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"FOREST BEATNIKS" AND "URBAN THOREAUS":
BEAT LITERATURE AND NATURE

By
Rodney L. Phillips

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Program in American Studies

1996

ABSTRACT

"FOREST BEATNIKS" AND "URBAN THOREAUS":
BEAT LITERATURE AND NATURE

By

Rod Phillips

Since the Beat Movement first rose to attention in 1955, critics have tended to view it
as an urban phenomenon--the product of a post-war youth culture with roots in the cities
of New York and San Francisco. This study examines another side of the Beat
Movement: its strong desire for a reconnection with nature. Although each took a
different path in attaining this goal, the four writers considered here—Gary Snyder, Jack
Kerouac, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure--sought a new and closer connection with the
natural world.

For Snyder, a significant part of this reconnection with nature involved breaking down
the barriers which had previously kept discussion of the human body--and human
sexuality--out of the most genteel of American literary genres: nature writing. One of
Snyder's most enduring contributions in the field of nature writing has been to successfully
reintegrate the human body into the landscape as a natural element.

Kerouac's path back to the natural world, as evidenced in The Dharma Bums (1958),
made use of a number of models from both American and Chinese traditions. Using Han-
Shan, Thoreau, and Muir as models for a prophesied "rucksack revolution," Kerouac's
writing about nature anticipates the counterculture's emerging interest in nature and

ecology.

California poet Lew Welch chose a hermit's gradual withdrawal into what he called
"the world that is not man" as his means of reconnection to the natural world. This study's
chapter on Welch examines the process of this withdrawal through both his poetry and
letters.

For McClure, the means of reconnection with nature is found in the modern scientific
disciplines of biology and ecology. Among McClure's poetic goals are the rediscovery of
what he has termed "the biological self," and the realization of humanity's "mammalian
possibilities."

The final chapter examines the work of several other writers of the Beat period and
their contributions in regard to nature and environmental writing: Allen Ginsberg, Philip
Whalen, Kirby Doyle, Ed Sanders, and Richard Brautigan. Finally, the conclusion
examines the itnpact of the Beats on the environmental movement of the 1970's and on the

development of the current "Deep Ecology" perspective.

Copyright by
RODNEY LEE PHILLIPS
1996

For Anne:

"Without her, what is there to say,
or do?"

Lew Welch, "The Uses of Poetry"

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In researching and writing this dissertation, I have accumulated many debts which can
only be repaid with my gratitude. First, to the subjects of this study--Michael McClure,
Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg-J offer my sincere thanks. Their letters,
interviews, and suggestions made the final product far richer, and the process of writing it
far more interesting. Speaking and corresponding with these writers has been one of the
great pleasures of this project, and the kindness and wisdom they have shown assures me
that my long-standing admiration for them has not been misplaced.

Michigan State University also deserves my recognition. Funding, through teaching
assistantships in the Department of English and the Department of American Thought and
Language, provided financial help during both my MA. and PhD. programs. I am
especially grateful to the M.S.U. College of Arts and Letters for the Dissertation
Completion Grant which they awarded me in November 1993, a grant which allowed me
to work full time on my writing during this project's final stages.

My guidance committee, composed of Dr. Michael Lopez, Dr. Douglas Miller, and
Dr. Victor Paananen, has done its job well. They have guided me through difficult areas
of writing and scholarship, all the while challenging me, yet never confining or obstructing
my efforts. Dr. Maria Bruno, of the Department of American Thought and Language,
generously agreed to serve as an outside reader for this dissertation, and in doing so,
brought to it her knowledge of both American literature and the American 1960's.

Finally, and most importantly, my dissertation director, Dr. James I. McClintock has
been a mentor in the truest sense of the word. This dissertation had its seeds in an
American Studies seminar he taught several years ago, a seminar which first guided me
towards nature writing as a subject for scholarship. Since then he has worked closely with

me on this project, sharing freely his extensive knowledge of American nature writing, and

vi

showing by example what it means to be both a dedicated scholar and teacher. I will
always be grateful for his guidance and his friendship.

I owe many thanks to my close friend and colleague John Kinch. Hundreds of
conversations with him over the course of the last several years have helped me develop
and shape the ideas presented here, and he has patiently read and commented on large
portions of my manuscript. His knowledge of American literature and the American
environmental movement have proven invaluable, second only to his encouragement.

Finally, my greatest debt is to my family. My mother, Leona Phillips, and my mother
and father-in-law, Bernita and Gayle Miller, provided me with more help and support than
they realize. My sons, Robert and Thomas, have been patient, quiet, and good far beyond
my expectations for small boys, and as they were promised, they now have their names in
"Dad's boo ."

And to my wife Anne, I owe my greatest debt of thanks. In many ways, this has been a
project that we've explored, enjoyed, and suffered through together. She has been my
closest reader and best critic, and has offered thoughtful comments on every portion of
this text. Her knowledge of computers has been a godsend--the perfect antidote to a
Luddite's fears of high-tech writing. But more importantly, her love, kindness and

support have sustained me in a thousand ways, and it is to her that this work is dedicated.

A portion of my chapter on Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums was presented as a paper at
the Midwest American Culture Conference: Oct. 10, 1991 in Cleveland, Ohio.

A portion of my chapter on Lew Welch, entitled "A Midwestern Beat: Lew Welch's
Chicago Poems," was presented as a paper at the Society for the Study of Midwestern
Literature Conference: May 12, 1994 in East Lansing, Michigan.

A version of my chapter on Lew Welch was published in the November 1994 issue of

Western American Literature.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I. Introduction:
"Forest Beatniks" and "Urban Thoreaus"
II. "This is Our Body":
Gary Snyder's Erotic Universe
111. Kerouac's "Virtuous Desert":
The Role of Nature in The Dharma Bums
IV. "The Journal of a Strategic Withdrawal":
Nature and the Poetry of Lew Welch
V. ‘ "Let Us Throw Out the Word Man":
Michael McClure's Marnmilian Poetics
VI. Conclusion:
Off the Road
APPENDICES
A. Chronology
B. An Interview With Gary Snyder
C. An Interview With Philip Whalen
BIBLIOGRAPHY

34

85

127

155

182
188
193
197

I. INTRODUCTION:
"FOREST BEATNIKS" AND "URBAN THOREAUS"

"I too am not a bit tamed . . . . I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of the day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the
shadowed wilds,

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk."

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself“ (1855)

Early in the fall of 1965, two bearded young hikers traveled along a ridge in Oregon's
Glacier Peak Wilderness Area. One was of slight build, with a scholar's Vandyke and
close-cropped red hair hidden beneath an Alpine climber's hat. His companion, broader in
stature, wore the dark curls which surrounded his balding crown at shoulder length, and
sported a full, flowing beard. As they walked they chanted, their hiking boots lending
cadence to a spirited voicing of "Hari Om Namo Shiva."l Along the trail, they met a
small party of fishermen--two men, a woman and a child—-who stopped short and stared
with curiosity at both the appearance and actions of the pair. In 1965 it was fast becoming
commonplace to encounter members of the youth counter-culture in the West Coast's
urban areas, but the fishermen were clearly taken aback to find them here, in the Oregon
wilderness. Sensing their bewilderment, the long-haired hiker graciously explained: "WE
are forest beamiks" (Snyder, Earth House Hold 96).

2

The two wild looking travelers were Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, two poets who
a decade earlier had helped to launch the literary and social phenomenon which has come
to be known as the Beat movement. Although almost certainly intended as a joke (writers
within the Beat circle rarely referred to themselves with the diminutive term "beatnik"),
Ginsberg's explanation to the fishermen, "WE are forest beatniks," does point out that, in
the minds of many Americans, by the mid-sixties the Beat movement was primarily
associated with urban life. The emphasis added to the statement spoken by Ginsberg, and
in the written version later recorded in Snyder's journal of the trip, seems to acknowledge
this perception, and in some small way, attempts to correct it.2

Only in recent years has there been a measurable change in this perception among
literary critics and social historians of the fifties and sixties; we are still, it seems, surprised
at the idea of associating Beat writers with nature and with what Sherman Paul has
referred to as "the green American tradition" of artists finding meaning in the natural
world (Repossessing xiii). Today, nearly forty years after the Beats fust came to the
public's attention following the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, the major Beat
writers are still viewed primarily as an urban phenomenon. Many critics and social
historians continue to depict the group as literary outlaws more closely resembling Henry
Miller than Henry Thoreau, whose main interests--jazz, drugs, free love, and experimental
literature--align them with William, but not John, Burroughs. Despite the fact that nature
plays a key role in many of the group's central texts--the novels of Kerouac, the essays of
Snyder and McClure, and the poetry of Snyder, Ginsberg, Welch, Kerouac, Whalen, and
McClure, among others--little critical attention has been given to this important theme of
Beat literature.3_

Recently, however, environmental historians have begun to understand the role played
by Beat writers in America's developing ecological awareness. Bill Devall and George
Sessions, in their influential 1985 book, Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered,
point to the early work of Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts and other Beat era

3

writers as influential voices who helped to open Western literature and philosophy to Zen,
Tao, and other Eastern traditions which promoted ecological consciousness (100-101).
Similarly, wilderness historian Roderick Nash, in his 1989 study The Rights of Nature: A
History of Environmental Ethics, finds the novels of Jack Kerouac and the poetry and
essays of Gary Snyder highly influential in the formation of "an ethic that combined
Buddhist and Native American principles with American natural-rights ideology," resulting
in a new and broadened ethical view which sought to include both human and non-human
nature (114).

