312
ROBERT BOYERS
Southern Review.
In its particulars the essay is fine, drawing attention
to Snyder's many failings as an artist, even acknowledging that Snyder
apparently cares less than he should for the art of poetry. Only what
Professor Parkinson says about some, or many, of Snyder's poems can
be
said of any of them, virtually without exception, and Professor Parkinson
seems to know this is so. Otherwise, why not provide, in the course
of a lengthy article, some one or two samples of the poet's achieved
work? The most Professor Parkinson is willing to give us are brief
fragments of poems that do not wholly succeed, for a variety of rea–
sons including glibness, the reduction of persons and experiences to the
status of objects and unnecessary clogging of lines in the interests of
compression. How then, seeing what he does obviously see, can Profes–
sor Parkinson say of one of Snyder's earlier volumes, "It has received
no prizes, but over the years it may well become, for those men who
care, a sacred text"?
I do not doubt that a number of Snyder's texts are treasured as
sacred books, but precisely by those who do
not
care, at least about
poetry as an art form. Snyder's most recent, and best publicized volume
tells us all we need to know about his poetry, and the concerns of 1m
disciples.
The Back;, Country
is a collection of generally brief lyrics
covering Snyder's characteristic themes, and written over a period of
roughly fifteen years. Reflected in these poems are Snyder's love of the
West Coast, especially the rugged mountain country where, presumably,
a man can be a man and smoke Marlboro and learn all about wood–
lore: "Woke once in the night, pissed, / checkt the coming winter's
stars / built up the fire / still glowing in the chilling dawn." More
im-
portant, though, is Snyder's long familiarity with the Orient, and
his
consequent love of all things orientally exotic, including Japanese place–
names, family names and the names of dishes most Americans will not rec–
ognize. Predictably, Snyder's things and places are for him simply guide-
posts in what the poet obviously considers a vast spiritual journey, one that
is to permit him to engage and transcend the realities of civilization
and evoke the superiority of wilderness and humble orient. The trouble
is that Snyder never really shows us why the one ought to be recom–
mended over the other - the contexts in which sensations and impres-
sions are evoked are patently unreal and unelaborated, in the nature of
still-life water colors or "washes." All one can think of when thinking
back on a Snyder poem is a blur of pine trees, lazy grasses and faint
sounds of bells and chants and bird cries emanating from temples and
the reaches of the night. The infrequent intrusions of reality have all
the complexity of this brief exchange: "-how long yc.u say you been
Japan? / six years eh you must like the place. / those guys in New York /
