{"id":15131,"date":"2015-09-21T09:08:30","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T16:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2015\/09\/21\/15131.html"},"modified":"2015-09-21T09:08:30","modified_gmt":"2015-09-21T16:08:30","slug":"on-first-looking-into-gary-sny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2015\/09\/21\/on-first-looking-into-gary-sny\/","title":{"rendered":"On first looking into Gary Snyder"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Among the books I rescued from my father's house were six books of poems by Gary Snyder<\/a>. I don't know for sure, but I think Snyder was one of Peter's favorite poets. I've now read or skimmed a couple dozen of the poems, and though they mostly aren't my cup of tea, I think I can see some of what Peter liked about them: the evocation of places up and down the West coast, the connection with nature and with ordinary daily life, the infusion of Zen (as I understand it from Wikipedia, Snyder lived and studied in Japan at various Buddhist temples for some years), the conjunction of manual labor with well-read intellectual curiosity. (Snyder worked as a logger, as a carpenter, and on a steam-freighter crew, among other jobs; Peter at various times worked<\/a> as a ditch-digger, a carpenter, a shipfitter-welder, a janitor, a dish-washer, and more.)<\/p>\n

I'm putting most of the Snyder books in the giveaway box, but I did rather like one poem I read, “Axe Handles<\/a>,” focused around creating a hatchet with his young son. I think part of my liking of this was in the context of thinking about my father and the ways he participated in shaping who I am, but mostly I just like what it says and how it comes together.<\/p>\n

That's the title poem in the book Axe Handles<\/cite>; I think I'll keep this book, or at least read more of it. A few pages later there's a poem called “River in the Valley”; I don't love it overall, but I do like the ending:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

One boy asks, “where do rivers start?”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

in threads in hills, and gather down to here—<\/p>\n

but the river<\/p>\n

is all of it everywhere,<\/p>\n

all flowing at once,<\/p>\n

all one place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among the books I rescued from my father’s house were six books of poems by Gary Snyder. I don’t know…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,85,118,57,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commonplace-book","category-nature","category-parents-children","category-verse","category-writers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}