In large part, however, the recognition that nature and ecological concerns have long
been a part of Beat literature has come from the movement's writers themselves. Writing
in the vitae which serves as an introduction to his collected travel sketches Lonesome
Traveler (1960), Jack Kerouac spoke of the critics' misconception of his life's work:

[I] always considered writing my duty on earth. Also the preachment of universal
kindness, which hysterical critics have failed to notice beneath frenetic activity of
my true-story novels about the "beat" generation.--Am actually not "beat" but
strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic... (vi)
Kenneth Rexroth, mentor as well as participant in the San Francisco Renaissance, noted in
an essay in 1971, at the height of the decade's ecological awareness phenomenon, that
Beat writers had been at the forefront of the new consciousness all along:
Long before ecology became a world-wide fad, Snyder and Whalen, still in college,
were talking about an ecological esthetic, a blending of American Indian and Far
Eastern philosophies of cooperation with, rather than conquest of, nature. (Retort
156)
Michael McClure, one of the five poets featured at the Six Gallery Reading, has been the
most vocal member of the Beat movement in attempting to correct what he sees as a
public misconception concerning nature and Beat writing--at times referring to the Beats

as "the literary wing of the new deeper more myriad nature consciousness" in America.4

4

In his essay "The Beat Surface," from his 1982 collection Scratching the Beat Surface,
McClure notes that from its inception, Beat literature has found an important theme in the
natural world:

Much of what the Beat Generation is about is nature--the landscape of nature in
the case of Gary Snyder, the mind as nature in the case of Allen Ginsberg.
Consciousness is a natural organic phenomenon. The Beats shared an interest in
Nature, Mind, and Biology-—areas that they expanded and held together with their
radical political or antipolitical stance. (1 1)

That American readers missed this persistent presence of nature in Beat literature and

J A JLI

have come to view the Beats as urban figures is ‘ ", when one

considers the works which first established the Beats in the nation's consciousness. Jack
Kerouac's first novel, The Town & the City (1950), John Clellon Holmes's Go (1952),
William Burroughs‘s Junkie (1953), and, perhaps most importantly, Allen Ginsberg's
"Howl" (1956) all depicted a frantic, hard-edged, and at times degrading view of life on
what the poet called "the negro streets" of American cities.

The nation's popular press further accentuated this view of the Beats as city dwellers.
New York's Greenwich Village, long a stronghold of America's literary Bohemians,
became a focal point for journalists wishing to track the Beat phenomenon, as did San
Francisco's North Beach. In a 1959 Life photo story on the Beats, "The Only Rebellion
Around," Paul O'Neil noted that "Bohemianism is not new to big American cities. . . ." So
it was not surprising that what he referred to as the Beat "Cult of the Pariah," like other
literary Bohemians before them, chose to inhabit the searnier side of the urban landscape:
"It yearns for the roach-guarded mores of the skid road, the flophouse, the hobo jungle
and the slum, primarily to escape regimentation" (115). Even more misleading were
sociological texts, such as Ned Polsky's 1967 work Hustlers, Bears, and Others, which
viewed the Beat Movement as not only as an urban phenomenon--but also as an urban

problem. Polsky's study examines "the sociology of deviance" among three major urban

5

groups: pool hustlers, pomographers, and the Beats of Greenwich Village (7). Polsky's
association of Village Beats with the other "deviant" urban groups in his text, along with
his repeated depictions of Beats as lazy, poorly educated, promiscuous, drug addicts, no
doubt strengthened the general public's notion of Beat culture as being synonymous with
life in the inner city.

But what O'Neil, Polsky, and many other critics of the period failed to understand, is
that although American cities do provide the setting for a number of early and influential
Beat texts, in general these works do not celebrate urban life; often, in fact, they
demonstrate a pronounced distaste for cities. Ginsberg's "Howl" (1955), the most famous
Beat text, is, as John H. Johnston has noted in his study The Poet and the City (1984),
"above all a city poem" (242). But, the critic points out, "Howl" can be seen as a
twentieth century version of William Blake's "London," a poem which chronicles the
maddening and harrowing effects of life within the confines of the city. Whereas Blake
told his readers of the "Marks of weakness, marks of woe" to be found among the
"charter’d" streets of London, Ginsberg graphically displays the insane realities of New
Yorkers in the mid-twentieth century:

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar
to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the
stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of
the moon. (10)
The poet also relies heavily on urban imagery in his denunciation of the evil effects of
Moloch on American culture; at times, Moloch and the modern metropolis are merged
into one:
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose
skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!

Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog. Moloch

. ,3.

6

whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! (17)

Likewise, Lew Welch's "Chicago Poem" (1958), although obviously set in the city,
finds little of value or beauty in the "City of the Big Shoulders" as Carl Sandburg had forty
years earlier; instead there are only the smoke and fumes of a wasteland where men
"Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and terrible sky":

In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago
passes its natural gas in flames

Bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high.
The stench stabs at your eyeballs.

The whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton
steel of a bombed-out town. (Ring of Bone 10)

While often writing from within the bounds of the modern city, many Beat writers
began to question the path that the nation was taking towards military and industrial world
dominance. These "urban Thoreaus," as Kerouac once called them (Subterraneans 15),
like their philosophical ancestors the nineteenth-century American Romantics, dreaded the
power of the state and its growing technocracy. As critic John Tytell has noted in his
influential study of the Beats, Naked Angels: "The Beat movement was a crystallization of
a sweeping discontent with American 'virtues' of progress and power. What began with an
exploration of the bowels and entrails of the city--criminality, drugs, mental hospitals—-
evolved into an expression of the visionary sensibility" (4). And, like Thoreau and the
other Romantics who preceded them, many members of the Beat movement turned away
from the city and towards nature for the source of this vision. For while many of the
themes and ideas expressed in the literature of the Beat movement were indeed radically
different from anything which had come before them in American literature-active
experimentation with psychedelic drugs, a far more open stance towards sexuality, and a

rejection of the economic status quo--one of the primary themes present in the work of

7

several key members of the Beat movement is much more traditional: the need to forge a

reconnection to the natural world.

"Real Work"

The life experiences of many of the Beat writers strongly suggest that nature played an
enduring role throughout much of their early lives, and several chose work which would
put them in the outdoors on a daily basis. In a post-war period in American letters which
seemed to value only academic and intellectual points of view, the Beats stood apart as
writers who placed a high value on the experiences of both the mind and body, and who
often prided themselves on their physical, as well as intellectual, accomplishments. "I've
held employment on all levels of society," writes Gary Snyder. "I can pride myself in the
fact that I worked nine months on a tanker at sea and nobody once ever guessed I had
been to college" (Real Work 111). For many of the Beat writers, work became an
important link to the natural world, and an important source of inspiration for their
writing.

After a childhood spent on a dairy farm near Puget Sound, Gary Snyder worked on
the forest trail crews of Yosemite National Park in the early fifties. Snyder credits the job,
and his surroundings, with the inspiration and the creative grist for his first collection of
poems, Riprap (1959), a book which he dedicated to a long list of fellow workers "In the
woods & at sea." In an afterword to the book's forth printing in 1990, the poet recalled
how the poems were conceived:

They [the US. Forest Service] soon had me working in the upper reaches of the
Piute Creek drainage, a land of smooth white granite and gnarly juniper and pine.
It all carries the visible memory of the ice age. The bedrock is so brilliant that it
shines back at the crystal night stars. In a curious mind of renunciation and long

day's hard work with shovel, pick, dynamite, and boulder, my language relaxed

8

into itself. I began to be able to meditate, nights, after work, and I found myself
writing some poems that surprised me. (65)

As Snyder suggests here, many of the poems in his first collection do seem to spring
from a combination of work, nature, and the meditative mind. The book's title, Riprap,
refers to a method of laying heavy stone cobbles to make mountain trails for horse travel
or hiking. In addition says Snyder, the title "celebrates the work of hands, the placing of
rock, and my first glimpse of the image of the whole universe as interconnected,
interpenetrating, mutually reflecting and mutually embracing" (Riprap 65—66). Laying out
the heavy slabs of stone, Snyder found in his trail crew experience a powerful metaphor
for his other occupation——working with words as a poet. The title poem to the collection
begins:

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time: (32)

During these years, the poet also worked as a seasonal forest fire lookout in the
remote Crater Mountain and Sourdough Mountain regions of Washington State. These
wilderness experiences provided the raw material for a great deal of Snyder's early work,
especially his collections Riprap (1959), The Back Country (1967), and Earth House ‘
Hold (1969). In 1954, after being fired from his Forest Service job because of his
affiliations during the period's anti-Communist hysteria,5 Snyder worked as a choke setter
involved in harvesting timber with the Warm Springs Lumber Company in the Oregon
Cascade range, an experience described poetically in Myths & Texts (1960), and more
recently, in his excellent essay "Ancient Forests of the Far West" from his collection The

Practice of the Wild (1990).

9

In addition to the substantial time Snyder spent in the forests of the Northwest, the
author also spent the better part of 1957 as a merchant seaman in the Pacific on board an
oil tanker The Sappa Creek, a period chronicled in "Tanker Notes" (included in his 1969
collection Earth House Hold) and such poems as "The Sappa Creek" and "Cartagena,"
both included in Riprap. Snyder's friend and fellow poet Michael McClure also spent a
portion of 1957 working on ship-board, visiting Pacific ports in Hong Kong, Japan,
Manilla, and Hawaii.6

East coast Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac also served on merchant
ships during the forties and fifties. The author of "Howl" worked on several merchant
ships irmnediately following his discharge from an abortive term in the US. Navy in 1945.
A decade later, in July 1956, while waiting for the first printing of Howl to be released by
City Lights, Ginsberg signed on for a voyage aboard the Navy's Sgt. Jack J. Pendelton.
The Pendelton’s mission would take it from San Francisco north to Point Barrow, Alaska,
more than 300 miles north of the arctic circle in order to supply the government's Early
Warning radar station located there (Miles 207-10).

