Snyder, Gary

Biography

Biographical Narrative

Masa Uehara, daughter of Tokusei and Mitsu, was raised in Japan. She and Gary Snyder were introduced in 1966 at a dinner party hosted by Hisao Kanaseki, one of her university professors and a friend of Snyder's. At the time of their introduction Uehara had recently graduated from Kobe University and was planning to pursue graduate studies at Ochanomizu Women's University.

Uehara and Snyder married on August 6, 1967 in a ceremony which took place on the rim of an active volcano on Suwa-no-se, a small island north of Okinawa. In April 1968, their first son, Kai, was born in Kyoto. The family left Japan in December 1968 to make their home in California. A second son, Gen, was born in 1969. In 1970, Snyder and Uehara and their two young sons took up residence on San Juan Ridge, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Nevada City, California.

Uehara studied ballet, Japanese classical dance, and Bharat Natyam in Japan and the United States. She was a member of the Balasaraswati dance troupe in Berkeley and performed in Japan, India, and many parts of the United States. She later undertook graduate study in Graphic Design/Visual Communications at California State University, Chico and started her own free-lance design business.

Uehara and Snyder divorced in 1989.

Source: Yamazato, Katsunori. "Seeking a fulcrum: Gary Snyder and Japan (1956-1975)" Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis, 1987.

Biography

Biographical Narrative

Poet, essayist, translator, Zen Buddhist, environmentalist, and teacher, Gary Snyder made an indelible mark on late-twentieth century thought. He is considered one of the most significant environmental writers of the twentieth century and a central figure in environmental activism.

Snyder wrote more than twenty books of poetry and prose including: Riprap (1959), Myths & Texts (1960), Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems (1965), A Range of Poems (1966), The Back Country (1967), Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries for Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (1969), Regarding Wave (1970), Turtle Island (1974), The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work: Interviews & Talks, 1964-1979 (1980), Axe Handles (1983), Passage Through India (1983), Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947-1985 (1986), The Practice of the Wild (1990), No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992), A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, New and Selected Prose (1995), Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), The Gary Snyder Reader (1999), The High Sierra of California (2002), and Look Out: A Selection of Writings (2002).

In addition to his books, Snyder contributed his works of poetry and prose to numerous journals and anthologies. He often provided introductions and prefaces to scholarly translations, Buddhist studies, and poetry books. His writings have been translated into a number of languages, and he has been the subject of several critical books and many interviews.

Gary Sherman Snyder was born to Harold and Lois Snyder on May 8, 1930 in San Francisco, California. The family soon moved to the Pacific Northwest, to start a small dairy farm north of Seattle, Washington. His sister, Anthea, was born in 1932. The family moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1942. Snyder climbed Mt. St. Helens in 1945; and a year later he joined the Portland Mazamas, a mountaineering club. Throughout his life he has continued to climb mountains and take long wilderness hikes. During his high school years, he held a number of part-time jobs including working at a camp on Spirit Lake in Washington and as a copy boy for the Portland Oregonian .

In 1947, Snyder graduated from Lincoln High School and enrolled at Reed College. He published his first poems in the campus literary magazine, Janus . While at Reed, he met fellow poets Philip Whalen and Lew Welch who would become his lifelong friends. Snyder graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Anthropology in 1951. His senior thesis was later published as the book, He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (1979).

Snyder spent the summer of 1951 working as a timber scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation on the east side of the Oregon Cascades. Following the summer job, he hitchhiked to Indiana University to begin graduate study in Anthropology. It was on the trip east to Indiana that Snyder had a revelation that constituted a real turning point in his life. In an interview with the Commonwealth Club on May 15, 2002, Snyder described the incident, "In the middle of Nevada, on old Interstate 40, there was a period of about five hours where nobody would give me a ride. As I stood there in the middle of the sagebrush flats, I was reading through a chapter of Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, and I hit on some phrases that turned my mind totally around. I knew that I wouldn't last at Indiana, and that I would soon be heading in the other direction back toward Asia, but I had to complete my short-term karma. So I did finish out that semester and then went back to the West Coast."

By spring 1952, Snyder was living with Philip Whalen in San Francisco and taking on odd jobs in order to support himself. During the early 1950's, Snyder returned several times to the forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest for summer employment including stints as a choker-setter for the Warm Springs Lumber Company and as a fire lookout. From 1953 to 1955, he lived in a tiny cottage near campus as he pursued graduate studies in the Department of East Asian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley. It was while he was at Berkeley that Snyder met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

In October 1955, Snyder and Ginsberg hosted a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Snyder, Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen read, and Kenneth Rexroth acted as master of ceremonies. Snyder read his poem, "A Berry Feast." Jack Kerouac recalled this event in The Dharma Bums (1958) and used Snyder as the basis for the book's fictional hero, Japhy Ryder, a Beat poet, Asian scholar, and mountain climber. In the early months of 1956, Snyder moved into a cabin in Mill Valley and Kerouac later joined him there. Snyder named the place, Marin-an -- Japanese for "Horse Grove Hermitage" for the adjacent meadow with its grazing mares.

In May 1956, Snyder left for Japan to study and work at a Buddhist temple, Shokoku-ji, in conjunction with the activities of the First Zen Institute of America's Kyoto facility. He took a job, in August 1957, as a wiper in the engine room of the S.S. Sappa Creek and was at sea for eight months until the ship reached the United States in April 1958. He spent the next nine months involved in the San Francisco Bay Area literary scene before returning, in early 1959, to Kyoto, where he began studying under Oda Sesso Roshi at the Daitoku-ji monastery. During this time, Snyder's first book Riprap was published, printed in Kyoto by Cid Corman and distributed through City Lights Books.

