We finished clearing the last
Section of trail by noon,
High on the ridge-side
Two thousand feet above the creek
Reached the pass, went on
Beyond the white pine groves,
Granite shoulders, to a small
Green meadow watered by the snow,
Edged with Aspen—sun
Straight high and blazing
But the air was cool.
Ate a cold fried trout in the
Trembling shadows. I spied
A glitter, and found a flake
Black volcanic glass—obsidian—
By a flower. Hands and knees
Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards. Not one good
Head, just razor flakes
On a hill snowed all but summer,
A land of fat summer deer,
They came to camp. On their
Own trails. I followed my own
Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,
Pick, singlejack, and sack
Of dynamite.
Ten thousand years.
“Above Pate Valley” by Gary Snyder from Riprap and Cold Mountain. © Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers, 2003. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Today is the birthday of poet Gary Snyder (books by this author), born in San Francisco (1930). When he was 15, he read Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, and he liked it so much that he went to the library to see what else Lawrence had written. He found a book called Birds, Beasts and Flowers. He said, “I was disappointed to find out that it wasn’t a sexy novel, but read the poems anyway, and it deeply shaped me for that moment in my life.” He began writing his own poetry, and continued to write during his years at Reed College, where he studied anthropology and literature. After graduating, he decided that the life of a poet wasn’t for him, and he went to work on a trail crew in the mountains.
In the mountains, he started writing again, poems about rocks and birds. He had never written anything like them before, and he realized that he must finally be writing in his own voice. He taught himself Chinese, and was particularly inspired by Chinese poetry. In 1955, at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, Snyder read his poem “A Berry Feast.” He spent many years studying Zen Buddhism in Japan. In 1961, he published an essay about what he called “Buddhist anarchism,” a concept that excited many of his fellow Beat writers. He was the model for Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958). He lived with a counterculture group on a Japanese island, translated poetry, taught English at the University of California Davis, and became an environmental activist.
His books include Turtle Island (1974), No Nature (1992), New and Selected Poems (1992), and most recently, Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places (2014).
He said, “I am a poet who has preferred not to distinguish in poetry between nature and humanity.”
It’s the birthday of Edmund Wilson (books by this author), born in Red Bank, New Jersey (1895). He is generally considered the greatest American man of letters of the 20th century, though he published almost all of his work in popular magazines. He never took a teaching position and rarely gave lectures.
He went to communist Russia and learned both Russian and German to write about the history of socialism in his book To the Finland Station (1940). He wrote about Russian poetry, Haitian literature, the Hebrew language, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the literature produced during the American Civil War.
Wilson introduced Americans to writers like James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Vladimir Nabokov. He almost single-handedly resurrected the reputation of the novelist Henry James, who had been forgotten for years. He championed new writers like Ernest Hemingway, and it was Wilson who persuaded American readers that F. Scott Fitzgerald had been a genius, and that The Great Gatsby was an American classic.
It’s the birthday of novelist Thomas Pynchon (books by this author), born in the Long Island city of Glen Cove, New York (1937). He’s considered one of the 20th century’s most gifted writers, and certainly one of its most elusive. There are only a few photos of him in circulation, and most of those are from his high school days. Much of what we know — or think we know — about him comes to us by way of rumor or anecdote. In 1977, Playboy published a fairly revealing article about his personal history, written by his college friend Jules Siegel. According to Siegel, Pynchon was obsessive about his teeth, studied with Nabokov at Cornell but couldn’t understand what he was saying, and had an affair with Siegel’s wife. Pynchon has made a couple of appearances on The Simpsons, but his cartoon image is always portrayed with a paper bag over his head. He’s the author of several novels, including V. (1963), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Against the Day (2006). His most recent book is Bleeding Edge (2013).
He said, “Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”