From Gary Snyder: Essential Prose
The poet and essayist Gary Snyder celebrates his 95th birthday today, May 8.
Snyder had been publishing poetry for more than a dozen years when, in 1969, he published the first of his eight books of prose. “Earth House Hold was a youthful book, written in snatches and at speed, sometimes on request, and over many years,” writes the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson in the introduction to a new Library of American collection. “It was gathered into a book after its parts were written, and it’s a tribute to Snyder’s persistence of vision that it holds together as well as it does.”
The earliest written piece from the book dates from 1958 and describes Snyder’s trip to Japan, where he underwent formal Zen training at the Shokoku-ji temple complex in Kyoto; he ended up living there for most of the next decade. Twenty years later, he described to an interviewer one of the lessons he learned from his first year spent at the monastery:
“My own personal discovery in the Zen monastery in Kyoto was that even with the extraordinary uniformity of behavior, practice, dress, gesture, every movement from dawn till dark, in a Zen monastery everybody was really quite different. . . . The dialectic of Rinzai Zen practice is that you live a totally ruled life, but when you go into the sanzen room, you have absolute freedom. The roshi wouldn’t say this, but if you forced him to, he might say, ‘You think our life is too rigid? You have complete freedom here. Express yourself. What have you got to show me? Show me your freedom!’”
The essay describing the last week of Snyder’s first year in Kyoto, “Spring Sesshin at Shokoku-ji,” is our latest Story of the Week selection, along with an introduction detailing Snyder’s brief friendship with Jack Kerouac before his move to Japan and how it influenced his writing.