Kerouac's stint as a seaman, like Ginsberg's, also included a brief attempt at military
life in the US. Navy. In 1942, the young novelist was a member of the crew of the S. S.
Dorchester, a ship which ferried materials and workers to Greenland in support of the war
effort. Later the same year, he enlisted in the Navy, but was discharged after six months
with what the Navy claimed was an "indifferent character." Apparently unable to fit into
military discipline, but still yearning for life on the sea, within months Kerouac again
signed up as a merchant seaman, this time on board the S. S. George Weems, which carried
in its cargo hold a load of ammunition bound for Liverpool, England (Charters 37-42).
The author’s time as a seaman gave rise to his first attempt at a novel, an unfinished effort
entitled The Sea Is My Brother, as well as portions of one of his final novels, Vanity of
Dulouz (1968) and his sketch "Slobs of the Kitchen Sea," collected among his travel

pieces in Lonesome Traveler (1960).

~‘

I

10

In later years, Kerouac subsidized what had not yet become a lucrative writing career
with a number of jobs--many of which placed him in close contact with nature. Like his
friend Neal Cassidy, who served as both catalyst and role model for several of the Beats,
Kerouac worked as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific railroad in the early fifties. The
job provided the author an opportunity to view first-hand those men he would later call
"The Vanishing America Hobo"--the sometimes romantic figures who hopped freights and
traveled the West with only a rucksack on their back, hoboes who became a model for
Kerouac's own view of himself as "an adventurer, a lonesome traveler" (Lonesome
Traveler v). The time Kerouac spent on the railroads also gave him the subject matter for
one of his finest prose sketches: "The Railroad Earth." Ostensibly the sketch concerns
itself with the author's days as a brakeman, but at times it is a rhapsodic love poem to the
California landscape:

The sweetness of the fields unspeakable--the names themselves bloody edible like
Lick Coyote Perry Madrone Morgan Hill San Martin Rucker Gilroy o sleepy
Gilroy Carnadero Corporal Sargent Chittenden Logan Aromas and Watsonville
Junction with the Pajaro River passing through it and we of the railroads pass over
its wooded dry Indian draws at somewhere outside Chittenden where one morning
all dew pink I saw a little bird sitting on a piece of stanchion straight up wood in
the wild tangle, and it was the Bird of Chittenden, and the meaning of morning.
(Lonesome Traveler 77- 78)

In 1956, with the help of his friend and roommate at the time, Gary Snyder, Kerouac
landed a Forest Service job as a forest fire lookout in the Cascade Range of northwest
Washington. The months spent in solitude on the mountain were the basis for some of
Kerouac's most nature-centered texts, including The Dharma Bums (1958), Desolation
Angels (1965), and the sketch "Alone on a Mountaintop," collected in Lonesome Traveler
(1960).

11

The California poet Lew Welch, after spending much of his early career as a copy
writer for Chicago advertising firms, took an abrupt mid-life turn and opted instead for the
existence of a hermit in the foothills of the California Sierras. In order to support his work
as a poet, in the early sixties Welch worked at a number of jobs-~including commercial
fishing in the small fleet of salmon trollers off the San Francisco coast. In an essay on the
experience he wrote a few years later, Welch lamented his "many years working at foolish,
exhausting, tiresome, humiliating jobs" and described the "oppressive vision of what it is
that a smart strong man might devote his entire life to Post Toasties or Prudential Life
Insurance." In place of this empty corporate existence, the poet was able to find meaning
in what he called the "real work"7 of salmon trolling (I Remain H, 43-44). Defending his
choice of vocations, Welch eloquently sums up the importance of his decision to work
close to the natural world:

I have lived all my life with people who will laugh at all of this, being too
sophisticated to hear what I said except as "another plea to return to nature." But
nature is larger than that, expressible in the word-game "Nature." It is all that goes
on whether we look at it or not. All-that-goes-on-whether-we-look-at-it-or-not
will always go on (though we almost never look at it) and we are in it, in this form,
for a little while at least. There is nothing to join since we are as much a charter
member as the jellyfish is, as the seasons are. The rest is what drives us mad. And
you do know exactly what the rest is. (I Remain II, 43)

Welch's friend and Reed College classmate, Philip Whalen, like Snyder and Kerouac,
also worked as a forest fire lookout in the Skagit Valley region of Washington's Mount
Baker National Forest, where he spent the warm months of 1952 through 1955. Whalen
found the lookout's job well suited to the vocation of writing, providing ample time and
solitude to meditate, read, and write while perched in a windowed tower high above the
forest canopy. Just as Snyder had internalized the physical task of laying riprap trails and

found in the work both a source and a vehicle for his poetic voice, Whalen found life as a

12

wilderness fire watch to be an experience which altered both the content and the form of
his writing. In a 1994 interview he described to me the effects of the experience on his
craft:

Living where you must chop wood for the stove and carry water to cook and
clean is enough to change anybody's point of view, writer or otherwise.
Sometimes you don't carry water, you carry snow and melt it. A great deal of
snow is necessary for the purpose. After the chores are done there is time to re-
read all of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and some of the longer 18th century English
novels and a few of the larger Russian ones. Such reading supplies one's
vocabulary with words which are not generally used in current newspapers and
magazines. The contemplation of nearby lakes and mountain peaks simultaneously
stimulates and calms the mind and imagination as do frequent encounters with
wildlife-~bears, deer, marmots, etc. It was during this period of time that I learned
that I could write in my own way rather than to follow academic prescriptions as
to form, composition, metrics and diction. (1)

Whalen describes the wilderness setting and the transformation he experienced there in

his early long poem "Sourdough Mountain Lookout" (1956):

Then I'm alone in a glass house on a ridge

Encircled by chiming mountains

With one sun roaring through the house all day

& the others crashing through the glass all night

conscious even while sleeping (0n Bear's Head 46)
It was here, at the Sourdough lookout tower in September of 1955, that Whalen was to
receive a letter from Gary Snyder inviting him to read, along with himself, Michael
McClure, Allen'Ginsberg, and Philip Lamantia at the Six Gallery reading--the event which
would mark the beginning of Whalen's success as a writer, and the American public's

introduction to the Beat movement (Christensen 557).

"Starting From San Francisco":
The Roots of the Beat Movement and the Six Gallery Reading

Early in October 1955, two hundred postcards were mailed to members of San
Francisco's North Beach arts community. Simple in design, the cards promised an
evening's entertainment unlike any the city had before witnessed:

Six poets at the Six Gallery. Kenneth Rexroth, M.C. Remarkable collection of
angels all gathered at once in the same spot. Wine, music, dancing girls, serious
poetry, free satori. Small collection for wine and postcards. Charming event.
(Miles 195)

This "charming event" was, of course, the now famous Six Gallery reading—the
cornerstone of what quickly became known as the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, and
the beginning of the rapid rise to public attention of Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg,
Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure. The reading, chronicled in the
opening chapters of Kerouac's 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums, marked a number of
important firsts in American letters. It was, for several of the writers involved--Snyder,
Ginsberg, McClure and Whalen--their first public reading. The event also featured the
first public reading of Ginsberg's "Howl," the poem which both launched, and for a time,
defined, the Beat movement.

But literary movements do not begin in a single night, and it would be a serious
mistake to treat the 1955 Six Gallery reading as the precise moment in which the Beat
movement "began." Although the reading did for the first time focus public attention on
the phenomenon known as the San Francisco Renaissance, and on an emerging group of
young writers who later came to be known as the Beats, the event's primary historical
importance is that it marks the convergence of two major contingents of American
writers-one from the West coast and one from the East--who had already been at work

for nearly a decade.

14

The first group--West coast writers like Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip
Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Larnantia, and later, Lew Welch--had gravitated
towards San Francisco in the early fifties, drawn to the city by forces which seemed,
according to Snyder's description in his essay "North Beach," biological as well as
political:

In the spiritual and political loneliness of America of the fifties you'd hitch a
thousand miles to meet a friend. Whatever lives needs a habitat, a proper culture
of warmth and moisture to grow. West coast of those days, San Francisco was the
only city. . .

A habitat. The Trans-America pyramid, a strikingly wasteful and arrogant
building, stands square on what was once called Montgomery Block, a building
that housed the artists and revolutionaries of the thirties and forties. Kenneth
Rexroth, many others lived there; foundations of post-war libertarianism; moves
that became publicly known as "heat" in the middle fifties. (Old Ways 45-47)

This northern California "habitat" which Snyder describes, with its unique mixture of
the artistic and the political, had long been a gathering place for both writers and political
advocates concerned with preserving the natural world. Since the late nineteenth century,
conservationists like John Muir and Warren Olney had made the area a focal point in the
effort to preserve the American wilderness. Here, Muir and others formed the Sierra Club
in 1892, dedicated to exploring and preserving the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast.
And it was here, in 1913, that the group fought unsuccessfully, in the landmark Hetch
Hetchy case, to prevent the darnrning of the nearby Toulumne River and the resulting
destruction of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the California Sierras. Even in the early years of
the twentieth century, it seems, environmental activism and cultural bohemianism went
hand in hand; in 1910, San Francisco's city engineer Marsden Manson noted that the
group opposing construction of the dam was largely made up of "short-haired women and
long-haired men" (quoted in Nash Wilderness 169).

15

The American West Coast was also heavily steeped in Asian culture, owing heavily to
the large numbers of Chinese and Japanese immigrants who had worked and settled in the
region during the 1900's. Buddhism and other Eastern religions flourished here among the
Asian-American population, and a small but dedicated number of European-Americans
began to share an interest in Eastern religion and literature.

American philosophers had dabbled in Eastern thought as far back as 1844, when
Henry Thoreau had first translated a Buddhist text. But in the 1940's with World War II
and the US. occupation of Japan, when, as Kenneth Rexroth has noted "captivity took
captivity captive," American interest in Buddhism skyrocketed (Retort 155). In the
decade that followed, Buddhist scholars and teachers such as D.T. Suzuki, and later, Alan
Watts, made Eastern religion and culture accessible to thousands of receptive Americans-
especially those who lived near the hub of Buddhist activity in San Francisco. West coast
Beat writers such as Whalen, Welch, and Snyder were among them. 8

For Snyder especially, an interest in Buddhism was also accompanied by an interest in
Oriental fiterature--especially the work of nature poets such as Han-shan, the Chinese
hermit / poet of the seventh century T'ang dynasty, whose "Cold Mountain Poems" Snyder
translated while a student at Berkeley. The twenty-four translations, later collected and
published in the same volume with Snyder's Riprap (Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems,
Four Seasons 1969), present a vision parallel to Snyder's own wilderness poems-
separated by geographic distance and a dozen centuries, but very similar in content:

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,

The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:

The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist blurred grass.

