Category: Poets

Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home

translated by Burton Watson is one of my favorite recent acquisitions.

Somehow I find it strangely comforting that I share so many thoughts in common with a “Buddhist poet-priest” born in 1118. In this sense, at least, the soul does, indeed, seem eternal, and mankind, no matter what its heritage, shares common feelings and emotions.

I seldom snowshoe or cross-country ski alone, but I often experience feelings of being strangely alone when I’m in the mountains. Perhaps it is the fact that we often travel trails that have not been broken by anyone else or perhaps it is merely the aesthetics of snow stretching out seemingly forever, but, for whatever the reason, I have been attracted to this feeling of being “alone” in the snow-covered mountains for many years now.

How timely
the delight
of this snowfall,
obliterating the mountain trail
just when I wanted to be alone!

Though the snow-covered mountains covered in a comforting blanket of beauty seem strangely suited to meditation, the biting wind can quickly bring you back to experience the reality of a harsh, and at times unforgiving, reality.

In a mountain village
when I’m lost in the dark
of the mind’s dreaming,
the sound of the wind
blows me to brightness.

Considering how easy it is to get lost in the wanderings of the mind, all its fears and doubts, it does, indeed, seem strangely comforting to be directly caught by the moment, to see things directly and in new ways.

And, then, there is always the sense of relief at leaving the world behind. Since even cell phones don’t reach the mountains where we ski, there is little danger of the real world intruding on our reveries.

Not stopping to mark the trail,
let me push even deeper
into the mountain!
Perhaps there’s a place
where bad news can never reach me!

Cold Mountain

One of the first glimpses we get of Japhy in Dharma Bums is in this early scene:

A peacefuller scene I never saw than when, in that rather nippy late red afternoon, I simply opened his little door and looked in and saw him at the end of the little shack, sitting crosslegged on a Paisley pillow on a straw mat, with his spectacles on, making him look old and scholarly and wise, with book on lap and the little tin teapot and porcelain cup steaming at his side. He looked up very peacefully, saw who it was, said, "Ray, come in," and bent his eyes again to the script.

"What you doing?"

"Translating Han Shan’s great poem called ‘Cold Mountain‘ written a thousand years ago some of it scribbled on the sides of cliffs hundreds of miles away from any other living beings."

Naturally, being the inquisitive type, I wanted to see if there was such a poet and, if there was such a poet, had Snyder actually written translations of his poems.

Sure enough, the poems were right there at the beginning of New Nature: New and Selected Poems
“Cold Mountain Poems”

Here’s an excerpt from Snyder’s introduction to the poems. I found the last line quoted particularly relevant for the translation I have chosen to cite.

Kanzan, or Han-shan, "Cold Mountain " takes his name from where he lived. He is a mountain madman in an old Chinese line of ragged hermits. When he talks about Cold Mountain he means himself, his home, his state of mind … They became Immortals and you sometimes run onto them today in the skidrows, orchards, hobojungles, and logging camps of America.

There are several poems in the section, but here is a representative one that seems to fit with Kerouac’s portrayal of Japhy in the novel.

In a tangle of cliffs I chose a place—
Bird-paths, but no trails for men.
What’s beyond the yard?
White clouds clinging to vague rocks.
Now I’ve lived here—how many years—
Again and again, spring and winter pass.
Go tell families with silverware and cars
"What’s the use of all that noise and money?"

Gary Snyder in No Nature

My curiosity piqued, I went another step further to look up Han Shan in one of my Chinese poetry collections. Sure enough, there he was at the beginning of the collection. I found the difference in tone of this translation and Snyder’s interesting.

Man lives his life in a dust bowl,
Just like vermin in the middle of a pot:
All day going round and round,
Never getting out from the inside.
Blessedness is not our lot:
Only nettlesomeness without end.
Time is like a flowing river
One day, we wake up old men.

from Sunflower Splendor edited by Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo

I like both poems, but I’m not surprised that the latter interpretation tends to be more “objective.”

Interestingly, though, each of the eight-line poems ends with a two-line “moral,” something you seldom find in Japanese haikus, and, I must admit, a quality I have come to find particularly appealing. After a long teaching career, I find it more interesting to discover my own morals, if there are ones, rather than being told them by the author.

A War Against Earth

Gary Snyder reminds me more of Edward Abbey than any poet. His poems look at nature, and at life, from radically diverse perspectives. In his preface to No Nature he says, "There is no single or set "nature, either as ‘natural world’ or the ‘nature of things.’ The greatest respect we can pay to nature is not to trap it, but to acknowledge that it eludes us and that our own nature is also fluid, open, and conditional."

Snyder studied Zen at a monastery in Kyoto and Tibetan Buddhism and that is reflected in his poems, but you are also likely to find the loggers attitude reflected in them. His poem entitled "Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier than Students of "Zen." though written in the simple language of a tanka or haiku, celebrates the "polished" "hubs" and "shiny" diesel "stack" of the logging truck, and ends with the simple declaration "There" is no other "life" That simple declaration could easily be made by either a truck driver or a Zen student.

"Call of the Wild" probably isn’t a typical Snyder poem, but it does contain several reoccurring themes. Like most of his poems, it is pro-environmental, and it’s not unusual for him to use native Indian themes. His poems often have a nice sense of humor, which certainly dominates this poem.

