User:Kris! Barks/Poetic Analysis

Prologue
You may have noticed this is a Wikipedia user page. I figured I wanted to try something different using Wikipedia's sandbox feature. I think the format is more interesting and the built-in ability to add hyperlinks to various topics could be helpful if not just a neat gimmick. Nevertheless, a Google Doc version is still available here if being BORING is more fun.

When we started this assignment, you gave us all a list of poets. Looking at the list, it wasn't difficult to figure out which individuals this assignment was designed to work with. You had Poe and T.S Eliot and all the other popular writers and I knew that these would be the people everyone would choose. But I didn't want to go that boring route, so I put all the names on a spinning wheel chooser (this) and left the choice up to chance. That's how I ended up with Gary Snyder for my poetic analysis and oh boy was researching this freak a helluva ride. So let's get into it!

Biography
Gary Snyder has a wacky life story which is great because I love those. Snyder was a hippie, plain and simple. Born in 1930s San Francisco and raised in and around Oregon and Washington, where he became interested in the local Native American groups. Initially studying as an anthropologist focused on regional folklore and myths, his interest in Zen led him to drop that in favour of Asian culture and languages during which he learned ink wash painting and studied Tang dynasty poetry. His interest in landscape painting inspired him to emulate the visual through poetry. Eventually, Snyder up and left to Japan to study Zen, learning the Japanese language and being initiated into the Shugendō religion along the way. By the end, he was pretty much a monk. From there on, he travelled India becoming an anarcho-Buddhist. But he was also influential in the U.S. as part of the San Francisco Renaissance during the Beat Generation. All this to say that the poetic style this now 90-year-old guy formed through all of these experiences made his works... well... unique to say the least.

Analysis
Snyder's works have always followed a free verse form. His poems also lack any particular metre or rhyming scheme. The main focus of Snyder's works have always surrounded his -well- surroundings! And given the diversity of surroundings in which Snyder has written his poems, it is no surprise that they vary very much. But you have expressly forbidden us from contrasting so I shall continue on comparing.

Observing Observation
The central theme which binds most of these works together is the idea of observation. This concept of observation is probably most simply conveyed in Waiting for a Ride in which the entire poem is nothing but a list of observations. Our protagonist, who is "Standing at the baggage passing time: / Austin Texas airport," spends his time making note of the goings on in the present "My wife and stepdaughter are spending weekdays in town" as well the past "Full moon was October second this year," before ending on the observation that in the future he'll probably find himself in the same situation "there you are again / / waiting for your ride." We can also point to a more literal example of observation in A Dent in a Bucket a poem so short that I can quote it in its entirety right now: "Hammering a dent out of a bucket / a woodpecker / answers from the woods." Here, the entire poem is just a single observation. Further examples include Kyoto:March "A few light flakes of snow / Fall in the feeble sun; / Birds sing in the cold, / A warbler by the wall" and Meeting the Mountains "He crawls to the edge of the foaming creek / He backs up the slab ledge / He puts a finger in the water / He turns to a trapped pool."

While all of the poems shown here keep with the theme of observation, they can be further divided in how these observations are used to tell a story. They fall into two categories: what I've decided to call myths and recollections. Let's start with the latter.

Recollections
Given Snyder's rich array of experiences, it's not a shock that many of his poems take inspiration from (if not entirely take) his life and travels and recount them in poem form. Waiting for a Ride, which we've spoken of before, is one such recollection of an actual, if mundane, event in Snyder's life. A bit of research shows that the protagonist waiting at the airport is in fact Snyder which can be surmised through the mention of his "wife", "former wife", and "former former wife" who "has become a unique poet." Snyder has been married multiple times, including to Carole Lynn Koda who indeed would become a poet, writing her first work Homegrown: Thirteen brothers and sisters, a century in America in 1991. The bottom of the text dates the poem to 5 October 2001 making the line "Full moon was October second this year" factual.

Seaman's Ditty, uniquely this time written in the form of a ditty, is also a poetic recounting of one of Snyder's travels. The ditty tells the story of a seaman working on a ship "Today I worked in the deep dark tanks, / And climbed out to watch the sea:" who thinks back to how things could have been different if he had never left a former lover "We could’ve had us children, / We could’ve had a home— / But you thought not, and I thought not, / And these nine years we roam." This poem is dated as "Indian Ocean, 1959." The date coincides with Snyder's second trip to Japan in which he sailed through the Indian Ocean as a crewman on an oil freighter. Further, Snyder had been a seaman when in 1950 he met and married his first wife Alison Gass only for the pair to separate seven months later and nine years before the writing of this poem "And these nine years we roam." Notably, only lines in the poem which deal with reality keep with the observational theme "Today I worked in the deep dark tanks, / And climbed out to watch the sea: while the "what ifs" "Now if we’d stayed together, / There’s much we’d never’ve known—" break with that pattern.

Myths
In contrast to recollections, Snyder's myth poems do not tell true stories and, at least in my experience, are the most outwardly bizarre of the lot. Poems such as The Berry Feast and The Bath add more spiritual "The worlds like an endless / four-dimensional / Game of Go." and fantastical "'Up yours!' sang Coyote / and ran." elements. From what I've seen, they're also either the most outwardly crude "'Gary don’t soap my hair!' /  —his eye-sting fear— / the soapy hand feeling /  through and around the globes and curves of his body / up in the crotch, / And washing-tickling out the scrotum, little anus, / his penis curving up and getting hard" or are the most nonsensical "Cobble of milky way, / straying planets, / These poems, people, / lost ponies with / Dragging saddles— / and rocky sure-foot trails." Now I will be entirely honest, these poems read like a fever dream and I'm certain that I'd have to be equally as drug-induced to even begin to comprehend what the living hell is going on within them. This to say, I do not understand what greater meaning works such as Riprap are attempting to convey when they say "Granite: ingrained" and I won't insult your intelligence by pretending that I do. What I will do is note that despite the psychosis of these poems, even they keep with the observational pattern. We see it in The Bath with "The kerosene lantern set on a box / outside the ground-level window, / Lights up the edge of the iron stove and the / washtub down on the slab" and The Berry Feast "Bear has been eating the berrie s. / high meadow, late summer, snow gone."

Why should you care?
Not everyone may understand Snyder's poetry but the concepts they bring are easy enough to grasp. Snyder's works are influenced by the fact he is a practising Buddhism. With its teachings and meditations on being attune with the world around us, it makes sense that much of Snyder's poetry would carry the same themes. Do I particularly like poetry? No. Did I enjoy Snyder's poetry? Depends. Some of them feel like checklists, others like A Dent in a Bucket are comedy gold in terms of self-aware humour, while poems like Riprap are fairly interesting if confusing and The Bath left me horribly traumatised. To each their own I suppose. "I ate a mooncake"