The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain
The pine sings, but there's no wind.

Who can leap the world's ties

16

And sit with me among the white clouds? (46)

While West coast Beats such as Snyder, Whalen, and Welch were eager to search out
ancient Far Eastern models for their writing, these writers were also able to trace a long
and illustrious heritage among earlier writers of their own region who had concerned
themselves with nature. Jack London‘s turn of the century novels such as Call of the Wild
(1903) and White Fang (1906) were penned here, as was John Muir's best selling 1894
volume The Mountains of California. In a 1994 interview with me, Gary Snyder recalled
that his reading of Muir's wilderness essays influenced him on a practical level as well as in
a literary sense:

I read Muir as an adolescent, . . . Muir inspired me, as a lad, on the practical level
of boldly going out and staying longer in the wood with less gear, and having the
nerve to do solo trips. So I did (for example) some lengthy trips in the summer of
1948 in the mountains north of Mt. St. Helens in the Washington Cascades,
including some third-class rock scrambles.
Through reading, through writing, and through the kind of conscious replecation which
Snyder describes here, West Coast Beat writers became the inheritors of a rich literary
tradition of the Pacific region. William Everson, poet and later chronicler of the San
Francisco renaissance, has called Snyder, Whalen and Welch the foremost "purely native
voices" of the West Coast during the Beat period, and finds their work in the tradition of
what he has termed "the Western archetype" embodied by earlier writers of the region
(Archetype West 141).9

A more recent, and more direct, literary antecedent to the West coast Beat writers was
California poet Robinson Jeffers, who in the 1930's began to capture readers' imaginations
with a view of the world which was markedly less anthropocentric than any before

encountered in American literature. Writing from his vantage point at Tor House near Big

Sur on the California coastline, Jeffers adopted an ecological perspective in his poetry, a

l7

perspective which urged his readers to view themselves as only a tiny part of the universe-
- not the center of it. His 1938 poem, "The Answer," warned readers that:
. . .[T]he great beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and
things, the divine
beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's
pitiful
confusions, or drown in despair when his days
darken. (536)

Snyder has called Jeffers "a very special ancestor" for West Coast poets of the period,
finding in the earlier poet's work "a sense of the West as a rare landscape" and "an interest
in the evolving Pacific Basin culture" which would become so important in Snyder's later
writing (Lauridsen and Dalgard 67).10

Perhaps the poet who provided the greatest link between the past and the present for
West Coast Beat writers of the mid-fifties was Kenneth Rexroth. Long a serious student
of Buddhism and advocate for nature, Rexroth became an important mentor for several of
the young Beat writers as they arrived in San Francisco. In the older poet's work, Snyder,
McClure and Whalen no doubt recognized a useful model. Since his early poetry of the
1940's, Rexroth's work had always featured a distinct reverence for the natural world--
often paired with an anarchist's distaste for American industrialism and militarism. In the
mid-fifties this theme became even more pronounced, as it is in this excerpt from "The
American Century," a poem later collected in Rexroth's 1956 volume entitled In Defense
of the Earth. In a dark reversal of Henry Luce's famous prediction of American
ascendancy, poet depicts a nature outing with his young daughter, and a natural world
changed forever by the specter of the arms race:

. . .Now she

Runs to me with a tuft of rose

Gray owl's clover. "What's that? Oh! What's that?"
She hoots like an owl and caresses

The flower when I tell her its name.

Overhead in the deep sky

Of May Day jet bombers cut long .

White slashes of smoke. The blackbird

Sings and the baby laughs, midway

In the century of horror. (28)

East Coast Beats, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, brought to San Francisco
their own literary roots--roots which reflected an conventional undergraduate education at
Columbia as well as some very unconventional education post-graduate work with
William S. Burroughs, Herbert Hunke, Neal Cassidy and other underworld figures of New
York City's Time Square. At Columbia, they found in American Romanticism a strain of
thought with which they felt a close connection. As John Tytell has noted, in his
discussion of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs, the nineteenth century New England
Transcendentalists were key figures in the three writers' development:

Their spiritual ancestors were men like Thoreau with his aggressive idealism, his
essentially conservative distrust of machines and industry, his desire to return to
the origins of man's relations to the land; or Melville, with his adventurous
tolerance of different tribal codes; or Whitman, optimistically proclaiming with
egalitarian gusto the raw newness and velocity of self-renewing change in America
while joyously admiring the potential of the common man. (4)

In addition to the nineteenth century American Romantics, East Coast Beat writers
had another very powerful influence in Dr. William Carlos Williams, the poet / physician
of Ginsberg's home town of Paterson, New Jersey. Williams was an inspiration to many

poets in the Beat circle—Snyder, Welch, Creely, Levertov, and Whalen--for his insistence

19

on free verse and poetic diction which approximated everyday speech; but it was Allen
Ginsberg on whom the writer had the greatest impact. Many of Ginsberg's earliest poems,
later collected in Empty Mirror ( 1961) are written in the tight, Irnagist form of Williams's
early work. Williams himself wrote the introduction to the collection, just as he had done
for Howl and Other Poems several years earlier.

As a youth growing up in Paterson, Ginsberg had known Williams and enjoyed a
lengthy correspondence with the elder poet for much of his adult life. It is not surprising
then, that Ginsberg's character should find its way into Williams's magnum opus Paterson,
the long poem which he constructed during the years 1946 to 1958. Several of Ginsberg's
letters are included in the poem, and his is one of the many voices which combine to give a
collective persona to the title city.11 Patterson was, and is, an important poem to those
interested in the depiction of the American landscape in all of its stages of development,
and it seems to anticipate much of the later Beat writing on the subject. Like Ginsberg's
"Howl," it portrays the modern city as a confused and chaotic jumble--a mirror image of a
chaotic and perhaps insane mind. "I began thinking of writing a long poem upon the
resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city," wrote Williams (quoted in
Sharpe 136).

Yet there is

no return: rolling up out of chaos,

a nine month's wonder, the city

the man, an identity--it can't be

otherwise--an interpenetration, both ways. (Paterson 12)
And like much of the later poetry of Snyder, Patterson is doggedly concerned with the
issue of place. Williams's poem is, above all, an effort at knowing one specific locale with
minute intimacy: its people, its history, its land, and its rivers. All these elements do not

coexist peacefully in Paterson, however; as William Sharpe notes in his study Unreal

20

Cities, "The poem is replete with images of the urban dislocation of the natural world"
(147):
a bud forever green,
tight curled, upon the pavement, perfect
in juice and substance but divorced, divorced
from its fellows, fallen low-- (28)

When Ginsberg arrived in San Francisco early in 1955, he carried with him a letter of
introduction written by Williams and addressed to Kenneth Rexroth-~a document which in
a very real way served as a bridge between the factions of young poets the two had
inspired and nurtured (Miles 171). In less than a year's time, the two groups would meet,
and for a time, become one--as the Beat movement gained momentum at the Six Gallery
reading.

It had been Rexroth who had suggested the names of the reading's participants when
he was asked by one of the gallery's owners, Wally Hedrick, if he knew any poets willing
to put on a reading. Under the impetus of Rexroth, Ginsberg contacted the other four
poets who were to take part in the event: Snyder, McClure, Whalen and Lamantia.
Although Rexroth was to serve only as master of ceremonies for the evening, and read
none of his own work, out of respect for their mentor the younger poets included him as
the sixth poet at the reading. Ginsberg later recalled: "Then Gary [Snyder] and I decided
that we ought to invite Rexroth to be the sixth--sixth poet--to introduce us at the Six
Gallery, to be the elder, since he had linked us up" (Gifford 198-99).

The setting for the event was an auto repair shop which had recently been turned into
a cooperative art gallery by a group of young artists from the San Francisco Art Institute.
As the poets arrived on the evening of October 7, 1955, they were surprised to find well
over one hundred people in attendance, drinking wine and milling about waiting for the
reading to begin (McClure Surface 12-13).

21

As Michael McClure has pointed out in his essay "The Beat Surface," a good deal of
the poetry read that night at the Six Gallery reflected a strong interest in the natural
world. 12 With the exception of the event's first reader, the American Surrealist poet
Philip Lamantia, who instead of reading from his own work chose to pay tribute to his
recently deceased friend John Hoffman by reading several of his poems, all of the poets
present at the event presented works which displayed a longing for a reconnection with
nature.

Michael McClure followed Lamantia as the evening's second reader. The youngest of
the poets, McClure was a Mid-Westemer who had migrated to California earlier in the
decade to pursue his life-long interests in literature, the natural sciences and mysticism.
The works which McClure chose to read for this his first public reading reflect these
interests. The first poem he read, "Point Lobos: Animism," is clearly an attempt at
viewing the world through fresh eyes. It reads, in part:

Of Animism:

I have been in a spot so full of spirits
That even the most joyful anirnist
Brooded
When all in sight was less to be cared about
Than death
And there was no noise in the ears
That mattered.

(I knelt in the shade
By a cold salt pool
And felt the entrance of hate
On many legs,

The soul like a Clambering

Water vascular system.

22

No scuttling could matter
Yet I formed in my mind
The most beautiful
Of maxims.
How could I care
For your illness or mine?)
This talk of bodies! (Hymns 4-5)

The poem is a curious blend of the primitive and the scientific--a trait common to
much of McClure's writing on nature. Here, the primitive notion of animism--the notion
that all things are in some way alive and possess a soul--is paired with phrases informed by
modern science such as "Water vascular system." While such a juxtaposition of ideas may
seem strange, McClure has pointed to early ecologists as the source of the poem's
inspiration: "Ernst Haeckel and Alfred North Whitehead believed the universe is a single
organism--that the whole thing is alive and that its existence is its sacredness and its
breathing" (Surface 27).