Snyder married Joanne Kyger in Kyoto in February 1960. From late 1961 to early 1962, the pair spent six months travelling in Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal. They joined Allen Ginsberg in New Delhi and visited with the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala. Snyder returned to San Francisco in May 1964, and that fall he taught English classes at the University of California, Berkeley. Snyder and Kyger divorced in 1965, and he returned to Japan in October of that year.

On August 6, 1967, Snyder married Masa Uehara. The ceremony took place on the rim of an active volcano on Suwa-no-se, a small island north of Okinawa. Suwa-no-se was the site of the Banyan Ashram, founded by Nanao Sakaki, a poet, World War II veteran, and Japanese cultural radical. In 1967, Snyder briefly lived at the Banyan Ashram with the group of young people who gathered around Sakaki and called themselves Buzoku or Tribe.

In April 1968, Snyder's first son, Kai, was born in Kyoto. The family left Japan in December 1968 to make their home in California. A second son, Gen, was born in 1969. In 1970, Snyder took up residence with his wife and two young sons on San Juan Ridge, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Nevada City, California. With students and friends, Snyder built his home and named it Kitkitdizze, a Native American (Wintun) word for a local plant with a unique and pungent aroma. Snyder and Uehara divorced in 1989.

Snyder was a founding member of the "Ring of Bone" Zendo, a country-based Mahayana Buddhist sangha, which is located on his property on San Juan Ridge. Meetings and sesshin were first held in Snyder's barn in the 1970's and later moved to the Zendo after it was constructed in 1982. The Zendo was named "Ring of Bone" after the poem by Lew Welch. Although the Zendo is an affiliate of the Diamond Sangha in Hawaii, it functions as a completely independent and self-governing church.

Using Kitkitdizze as his home base, Snyder toured extensively, giving readings and talks, doing what he termed, "hunting and gathering." In addition to his numerous appearances in the United States and Canada, his lecture tours took him to Australia in 1981, Sweden, Scotland, and England in 1982, Taiwan in 1990, Spain in 1992, Ireland in 1995, and Greece and the Czech Republic in 1998, Korea and Japan in 2000, Japan and France in 2002, and Japan again in 2003.

Snyder married Carole Koda in April 1991 in a ceremony at Kitkitdizze. She is a writer and has two daughters, Mika and Robin. Of Japanese-American heritage, Koda grew up in the South Dos Palos area of the San Joaquin Valley of California on a large rice farm that had first been planted by her father's parents. Her father researched and founded the "Kokuho Rose" line of rice and was a pioneer in using airplanes to plant rice from the air.

Snyder became a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis in 1986. He was instrumental in founding the "Nature and Culture" program (1993), an undergraduate academic major for students of society and the environment. He was also active in establishing "The Art of the Wild" (1992), an annual conference on wilderness and creative writing. The Academic Senate selected Snyder as the 2000 Faculty Research Lecturer, the University of California, Davis' highest faculty peer honor. He retired in 2002.

Recognition of Snyder's achievements includes the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book Turtle Island, his appointment to the California Arts Council (1975-1979), and his induction into both the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1987) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993). After his long poem cycle and forty-year work, Mountains and Rivers Without End, was published, he was presented with the 1997 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. In conferring the award, the judges observed, "Gary Snyder through a long and distinguished career, has been doing what he refers to in one poem as 'the real work.' 'The real work' refers to writing poetry, an unprecedented kind of poetry, in which the most adventurous technique is put at the service of the great themes of nature and love. He has brought together the physical life and the inward life of the spirit to write poetry as solid and yet as constantly changing as the mountains and rivers of his American -- and -- universal landscape." Snyder received the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Grant in 1998. Also in 1998, he was honored with the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (Society for the Propagation of Buddhism) award for his outstanding contributions in linking Zen thought and respect for the natural world across a lifelong body of poetry and prose. In 2001, he was awarded the California State Library Gold Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Science.

Snyder continues his writing career at Kitkitdizze.

A detailed chronology follows this biography.

Sources:

"A Brief Biography." University of California, Davis. Dept. of English website. http://wwwenglish.ucdavis.edu/faculty/snyder/a_brief_biography.htm Accessed August 20, 2003.

Donahue, James J. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 275: Twentieth-Century American Nature Writers: Prose. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Roger Thompason, Virginia Military Institute, and J. Scott Bryson, Mount St. Mary's College. Gale Group, 2003. pp. 294-302.

"Gary Snyder: A Brief Biography." Stanford Humanities Center, "Mountains and Rivers" workshop website. http://shc.stanford.edu/shc/1997-1998/97-98workshops/Gary.Snyder.html Accessed Sept. 29, 2003.

"Gary Snyder & John Suiter, In Conversation-May 15, 2002." Commonwealth Club website. http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/02/02-05snyder-suiter-speech.html Accessed August 27, 2003.

McLeod, Dan. "Gary Snyder." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1983. p. 486-500.

Murphy, Patrick D. A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and Prose of Gary Snyder. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2000.

Ring of Bone Zendo Newsletter . Oct. 15, 1986; March 10, 1987; March 7, 1988.

Snyder, Gary, Wendell Berry, and Carole Koda. Three on Community . Boise, Idaho: Limberlost Press, 1996.

Suiter, John. Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002.

Yamazato, Katsunori. "Snyder, Sakaki, and the Tribe." Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991.

Chronology