it at the

Edge of the light

This is what Snyder, the greatest of living nature poets, means by calling his book “No Nature.” In the preface he writes: “The greatest respect we can pay to nature is not to trap it, but to acknowledge that it eludes us and that our own nature is also fluid, open, and conditional.” The last poem in the book echoes the phrase, implying that to set any limits on nature is to deny its essence. Nature is everywhere, within and without, in, as he says in another poem, “parsnips or diapers, the deathless / nobility at the core of all ordinary things,” and in Shakespeare and Li Po, the good, bedrock ordinariness in the mind of genius.

The first poem in the book, from “Riprap” (1959), “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” reveals how early Snyder found his own voice, and with what sureness he set down the lines:

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.

Not yet 30 when he wrote this, he incorporated so many of the elements we still recognize in his work: the quality that the first stanza shares with Sung landscape painting; the first couplet in the second stanza reminiscent of the T’ang poet, Po Chu-I; some of the five senses in the last three lines--taste, touch and sight. And we taste the cold metal of that cup with our lips and teeth--that snow-cold water!

But several aspects of Snyder’s work emerge in this collection that haven’t, to my knowledge, been recognized. For example, reviewers and interviewers customarily bring up the Oriental and Zen elements in Snyder’s work. They tend to overlook the quite open references to Western literature. Often these references are made lightheartedly and playfully, as in “Milton by Fire-Light,” in which the central figure proclaims: “O hell, what do mine eyes with grief behold?” and proceeds to question the relevance of these lines while he’s blasting granite with an old single-jack miner. He goes on to say that the Sierras will be dead in ten thousand years, “No paradise, no fall. . . . Oh Hell!” The poem ends sweetly:

The bell-mare clangs in the

meadow

That packed dirt for a fill-in

Scrambling through loose rocks

On an old trail

All of the summer’s day.

That last line, as if to tease Milton’s orotund rhetoric, is from a simple old nursery rhyme (the line itself copied and teased by Lewis Carroll as well).

In a series of poems called “Logging” (from “Myths and Texts”), writing of a pine cone chased by squirrels, Snyder quotes Keats: “What mad pursuit! What struggle to escape!,” again playfully; these poems contain references to Han Shan, Crazy Horse, the Gautama, the Haida, Cybele and the Weyerheuser Timber Company. And, to quote from his cohort, Robert Creeley, “They all fit!” because Snyder has so fully internalized everything he has ever seen.

Eroticism is another quality frequently overlooked in Snyder’s poetry. Take the poem “Night,” from “The Back Country” (reprinted in full last week):

. . . the bit tongue and trembling

ankle,

joined palms and twined legs,

the tilted chin and beat cry,

hunched shoulders and a throb in

the belly.

teeth swim in loose tongues, with

toes curled.

eyes snapped shut, and quick

breath.

hair all tangled together.

There are others--”September,” “Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills, Your Body”--in which the account of love-making is equally vivid and poignant because it occurs in the midst of homely, ordinary things: “ate dinner on worn mats / clean starcht yukata / warm whisky with warm water . . . told each other / what we’d never said before, ah, / dallying on mats / whispering sweat / cools our kissing skin . . . . “

Poems like “Axe Handles” (from the book of the same name) are much more basic to the Snyder cosmos. In this poem, Snyder is teaching his son, Kai, to make a hatchet by carving an old axe handle into a hatchet handle. He is reminded of a phrase first learned from Ezra Pound, which is a translation from the “Wen Fu” of Lu Ji, a 4th-Century discourse on poetics: “In making the handle of an axe by cutting wood with an axe the model is indeed near at hand.”

My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

Translated that and taught it

years ago

And I see: Pound was an axe,

Chen was an axe, I am an axe

And my son a handle, soon

To be shaping again, model

And tool, craft of culture,

How we go on.

How we go on. . . . And it helps us to go on, having Gary Snyder in our midst.