This concept, of a natural world alive and linked by what McClure has called a visceral
"undersoul" (26), was a key element in the poet's early work. Another of the poems he
read at the Six Gallery, entitled "For the Death of 100 Whales," extends this recognition of
ecological and spiritual interconnectedness with nature to an early plea for the protection
of whales. The poem was inspired by an April 1954 article in Time which described the
mass slaughter of whales by the American military. McClure used portions of the article
as a preface to the poem:

Killer whales. . . .Savage sea cannibals up to thirty feet long with teeth like
bayonets. . . one was caught with fourteen seals and thirteen porpoises in its belly
. . . often tear at boats and nets . . . destroyed thousands of dollars worth of fishing

tackle. . . . Icelandic government appealed to the US, which has thousands of

23

men stationed at a lonely NATO airbase on the subarctic island. Seventy-nine
bored G.I.'s responded with enthusiasm. Armed with rifles and machine guns one
posse of Americans climbed into four small boats and in one morning wiped out a
pack of 100 killers. . . .

First the killers were rounded up into tight formation with concentrated machine
gun fire, then moved out again one by one, for the final blast that would kill them
. . .as one was wounded, the others would set upon it and tear it to pieces with
their jagged teeth. (Hymns 7)

The excerpted article is an effective device for holding a mirror up to American
attitudes of the 1950's concerning humanity's dominance over nature. The line between
"beast" and man is blurred as McClure points out, using the Time reporter's own words,
that the real "killers" are American G.I.'s. The poem which followed the preface is even
more effective in condemning the slaughter:

Hung midsea
Like a boat in midair
The liners boiled their pastures:
The liners of flesh,

The Arctic steamers.

Brains the size of a football

Mouths the size of a door.

The sleek wolves
Mowers and reapers of sea kine.
THE GIANT TADPOLES
(Meat their algae)

Lept

24

Like sheep or children

Shot from the sea's bore

Turned and twisted
(Goya! !)
Flung blood and sperm.
Incense.
Gnashed at their tales and brothers,
Cursed Christ of mammals,
Snapped at the sun,

Ran for the sea's floor.

Goya! Goya!
Oh Lawrence 13
No angels dance those bridges.
OH GUN! OH BOW!
There are no churches in the waves,

No holiness,

No passages or crossings

From the beasts' wet shore. (Hymns 7-8)

Philip Whalen was the next poet to read. A schoolmate of both Gary Snyder and Lew
Welch at Reed College in Oregon, Whalen shared his peers' enthusiasm for both Buddhism
and the outdoors, and the poems which Whalen selected to read at the Six Gallery reflect
this. The first, "The Road Runner," displays a keen eye for detail in the description of its
subject:

Thin long bird

with a taste for snakes' eyes

25

Frayed tail, wildcat claws

His pinions are bludgeons.

Few brains, topped

By a crown

And a flair for swift in-fighting--

Try to take it from him. (On Bear's Head 4)

The forth poet to read at the Six Gallery was Allen Ginsberg--a young poet who only

a few weeks before had completed the composition of "Howl," the poem which would
gain notice for himself, and indirectly, several other poets present at the reading. While
Ginsberg's major works embracing nature and ecology, such as "Wales Visitation" (1967),
were more than a decade away, the poet's early work exhibits strong suggestions of a turn
towards nature in its virulent condemnation of industrial capitalism and the ills associated
with the modern city. Ginsberg's "Howl," like Whitman's "barbaric yawp"14 which
preceded it, takes a part of its inspiration from the natural world and the howling of
wolves--a sound which Aldo Leopold had once described as "an outburst of wild defiant
sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world" (137). The description is as
apt for Ginsberg's "Howl" as it is for the wolf's. Ginsberg took the stage and began a
rhythmic and emphatic chanting of the long poem, reading, as observer John Montgomery
would later recall, "like a referee counting out Nixon." 15

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving

hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for
an angry fix, . . . (Howl 9)

The poem marked an important breakthrough for Ginsberg, but perhaps more importantly,
this first reading of the poem, and the sensational publicity that both the poem and its

author received in the ensuing months, provided a crucial catalyst for the early success of

26

the Beat movement, thus making Ginsberg at least indirectly responsible for the public's

first taste of the more nature centered work of Snyder, Whalen and McClure. As Snyder

has noted:
That reading held in November, 1955 16. . . was a curious kind of turning point in
American poetry . . . Poetry suddenly seemed useful in 1955 San Francisco . . .
Howl became the second book published in Ferlinghetti's Pocket Poet series, and
Ginsberg's extensive readings all over the United States began to draw audiences
of a size not seen before. Kerouac's novels were published, and the "heat
generation" was launched. Allen was to a great extent responsible for generating
the excitement. (Real Work 163)

While Ginsberg's reading of "Howl" has usually been seen as the climax of the Six
Gallery reading by most literary historians, Jack Kerouac, himself a close friend and
enthusiastic supported of Ginsberg, gave the poet and his poem little emphasis in his
slightly fictionalized version of the reading in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. Instead,
Kerouac chose to emphasize the importance of another new voice in American poetry--the
evening's final reader, Gary Snyder. In writing about the Six Gallery performance of
Japhy Ryder, the fictionalized version of Snyder, whom he termed a " great new hero of
American culture" (27), Kerouac enthusiastically described both Snyder's poetry and the
poet's life experience:

And he had his tender lyrical lines, like the ones about bears eating berries,
showing his love of animals and great mystery lines about oxen on the Mongolian
road showing his knowledge of Oriental literature. . . .And his anarchistic ideas
about how Americans don't know how to live, with lines about commuters being
trapped in living rooms that come from poor trees felled by chainsaws (showing
here, also, his background as a logger up north). (14) '

The poem to which Kerouac here refers is Snyder's long piece entitled "A Berry
Feast," later collected in The Back Country (1968). The poem is an amalgam of Native

27

American traditions, Eastern religion and ecology which combine to present a portrait of
nature quite unlike any which had preceded it in American literature. The poem's
protagonist is the figure of Coyote--traditionally seen in Indian myth as the long-enduring
trickster of the natural world. Coyote functions as observer to all man's foibles as he
struggles to find his place in the natural world, as in this passage in which he observes
man's attempts to house himself:

The chainsaw falls for boards of pine,

Suburban bedrooms, block on block

Will waver with this grain and knot,

The maddening shapes will start and fade .

Each morning when commuters wake--

Joined boards hung on frames,

a box to catch a biped in. (Back Country 13)

Often, the poem jumps ahead and back in time to portray human history as a long
series of crimes against nature. Here, Snyder juxtaposes the deforestation of China during
the Shang dynasty (1766-1122 BC.) with modern high-technology logging in the
American Northwest:

Clanks of tread

oxen of Shang

moving the measured road
Bronze bells at the throat
Bronze balls at the horns, the bright Oxen
Chanting through sunlight and dust

. wheeling logs down hills
into heaps,
the yellow

Fat-snout Caterpillar, tread toppling forward

28

Leaf on leaf, roots in gold volcanic dirt. (14)

Despite these images of destruction, the poem does finally offer some hope-—if not for
man, then for the rest of nature. Snyder's hero, Coyote, endures through all of the
environmental destruction wrought by man with an attitude of radical defiance. When told
by his fellow creature Magpie that "The people are coming," his response is unmistakable
in its intent:

"Fuck you!" sang Coyote

and ran.

The poem ends with a landscape devoid of humans, with only man's buildings left in ruin
as a reminder of his presence. The final image is one of smiling victory for coyote, as he
watches what was once owned by man return to nature:

From cool springs under cedar

On his haunches, white grin,

long tongue panting, he watches:

Dead city in dry summer,

Where berries grow. (16)

Snyder also read portions of his long epic Myths & Texts at the Six Gallery, a work
which like "A Berry Feast" is grounded in the poet's long range view of nature and world
history:

The ancient forests of China logged

and the hills slipped into the Yellow Sea.
Squared beams, log dogs,

on a tamped—earth sill.
San Francisco 2X4s

were the woods around Seattle:
Someone killed and someone built, a house,

a forest, wrecked or raised

29

All America hung on a hook
& burned by men in their own praise. (Myths & Texts 4)

With the end of Snyder's set, the Six Gallery reading came to a close; but among those
who had witnessed it there was a palpable sense of a new direction in American poetry.
Michael McClure recalls:

In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before--we had gone
beyond the point of no retum--and we were ready for it, for a point of no return.
None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the
intellective void--to the land without poetry--to the spiritual drabness. We wanted
to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it.
We wanted voice and we wanted vision. (Surface 13)

A significant portion of this new vision that McClure speaks of was a renewed
emphasis on the natural world present in his own writing and in the work of Snyder,
Whalen, Ginsberg, and others within the Beat circle. Clearly, this theme was a dominant
force in much of the work presented at the movement's first floweringuthe Six Gallery
reading. Often this new emphasis on nature employed by the Beats involved a mixing of
old ways with new: of ancient animism with marine biology, of Zen and Native American
beliefs with the modern scientific notion of food chains. Such an unlikely mixture must
have seemed truly radical in 1950's America; yet the environmental movement which
gained momentum in the 1960's and has continued to thrive into the final years of this
century has in large part depended on this blend of what Snyder has called "the old ways"
with modern science common to much Beat writing on nature. It is a short philosophical
step from the animism offered in McClure's poetry of 1955 to biochemist James
Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis--the notion that the entire planet functions as a single living
organism--one of the most pervasive theories among environmentalists since the early
1970's. Likewise, the Buddhist and Native American traditions which inform much of the

early poetry of Whalen, Ginsberg and Snyder have become a mainstay of the American

30

environmental movement, and a major source of wisdom for the increasingly influential
"deep ecology" perspective offered by environmental ethicists such as George Sessions
and Bill Devall.

