Award-winning poet promotes active environmentalism in Utah
There’s only one way it could happen.
To bring together, even for a few hours, two departments as different as Natural Resources and English is nothing less than a modern-day miracle.
The reason? Gary Snyder.
An award winning poet, environmental activist and vocal proponent of Zen Buddhism, Gary Snyder is a modern renaissance man.
Due to a grant from the Eccles foundation, Thursday evening, students and faculty of Utah State University and members of the community were able to hear Snyder’s reading of his as yet unpublished work, “Not Worn, Not Destroyed.”
When his last published work, “Mountain and Rivers without End,” came out in 1996, Snyder was wary whenever anyone would ask him what his next “project” was going to be.
“It seems like today everyone has to have a project,” he said. “But I didn’t want to have a project.”
And so, taking a step back to the simpler poetry of his youth, Snyder came up with a compilation of what he described as his shorter, stranger poems.
With topics ranging from meteorites found in Antarctica that are said to be older than our solar system, to Zen Buddhism, Snyder addressed his audience with what they thought was light humor and serious rhetoric. His poems dealt with love, nature, religion, and even the Sept. 11 events.
But his poetry was only the tip of the iceberg.
Earlier in the afternoon, an informal question and answer lecture was held in the Tippets Gallery in the Fine Arts Center.
“You’ll all be leathery veterans before we quit,” Snyder said.
Snyder began the lecture by quoting part of an address he had delivered at a university in Okinawa, Japan entitled, “The New World Disorder.”
The address followed several negative events of the past several years and reproached many nations of the world for their lack of care in regards to the environment. The address ended by explaining that “get real and get a life” is the daily message of Mother Nature.
Explaining that the opinions expressed in the speech were a good sample of his current thoughts, Snyder then opened the floor to questions from the audience.
Many of the first questions focused on what Utahns could do to protect the environment.
“Put your energy where they will hear it and feel it,” Snyder said. “Just go with the flow. There are many scales at which you can make your voice heard.”
Ken Brewer, the moderator, added that environmentalists also have to make some noise.
“Nature writers are very nice people and very non-confrontational,” Brewer said, “but I think we need to be a little louder. There are lots of ways to be an activist.”
Snyder then discussed what he felt was one of the underlying factors of confrontation between environmentalists and corporations: The viewing of nature as utilitarian by major religious and philosophical characters.
Quoting the famed environmentalist Edward Muir’s essay “Wild Wool,” Snyder explained that “nature is here in its own interest, not in [man’s] interest.”
Snyder also defended compromise as a means of promoting environmental issues.
“It’s true that compromise is always tricky,” he said. “The group Earthfirst used to have the motto, ‘No compromise in defense of Mother Earth.’ Yeah, that’s great, but they boxed themselves into a corner. You get nowhere with that attitude.”
Responding to a question about the role of literature and particularly poetry in promoting the causes he espoused, Snyder said “writing and literature are information and content providers. If you want to make sure of getting your message across, you write prose. I write prose now and again.”
However, Snyder was also quick to point to poetry as a promoter of social change.
“I appreciate the possibility of writing poetry in the passion of the moment that has the potential to change or to help change,” he said, “art is under the radar – art sneaks by – art gets under your skin before you know it. That’s the way … that social and cultural change has always happened.”
With other topics ranging from finding balance between oral and written tradition (“The last genuine flourishing of oral tradition in our culture is dirty jokes,” Snyder said) to the performance art of South-east Asia which takes as long as 14 hours to perform, Snyder definitely brought a liberal education to the table.
“If the intergalactic counsel on the arts asked me ‘who is the regional poet of your planet?'” Brewer said, “I would answer immediately: Gary Snyder.”
-mattgo@cc.usu.edu