Gary Snyder said this about writing poetry: “I try to hold both history and wildness in my mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our time.”
I’m marking the day. Snyder was born May 8, 1930, in San Francisco. He’s 92.
Snyder was the basis of Jack Kerouac’s character Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums. I liked the fictional character, and I suspect I’d like the man.
One of the biases — or topics — of this collection of notes is that some really good writers rework texts that are the common property of cultures. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and the boys reworked Greek myths. Snyder is good at reworking traditional texts that are handed down by people who live close to nature.
His “Prayer for the Great Family” is a reworking of a Mohawk prayer. It begins:
Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through the night and day —
and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet
in our minds so be it.
I read the poem as a litany, with the reader, or reciter, listing the wonders for which we can all be grateful, and then the people responding with the refrain:
In our minds so be it.
I love that refrain. In my mind, this poem would be a good Thanksgiving service.
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