But perhaps even more important than the Beats' merging of older cultural traditions
with science was their use of the newest of the sciences—~ecology--as a source for their art.
Although the basic precepts of ecology had their roots in the writings of Alfred North
Whitehead almost half a century earlier, these theories remained vague concepts until
scientist / writers such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson helped to familiarize them in
the post-war years with books such as A Sand County Almanac ( 1949) and The Sea
Around Us (1951). But it was the Beat writers of the 1950's who raised ecology~—the
discipline which Paul Shepard has called "the subversive science"--to the level of fitting
subject matter for art, and in doing so, set the stage for the ecological consciousness of the

American 1960's.

31

NOTES

1 Shiva is the Hindu god of destruction and reproduction.

2 Ginsberg‘s poetry has long made extensive use of the unexpected juxtaposition of
dissimilar words (i.e. the image of the "hydrogen jukebox" which he uses to describe the
setting of the American 1950's in his most famous work "Howl"). It may be that he
considered "forest beatniks" equally unexpected.

3 The only notable exception is the considerable critical attention paid in recent years to
the poetry and essays of Gary Snyder.

4 Letter to the author. 27 July 1993

5 See Patrick D. Murphy's Understanding Gary Snyder 5.

6 Letter to the author. Dated "Solstice 93" (21 Dec. 1993).

7 This phrase, altered slightly in its meaning, also occurs repeatedly in Gary Snyder's
work, and in fact, became the title for his first collection of essays and interviews. Says
Snyder: ". . . all of us will come back again to hoe in the ground, or gather wild potato
bulbs with digging sticks, or hand-adze a beam, or skin a pole, or scrape a hive--we're
never going to get away from that. We've been living in a dream that we're going to get
away from it, that we won't have to do it again. Put that out of our minds. We'll always
do that work. That work is going to be there. . . And that's the real work: to make the
world as real as it is, and to find ourselves as real as we are within it" (The Real Work 81-
82).

8 For a more complete discussion of this phenomenon, see Rick Fields's How the Swans
Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America, 195-224, and Carl
Jackson's "The Counterculture Looks East: Beat Writers and Asian Religion." American
Studies. Vol. xxix, Number 1 (Spring 1988): 51-70.

9 Other critics have written essays which place the Beats in the literary tradition of the

American West. See Thomas J. Lyon's "Gary Snyder, A Western Poet" in Western

32

American Literature 3 (1968): 207-16. A more intimately regional approach to Beat
writing can be found in David Robertson's "Real Matter, Spiritual Mountain: Gary Snyder
and Jack Kerouac on Mt. Tamalpais" in Western American Literature 3 (1992): 209-26.
See also Edward Abbey's reflections on his own "beatnik" days in Northern California
during the mid-fifties in "A San Francisco Journal" from his collection One Life at a Time,
Please, 51-84.
10 In later years, Snyder would temper his high regard for the ecological perspective in
the work of Jeffers with doubts about the older poet's cloistered, at times hostile,
perspective on the subject of humanity and nature. In a 1992 poem, "Word Basket
Woman," he notes:

Robinson Jeffers, his tall cold view

quite true in a way, but why did he say it

as though he alone

stood above our delusions, he also

feared death, insignificance,

and was not quite up to the inhuman beauty

of parsnips or diapers, the deathless

nobility at the core of all ordinary things. (No Nature 371)
11 Ginsberg is referred to in the poem as "A.P.," the initials meaning "A Poet." See
Ginsberg's Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties, 4.
12 In an interview I conducted in March 1994, Philip Whalen concurred with McClure's
observation, saying: "I would agree that there was a common concern among us about the
values of protecting and preserving the natural world." When I asked Gary Snyder
whether he felt the event exemplified a interest in nature among the Beat poets, he said: "If
by interest you mean one who backpacks, climbs, does forest or range work, is a member
of a conservation organization, is a naturalist, then Rexroth and I were the only ones. But

if you mean a sensibility open to nature, tuned to the landscape, then Philip Whalen is

33

certainly included. Michael McClure's interest was that of the naturalist and
conservationist. Allen [Ginsberg] and Jack [Kerouac] and Lawrence [Ferlinghetti] were
still developing a nature sensibility."

13 McClure's references here require clarification. He writes: "The slaughter of the
whales was a murder that I thought only Goya could have portrayed in his Horrors of
War. I called on DH. Lawrence at the end to be the tutelary figure of the poem because
of his description of the copulation of whales [in Whales Weep Not] and his imagining of
the angels moving from body to body in the mammoth act." (Scratching the Beat Surface
33)

14 The original title of Ginsberg's "Howl" had, in fact, been "Yawp," a title taken from
Whitman's line in "Song of Myself": "1 sound my barbaric yawp over the roof of the
world. "

15 Kerouac West Coast: A Bohemian Pilot Detailed Navigation Instructions. N. pag.

16 I believe Snyder is mistaken about this date, as are several other literary historians.
The most reliable documentation for what I believe to be the correct date of the reading--
Oct. 7, 1955-comes from the letters of Allen Ginsberg. Since so much attention was
given to his first reading of "Howl," a great deal of dated material (i.e. letters, telegrams)

was generated in the reading's aftermath which point to this as the correct date.

11. "THIS IS OUR BODY":
GARY SNYDER'S EROTIC UNIVERSE

"Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature!--ah if poor, sick, prurient
humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness
then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication,

your fear, your respectability, that is indecent."

Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (1882)

"America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?"

Allen Ginsberg, "America" (1956)

Despite the many historical and geographical coincidences which have led readers and
critics to place poet / essayist / environmentalist Gary Snyder within that loosely defined
subset of postwar American writers known as the Beat Movement, the writer himself has
long resisted the label of "Beat poet. " While he acknowledges his role "as part of the
social phenomenon" of the Beat movement, Snyder prefers to think of his poetics as
sharing the esthetics of the slightly earlier San Francisco renaissance (Lauridsen and
Dalgard 68). As he recently told an interviewer: "As a poet I belong to the San Francisco
renaissance, but I'm not a Beat poet, and I've never been called a Beat poet" (68). Still, it
is hard to ignore the four decades of close association Snyder has had with Beat writers,

and harder still to imagine the strong emphasis on nature present in so much Beat

34

35

literature had he not been there to guide it in that direCtion, to bring, as Thomas J. Lyon
put it, "to the sub-culture itself the bright clean air of the mountains" (208).

Snyder has been a crucial catalyst to the Beat Movement for as long as it has existed.
He took part in the opening salvos of the movement, as one of five readers at the
legendary Six Gallery reading in 1955, with a performance which lead his friend Jack
Kerouac to proclaim his fictional counterpart, J aphy Ryder, "a great new hero of
American culture" (Dharma Burns 27 ). Snyder befriended Kerouac when he arrived in
San Francisco, shared a rented house with him at the foot of Mt. Tamalpais, and
introduced him to mountaineering in the California Sierras-~a friendship chronicled in
Kerouac's third novel, The Dharma Burns (1958).1 In recent years, Snyder's name has
more often been mentioned in conjunction with writers such as Wendell Berry, Annie
Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Edward Abbey, as one of America's preeminent nature and
environmental writers; but through the years, he has also remained a close friend and
associate of many writers within the Beat circle, including Allen Ginsberg, Michael
McClure, Anne Waldman, Peter Orlovsky, Joanne Kyger, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and
former Reed College classmates Philip Whalen and Lew Welch.

Beyond these close personal ties to the Beat movement, however, critics have seen
little to link Snyder's work to that of other Beat writers. His poetry has almost always
shunned the long expansive line prevalent in so much Beat writing, exemplified by Allen
Ginsberg's "Howl," Gregory Corso's "Marriage," or the free-flowing, jazz-inspired
sentences of Jack Kerouac's prose. Instead, Snyder's poetic lines more often run short and

are tightly controlled, reminiscent of the haiku and other far eastern forms.2

The topics of
Snyder's writings also set them apart from much Beat hterature--or at least from the
American public's initial conception of Beat literature. Whereas Ginsberg's "Howl,"
Kerouac's On the Road, and Burroughs's Naked Lunch depict the insane, fast-paced life of

urban America, Snyder's works from the same period more often speak of isolated

36

wilderness experience, Native American mythology, and quiet moments of Buddhist
meditation.

There are, however, some genuine esthetic and thematic links between the work of
Gary Snyder and other writers more squarely situated within the Beat Movement. One of
these areas which Snyder shares with Beat writers such as Ginsberg, Kerouac and
Burroughs is the unshrinking desire to depict the universe beyond the boundaries and
conventions of literary "decency," and to make formerly taboo subjects--the naked, the
raw, the sexual, the scatological--into subjects worthy of literary treatment. In his early
study of the work of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg, Naked Angels, John Tytell has
described this theme of "nakedness" as a key element in what he refers to as "the Beat
vision":

Beginning in despair, the Beat vision was elevated through the shocks of
experience to a realization of what was most perilous about American life. One of
the images that best captures the motivating energy of this search is the nakedness
that was expressed aesthetically in Jack Kerouac's idea of the writer committing
himself irrevocably to the original impulses of his imagination, in Ginsberg's
relentless self-exposure in a poem like "Kaddish," in Burroughs' relentless refusal
in Naked Lunch to disguise the demonic aspects of his addiction. But for the
Beats nakedness did not exist simply as an aesthetic standard, it was to become a
symbolic public and private stance, making art and action inseparable: thus Allen
Ginsberg disrobed at poetry readings, and Kerouac once wrote that he wanted to
be like the medieval Tibetan scholar-monk Milarepa who lived naked in caves. . . .
This emphasis on baring the body and exposing the soul was an intuitive reaction
to a betrayal the Beats felt because of mass acceptance of demeaning changes in
the American ideal of self-determination. Nakedness signified rebirth, the recovery
of an identity. (4)