The Call Of The Wild

The heavy old man in his bed at night
Hears the Coyote singing
in the back meadow.
All the years he ranched and mined and logged.
A Catholic.
A native Californian.
and the Coyotes howl in his
Eightieth year.
He will call the Government
Trapper
Who uses iron leg-traps on Coyotes,
Tomorrow.
My sons will lose this
Music they have just started
To love.

The ex acid-heads from the cities
Converted to Guru or Swami,
Do penance with shiny
Dopey eyes, and quit eating meat.
In the forests of North America,
The land of Coyote and Eagle,
They dream of India, of
forever blissful sexless highs,
And sleep in oil-heated
Geodesic domes, that
Were stuck like warts
In the woods.

And the Coyote singing
is shut away
for they fear
the call
of the wild.

And they sold their virgin cedar trees,
the tallest trees in miles,
To a logger
Who told them,

"Trees are full of bugs."

The Government finally decided
To wage the war all-out. Defeat
is Un-American.

And they took to the air,
Their women beside them
in bouffant hairdos
putting nail-polish on the
gunship cannon-buttons.

And they never came down,
for they found,
the ground

is pro-Communist. And dirty.
And the insects side with the Viet Cong.

So they bomb and they bomb
Day after day, across the planet
blinding sparrows
breaking the ear-drums of owls
splintering trunks of cherries
twining and looping
deer intestines
in the shaken, dusty, rocks.

All these Americans up in special cities in the sky
Dumping poisons and explosives
Across Asia first,
And next North America,

A war against earth.
When it’s done there’ll be
no place

A Coyote could hide.

envoy

I would like to say
Coyote is forever
Inside you.

But it’s not true.

The Republican in the poem seems pretty predictable, almost stereotypical, but the ironic portrayal of the ex acid-heads and their ignorance of the natural world they claim to be concerned about makes us wonder if anyone in America really cares about "the" "wild" Do Americans all want nature to reflect our reality. Do we all want to remake the world in our own image rather than accept it for what it is?

The lines "And the insects side with the Viet Cong./So they bomb and they bomb" recall the American use of defoliants in Viet Nam to deny the North Vietnamese the ability to deliver arms to the Viet Cong. Unfortunately, in the process all the animals that depended on the jungle were destroyed, and the area still "hasn’t" healed. But, hey, it is war.

In a very real sense, America seems to have declared war on the earth, "Dumping poisons and explosives" on the entire environment in order to remake it into our image of what it should be like and to serve our own purposes. It should be "bug free" and wild animals should be like the wild animals in Disney’s movies, or, at the very least, kept out of our sight.

Snyder, like Abbey, seems to feel that the loss of nature will necessarily bring with it the loss of "coyote," that special spirit inside of us that can only come from our exposure to the real "wild."

Unlike Abbey, though, Snyder is able to view America’s attempts to destroy the environment from a distance, to somehow find ironic humor in these actions. Perhaps it is absurdist humor, but laughing is better than crying, particularly when crying won’t change the situation.

Open Directory – Arts: Literature: Authors: S: Snyder, Gary

A Prayer for Old Age

A PRAYER FOR OLD AGE

GOD guard me from those thoughts men think

In the mind alone;

He that sings a lasting song

Thinks in a marrow-bone;

From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
0 what am I that I should not seem
For the song’s sake a fool?

I pray-for fashion’s word is out
And prayer comes round again
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.
Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats

Here’s another Yeats’ poem that I didn’t really appreciate until recently, perhaps because old age didn’t seem too relevant until now. I suspect, though, that what Yeats seeks in all of his poems are eternal values that can guide our entire life.

Although it is common for Romantic poets to emphasize intuition over logic, to emphasize heart over mind, there does seem to be a certain irony in a man who has devoted his life to letters condemning men whose thoughts are ‘in the mind alone."

I suspect, though, that this is an ambivalence that haunts many of us who enjoy studying ideas and reading literature. Too often literature seems a form of escape rather than a solution to lifeâs problems. Itâs easier to read a romantic novel than it is to build real love in your life. Itâs certainly easier to analyze politics than it is to effect real change in our society. No matter how many environmental books you read, the environment continues to degrade.

As a literature teacher, I was often accused of promoting this. Many students found literature irrelevant, and it was extremely difficult to show them the relevance if they didn’t already see it. Despite my occasional sarcastic remarks that I would hate to marry a person who couldnât even understand the motivation for a character in a novel, too often I felt unable to show students how these ideas were relevant to their lives.

Nor am I denying that reading for escapism isn’t sometimes necessary. My best friend sent me a copy of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 to read while I was stationed in Vietnam. Although this later became one of my favorite 20th century novels, I could barely get through two chapters. Instead, I repeatedly read passages from the Rubiat of Omar Khayyam, a work I haven’t read since.

Still, I would argue that the major goal of reading and thinking should be to empower your life, not avoid it. Reading and thinking should enrich your life, make you happier, and give you the understanding you need to cope with an increasingly complex world. They should unite you with your world, not alienate you from it.

Most of all, though, they should create a passion for life that, no matter how foolish it may appear to others, provides meaning to your life.