The VC Reporter's Maureen Foley takes a closer look at Gary Snyder:
A friend of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, poet Gary Snyder was immortalized as Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, a story about a group of friends interested in backpacking, women, carousing and Buddhist philosophy. But if you see Snyder at the Ojai Poetry Festival, do not call him “Japhy.”
For the record, Snyder says the character is a fictional creation. He was “modeled on who I was then,” Snyder says, but the stories of Japhy Ryder are not really based in truth. Snyder, who lived with Kerouac, also claims the book is not his friend’s best work. “It was written too hastily,” he says.
The real Gary Snyder, though perhaps less well-known by mainstream America than his fictional counterpart, is a poetic force of nature. According to his Web site at UC Davis, where he taught until recently, Snyder has published 18 books and had his work translated into more than 20 languages. Born in San Francisco and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Snyder’s work is infused with the language of the outdoors. Over the years, his poetry has won him numerous awards, from the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 to the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1997.
And although Snyder may not be a big fan of Dharma Bums, the book itself does give a generalized (if distorted) overview of the real bard. As in the book, Snyder is interested in Buddhism and is a proponent of environmentalism, and was active in both long before they became hip trends. Snyder acknowledges his early ecological mindset by citing his Four Changes manifesto, which he wrote in 1969. Looking back, Snyder is still amazed by how well the ideas about population, energy, pollution and other ecological issues have held up over time. “My gosh, it could have been written yesterday,” he says.
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