37

Kerouac's fictionalized version of Gary Snyder, J aphy Ryder, is the supreme example
of this "emphasis on baring the body and exposing the soul" which Tytell finds so central
to the Beat vision. J aphy, the hero of Dharma Bums, seems almost entirely without
inhibition when it comes to the human body and sexuality-either in his life or in his
writing. Kerouac portrays him disrobing frequently and unashamedly—-at parties, while
enjoying the ancient Tibetan sexual rite of yabyum, even while on a mountain climbing
expedition in the California Sierras. J aphy's poetry, too, possesses an openness towards
sexuality, an openness which in Kerouac's view, elevates the formerly obscene to a level of
artistic purity--as it does when Japhy Ryder shares his poetry at the "Gallery Six" reading:

J aphy himself read his fine poems about Coyote the God of the North American
Plateau Indians . . . "Fuck you! sang Coyote, and ran away!" read Japhy to the
distinguished audience, making them all howl with joy, it was so pure, fuck being a
dirty word that comes out clean. (13-14)3

Not surprisingly, in his own literary career, Gary Snyder shares this same "emphasis on
baring the body and exposing the soul" exhibited by Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and
other Beat writers, and brings it to what would seem to be the most unlikely of genres:
nature writing.4 With the advent of Snyder's work in the late fifties and early sixties, an
area of American literature which had been in this century dominated by the genteel
voices of writers such as Aldo Leopold, Robert Frost, and Rachel Carson, now found
itself exposed to a new voice--one which reveled in the sexual aspects of nature (both
human and non-human), took pleasure in the bawdy words and actions of humans apart
from society, and boldly and honestly discussed human sexuality. It can be truthfully said,
as Thomas Lyon has noted, that Snyder brought to the subculture "the bright clean air of
the mountains"; but it is equally true that he brought to the mountains, and to his
description of them, the sub-culture's openness towards the body and sexuality.

The attitude of openness towards sexuality expressed by Snyder and other Beat

writers can not really be seen as new in American literature, of course. Walt Whitman had

38

opened the door to a frank poetic treatment of the human body and sexuality a century
before, in poems such as "Song of Myself," and "I Sing the Body Electric." But it was a
door which, for one reason or another, few writers were willing to enter until the Beat
Movement reawakened this vibrant, yet dormant, strain of American writing.

Beat writers bravely took on Whitman's mission of restoring the body's place in
literature, but they did so at no small personal and social cost. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and
Other Poems met with a barrage of controversy on the occasion of its publication, and the
book's publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, quickly found himself embroiled in a lawsuit over
the book's alleged obscenity. A similar fate awaited William Burroughs, when his 1959
novel Naked Lunch also faced trial due to obscenity charges. A decade after the Howl
case, Michael McClure's experimental play, The Beard, became the target of yet another
censorship trial. On several different literary fronts--poetry, fiction, and theatre--Beat
writers challenged the existing standards, and in each case won court victories which
helped to make the frank discussion of sexuality and other formerly taboo subjects in
American literature possible.5

The challenges facing Gary Snyder's work were not legal, but cultural, as he attempted
to broaden and liberalize the boundaries of that most genteel of American literary genres-
writing about nature.6 In the first half of the twentieth century, nature writing had come
to be exemplified by works in which the natural world had been "cleansed" of much of its
sexuality: the natural history essays of John Burroughs, John Muir, Rachel Carson and
Aldo Leopold, the agricultural essays of Liberty Hyde Bailey, and the poetry of Robert
Frost and Theodore Roethke. There were of course exceptions, moments when the genre
momentarily granted a look into the sexual aspects of nature, such as Joseph Wood
Krutch's essay on the mating habits of desert plants and animals, "Love in the Desert," or
moments when popular fiction brought human sexuality briefly into a natural setting, such
as Ernest Hemingway's short stories "Up in Michigan" and "Fathers and Sons." But in

general, American nature writing before 1950 remained a remarkably chaste and asexual

39

institution--an institution which as Snyder has noted recently, "was much captured by
'gentility'." 7

Despite the radical departure from the norms of twentieth century American nature
writing which Snyder's work represents, critics have been slow to acknowledge the
connection between sexuality and nature in his poetry. Thomas Parkinson, in an early
essay, "The Poetry of Gary Snyder," notes that among the distinctive traits of 3 Gary
Snyder poem are "a natural (preferably wilderness setting)" along with "erotic overtones"
(618). Bob Steuding, in his groundbreaking study, Gary Snyder, has placed the poet's
erotic verse in the tradition of DH. Lawrence because of the sensual emphasis present in
the work of both writers (147).8 While Steuding does suggest briefly that there are
connections in Snyder's poems "between body and land, between love and the cycle of
nature" (149), these connections remain unexplored in the critic's survey of the poet's
work.

Of all of Snyder's early critics, Sherman Paul ventured furthest in his examination of
some of the erotic elements in the poet's work up to, and including, his 1970 collection,
Regarding Wave. In his 1970 essay surveying the first ten years of the poet's career,
"From Lookout to Ashram: The Way of Gary Snyder," Paul points out, among other
things, the development of what he calls Snyder's "love ethic" in its various manifestations:
love in friendship, love in marriage, and love of "nature as woman" (4, 82). Paul's
discussion of the theme of love in Snyder's poetry is enlightening and suggestive of further
study, but it makes up only a small part of this now quite dated overview of Snyder's
writing.

What is suggested, but remains unexplored, in these earlier critical treatments of
Snyder's work, is a connection between what may well comprise the two most important
aspects of the writer's thought: nature and the erotic.9 That they often occur in the same

poetic line in much of Snyder's work has been well documented, but the question of how

4O

nudity and eroticism function in Snyder's writing-particularly in his writing about nature--

has never been adequately addressed.

"Know Nature"

In the very first paragraph of the preface to his 1992 volume of collected poems, No
Nature, Gary Snyder asks a question which is pivotal to many of the hundreds of poems
which follow it:

What's intimate? The feet and hands, one's confection of thoughts, knowledges
and memories; the kitchen and the bedding. And there is one's language. How
wonderful to be born to become a Native Speaker, to be truly native of something.
I've been at home with the same language-eased by it, amused by it, surfing on it,
no matter where I lived, through the years. (v)

The intimacy which the poet speaks of here goes much farther than the intimacy shared
among humans, although this is certainly a large part of it; for Snyder, the concept of
intimacynof what it means "to be truly native of something"--extends far beyond the
human realm and has as its goal a kind of universal intimacy with the whole of nature. But
the realization of such an intimacy, in Snyder's view, is difficult, indeed perhaps
impossible, to attain:
But we do not easily brow nature, or even know ourselves. Whatever it actually
is, it will not fulfil our conceptions and theoretical models. There is no single or
set "nature" either as "the 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. (v)

As Snyder notes in his preface, much of his life's work as a poet has been to "know
nature" on an intimate level as "An open space to move in, with the whole body, the whole
mind. My gesture has been with language" (v). This admittedly impossible quest for a

universal intimacy with nature in all its myriad facets lies at the root of much of the poet's

41

work, and at the root of many of the "obscene" or erOtic elements of Snyder's poetry.
The naked, the raw, the sexual, and the scatological elements in Snyder's language take
many forms, from the bawdy joke to the sacred chant, and serve just as many functions--
from capturing accurately the language of the logging camp to providing a far-reaching
social critique of America's relationship with wildemess--but each has as its final goal the

desire for an intimacy, for a oneness with nature.

"This Is Our Body"

In Allen Ginsberg's 1956 poem, "America," he asks "America when will you be
angelic? / When will you take off your clothes?" (Howl 31). Reversing the ages-old
Western tradition which viewed nudity as unnatural and immoral, and making the
unclothed human form "angelic" instead of obscene was a shared concern among several
of the Beat writers, including Gary Snyder. A number of Snyder's poems have as their
purpose the reintroduction of humanity to its own corporal body--a mission to view the
human body as a part of nature's beauty which had been left largely untended since
Whitman's day. A passage from his "Lookout's Journal" dated 6 August 1952, makes it
clear that a young Gary Snyder was considering such ideas even in his pre-Beat days.
Writing from his perch atop a fire lookout tower in the Mt. Baker National Forest, he
notes:

What happens all winter; the wind driving snow; clouds--

wind, and mountains--repeating
this is what always happens here,
and the photograph of a young female torso hung in the lookout

window, in the foreground. Natural against natural, beauty. (Earth House Hold
7)

42

Snyder's most famous poem in this vein is "The Bath" from his Pulitzer Prize winning
1969 collection Turtle Island. The long poem is a celebration of the human body in all of
its forms and stages of development. Set in a sauna where Snyder bathes nude with his
wife and two sons, the poem begins with a detailed description of the poet bathing his
young son:

He stands in warm water
Soap all over the smooth of his thigh and stomach
"Gary don't soap my hair!"
«his eye-sting fear-
the soapy hand feeling
through and around the globes and curves of his body
up in the crotch,
And washing-tickling out the scrotum, little anus,
his penis curving up and getting hard
as I pull back skin and try to wash it
Laughing and jumping, flinging arms around,
I squat all naked too,
is this our body? (Turtle Island 12)

The poem is at once both utterly wholesome and openly sexual, as the poet's
description of the simple act of bathing a child becomes a joyful reminder of humanity's
innately sensual nature. The stanza's final line, "is this our body .7," perhaps the
questioning voice of the poet's son, might just as easily speak for a nation grown ashamed
of, and detached from, its own physical nature.

