Recently Amazon pointed me in the direction of the Gary Snyder Reader, a compendium of his fifty years of writing: I bought it!
It must have been the late sixties/early seventies when I first came across his poetry; perhaps it was from reading Jack Kerouac or maybe I was simply browsing through the poetry section in Compendium Books in Camden Town–I no longer remember.
I loved his writing then and I love it now, and right now I want to quote from Poetry and the Primitive which was first published in Earth House Hold. My copy of Earth House Hold was published in 1969:
“”Poetry” as the skilled and inspired use of the voice and language to embody rare and powerful states of mind that are in immediate origin personal to the singer, but at deep levels common to all who listen. “Primitive” as those societies that have remained nonliterate and nonpolitical while necessarily exploring and developing in directions that civilised societies have tended to ignore. Having fewer tools, no concern with history, a living oral tradition rather than an accumulated library, no overiding social goals, and considerable freedom of sexual and inner life, such people live vastly in the present. Their daily reality is a fabric of friends and family, the field of feeling and energy that one’s own body is, the earth they stand on and the wind that wraps around it; and various areas of consciousness.”
That’s worth some reflection.
On the train, as it waited to cross the border from Serbia into Bulgaria – waiting for customs officers to check the roof spaces for hidden contraband; police to look at us severely, and passport control to check and stamp our passports – I noticed graffiti on the wall next to the track:
Not only in English, which surprised me, but an uttering, a “poem” which links to what Gary Snyder celebrates.
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