Gary Snyder

Lit Gloss

Gary Snyder

by Liz Spikol

Crime doesn’t pay, so they say, and neither does poetry, which is why so-called professional poets tend to do other things to make their daily bread. Miroslav Holub and William Carlos Williams were doctors. Wallace Stevens sold insurance. Walt Whitman was a printer. Innumerable poets have served as teachers. But now and again, luck strikes and the money comes in. This month Gary Snyder won the 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement honor that awards $100,000, which will keep him in metaphors for at least a couple years. Snyder started his writing career with the beats in the ’50s, and like contemporary Allen Ginsberg, he found a singular passion—the natural world, in his case—early on. His voice rarely wavered from its reverence, which was influenced by Buddhist practice. But his poems are not mere banal meditations on the wonder of sunsets or stormy skies. Take for instance this passage from “Message From Outside”: “I dug like mice below the cabin’s floor/ Crawling through oil and rotted hides, I broke/ Into that curious handsewn box. Pursued by birds,/ Threw my comb, my magic marbles to the wind,/ Caught the last bus, and made it here on time.” That’s certainly not the natural world as I’ve ever seen it. When most people think about nature writing, they think about school days marked by reading Robert Frost poems ad nauseam, and that’s a shame. I recently discovered contemporary poetry is often the best way to read about the wonder of the natural world without feeling like you’re going to throw up from the earnestness of it all.