Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community (Contemp North American Poetry)

377 Pages·2006·1.61 MB·English

by  Timothy Gray

G A R Y S N Y D E R and the Pacific Rim
S N Y D E R
G A R Y
CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN POETRY SERIES
Series Editors Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, and Adalaide Morris
and the Pacific Rim
C R E A T I N G
C O U N T E R -
C U L T U R A L
by Timothy Gray C O M M U N I T Y
U N I V E R S I T Y O F I O W A P R E S S , I O W A C I T Y
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242
Copyright © 2006by the University of Iowa Press
http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Teresa W. Wingfield
No part of this book may be reproduced or
used in any form or by any means without
permission in writing from the publisher. All
reasonable steps have been taken to contact
copyright holders of material used in this book.
The publisher would be pleased to make suitable
arrangements with any whom it has not been
possible to reach.
The University of Iowa Press is a member of
Green Press Initiative and is committed to
preserving natural resources.
Printed on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gray, Timothy, 1964–.
Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: creating countercultural community/
by Timothy Gray.
p. cm.—(Contemporary North American poetry)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-87745-976-2(cloth)
1. Snyder, Gary, 1930–—Homes and haunts—Pacific Coast (North
America). 2. Snyder, Gary, 1930–—Knowledge—Pacific Coast (North
America). 3. Authors, American—Homes and haunts—Pacific Coast
(North America). 4. Snyder, Gary, 1930–—Criticism and interpretation.
5. Pacific Coast (North America)—Intellectual life. 6. California—
Intellectual life—20th century. 7. Pacific Coast (North America)—In
literature. 8. Counterculture—California. I. Title. II. Series.
ps3569.n88z667 2006
811'.5409—dc22 2005052993
[b]
06 07 08 09 10 c 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents and,
especially, for Maria

C O N T E N T S
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xix
The Pacific Rim and the San Francisco Renaissance: Two Communities
“Taking Place” in Midcentury America 1
1. Migrating: Exploring the Creaturely Byways of the Pacific Northwest 45
2. Translating: The Poetics of Linking East and West 99
3. Embodying: Human Geography and the Way to the Back Country 155
4. Communing: Tribal Passions in the Late 1960s 215
Digging In: The Reinhabitation of Turtle Island 269
Notes 295
Index 343

P R E F A C E
The Geographic Impulse
For several years now, I have been interested in the crosscultural energies
that circulate in avant-garde literary communities. I have therefore found
myself turning time and again to The New American Poetry 1945–1960, a land-
mark collection of early postmodern verse edited by Donald Allen and pub-
lished by Grove Press in 1960. As Allen hints in the preface to this anthology,
it was not just aesthetic experimentation that made the New American Poets
so daring and intriguing, but also the fundamental groupishness these writ-
ers advocated during a period when individualism was the predominant
focus of both cold war political discourse and literary analysis. Displaying an
impulse that is communitarian and geographic by turns, Allen divides forty-
four American poets into five distinct groups: those associated with Black
Mountain College, those who were a part of the San Francisco Renaissance,
those affiliated with the Beat Generation, those belonging to the New York
School, and lastly, those with no geographical definition. Allen explains that
he employs the unusual device of geographical division “in order to give
the reader some sense of the history of the period and the primary align-
ment of the writers” as well as “some sense of milieu.” While Allen admits
that his divisions “are somewhat arbitrary and cannot be taken as rigid cate-
gories,” these delineations continue to influence scholars in the field. By