While "The Bath" contains elements of the erotic, such as Snyder's description of his
wife Masa's nude body as he bathes her, the poem's over-riding tone is not sexual, but

sacred. Even in the poem's most erotically charged moments, the human body is not

43

displayed to titillate the reader's prurient interest, but instead to instill a sense of wonder
and awe at the beauty of the human form:
The body of my lady, the winding valley spine,
the space between the thighs I reach through,
cup her curving vulva arch and hold it from behind,
a soapy tickle a hand of grail
The gates of Awe
That open back a turning double-mirror world of
wombs in wombs, in rings,
that start in music,
is this our body? (12-13)

In his 1953 journal notes from his time on Sourdough Mountain Lookout, published in
Earth House Hold, Snyder commented on the American public's narrow but all-consuming
fascination with sex and romantic love:

In a culture where aesthetic experience is denied and atrophied, genuine religious

ecstasy rare, intellectual pleasure scomed--it is only natural that sex should become

the only personal epiphany of most people & the culture's interest in romantic love

take on staggering size. (19)
What is celebrated, in poems such as "The Bath," is not merely sex and romantic
attraction, but a host of other even more elusive and mysterious issues: among them
familial (and tribal) love, reproduction, birth, and gender. Snyder's sauna becomes the
nexus for all of the poet's ruminations concerning what Whitman had referred to a century
before as "the procreant urge," the mysterious physical forces which drive all species
towards the next generation of offspring:

Kai's little scrotum up close to his groin,

the seed still tucked away, that moved from us to him
In flows that lifted with the same joys forces

as his nursing Masa later,
playing with her breast,
Or me within her,
Or him emerging,
this is our body: (13)

The elemental and stark setting of the steam-bath allows Snyder to depict the human
body stripped of all its societal trappings, as beautiful and as much a part of the natural
world as any other creature "Laughing on the Great Earth":

The cloud across the sky. The windy pines.
the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow

this is our body.

Fire inside and boiling water on the stove
We sigh and slide ourselves down from the benches

wrap the babies, step outside,

black night a all the stars. (14)

"The Vernacular of the Rowdy Working Class"
Snyder's Humor as Cultural Critique
Not all of Snyder's poetry takes the same high-minded path towards re-establishing the ‘
human body as a part of nature that we see in "The Bath," of course. The poet's writing is
well known for its wry, earthy tone, and a good many of Snyder's most effective poems
use elements of humor to get their point across. In some cases, such as in the small prose
entries in Earth House Hold and poems in Myths & Texts, Snyder makes use of what

many readers would see as "raunchy" material in order to deal more honestly and openly

45

with human sexuality. In place of poetic diction, Snyder often relies on what he calls "the
vernacular of the rowdy working class" 10 to break down the barriers preventing a frank
discussion of sexuality and the human body, such as in this Sourdough journal entry from
Earth House Hold:
«And then there was this young married couple, who stay locked in their room
four weeksuwhen friends finally break in all they find is two assholes jumping back
and forth through each other. " " " (14) 11

The passage is decidedly raunchy-~and Snyder no doubt knows a funny story when he
hears one--but within the outrageous humor is an image suggestive of Snyder's journal
entry concerning a misguided American culture in which "aesthetic experience is denied
and atrophied, genuine religious ecstasy rare, [and] intellectual pleasure [is] scorned" and
where sex and romantic love "take on a staggering size" (19). Although humorous,
Snyder's honeymoon couple anecdote drives home the same point. The anecdote's "two
assholes jumping back and forth through each other" are worn down by their own over-
indulgence in sex and romanceua comic version of the same aesthetic atrophy which
Snyder speaks of in his journal entry.

This humorous cultural critique of prevailing American attitudes towards sexualityna
mindset which lusts after romantic sexuality while at the same time denying the human
body as a part of nature-is also at the heart of several of Snyder's later poems, such as
"No Shirt No Shoes No Service" from his 1986 collection Left Out in the Rain. The fast
stanza reads:

Padding down the street, the
Bushmen, the Piaute, the Cintas Largas
are refused.
The queens of Crete,
The waiting-ladies of the King of Bundelkhand.

Tara is kept out,

46

Bare-breasted on her lotus throne. ( 125)
Here, the widely held and displayed American standard for proper attire in the public
marketplace, "No Shirt No Shoes No Service," is held up to a more universal standard of
what constitutes acceptable dress, as Snyder assembles a diverse and prestigious catalogue
of those excluded by such a narrow view of the human body's "decency." 12 Not only is
such a mandate laughably repressed, Snyder points out, it is also laughably futile; for in the
poet's view, the human body is a fact of nature which the comparatively brief Western
epoch cannot and will not deny for long. The poem concludes:
And the soils of the region will be fertile again
After another round of volcanoes
Nutrient ash--
Shiva's dancing feet 13
(No shoes) (125)

In poems like this one, nudity becomes one of the "old ways"--a means of reconnection
with earlier, more primitive cultures which demonstrated a greater harmony with the
natural world. By shipping away clothing-as well as the Western social codes which
enforce its use--Snyder brings himself closer to the intimacy with nature experienced by
earlier human cultures who knew their surrounding landscapes as true "inhabitants."14 In
poems such as "By Frasier Creek Falls" from Turtle Island, the prospect of nudity
becomes a key to reinhabiting the natural world:

The living flowing land

is all there is, forever

We are it

it sings through us--

We could live on this Earth

47

without clothes or tools! (41)

"Nature is Just Naturally Sexy":
Snyder's Eroticized landscape
Snyder's efforts to "know Nature" on an intimate level often involve far more than
simply bringing the nude human figure into the poetic landscape. Just as often, the poet
imbues the natural world with an all-encompassing sensuality, thereby creating an
atmosphere in which all of nature--plants, animals, and entire food chains—-resound with
sexual energy. But, perhaps to suggest that the poet "imbues" nature with an
overwhelming sexual energy is a misreading of Snyder's intent. For rather than creating a
sensual landscape, Snyder might argue that he is merely recognizing a pre-existing
sexuality inherent in nature. As he told me in a recent interview: "For me I guess nature is
just naturally sexy." 15
A prime example is Snyder's often anthologized poem "Song of the Taste" from his
collection Regarding Wave (1970). Here, as James McClintock points out, the scientific
notion of the food chain, usually depicted as one of nature's most harsh realities, is
portrayed as a sensual exchange of vital energies which "culminates with acts of love and
promises of fecundity" (116): 16
Eating the living germs of grasses
Eating the ova of large birds

the fleshy sweetness packed

around the sperm of swaying trees

The muscles of the flanks and thighs of
soft-voiced cows

the bounce of the lamb's leap

48

the swish of the ox's tail

Eating roots grown swoll
inside the soil

Drawing on life of living
clustered points of light spun
out of space

hidden in the grape.

Eating each other's seed
eating
ah, each other.

Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread:
lip to lip. (Regarding Wave 17)

In other cases, Snyder creates a feminized landscape which takes on the outward
appearance of the female body. 17 Just as in "The Bath" the poet describes "the winding
valley spine" of his wifeuusing landscape features to describe the female form--in poems
such as "Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills, Your Body," from The Back
Country (1968), Snyder uses the female form to describe the surrounding terrain. The
poem captures the perfect coming together of the human form and landscape, as Snyder's
hands explore "the swimming limits" of his lover's body while his eyes focus on the
corresponding features of the distant Uintah Mountains:

What my hand follows on your body
Is the line. A stream of love

of heat, of light, what my

49

eye lascivious
licks

over, watching

far snow-dappled Uintah mountains
Is that stream.
Of power. what my

hand curves over, following the line.

"hip" and "groin"
Where "I"

follow by hand and eye

the swimming limits of your body. (123)

In a slightly later poem, "Song of the Tangle," from Regarding Wave (1970), Snyder
invests the landscape he views around him with an aura of feminine sexuality, as he makes
love with his wife during a yabyum ritual outside a remote Japanese temple. Although
yabyumnan ancient Tibetian sexual ritual involving prolonged intercourse while in a sitting
position-«is the occasion for the poem, it is the landscape surrounding the couple which
provides the poems sexual imagery and energy. 18 Aside from Snyder's indirect reference
to the couple's activity-~"we sit all folded"—-in the second stanza, the only clue to the
poem's subject matter comes from the poet's description of a feminized and erotically

charged landscapeua landscape which mirrors the poem's human sexuality:

Two thigh hills hold us at the fork

round mount center

we all sit folded
on the dusty planed planks of a shrine
. drinking top class sake that was left
for the god.

50

calm tree halls
the sun past the summit
heat sunk through the vines,

twisted sasa

cicada singing,

swirling in the tangle

the tangle of the thigh

the brush
through which we push (Regarding Wave 14)

"She is Sacred Territory"
In the Service of the Magna Mater

In both "Song of the Tangle" and "Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills, Your
Body," there is a very real sense that the poet has achieved a simultaneous intimacy with
both his lover and the landscape. In Snyder's case, such thoughts are not merely flights of
poetic imagination, but the basis for a new and closer relationship with the natural world.
To really "know" nature (in the Biblical sense of the word) as one would know a lover,
implies a tender and complex relationship with one's environmentua relationship involving
respect, affection, and an almost instinctive desire to protect the object of one's love and
affection from harm.

Throughout his career as a poet, Snyder has often referred to nature by using a
number of female terms--sometimes as Gaia, sometimes as Mother Earth, and often as
simply "she." In his most popular collection, Turtle Island (1974) Snyder presents his

clearest and most unified depiction of a feminized natural world. In the prose pieces

51

which make up the book's afterword, "Plain Talk," Snyder makes it clear that "Turtle
Island," the Native American term which he suggests as an alternative to the Eur0pean
term "America," is indeed female:
She is sacred territory. To hear her voice is to give up the European word
"America" and accept the new-old name for the continent, "Turtle Island." (104-
105)

Later in the same volume, in his essay "The Wilderness," Snyder states that "the voice
that speaks to me as a poet, what Westerners have called the Muse, is the voice of nature
herself, whom the ancient poets called the great goddess, the Magna Mater. I regard that
voice as a very real entity" ( 107). As Ed Folsom has suggested in his excellent essay
"Gary Snyder's Descent to Turtle Island," a central theme of Turtle Island is the loving
protection of a feminized wilderness: "Snyder," writes Folsom, "is the protecting voice of
the continental She, who, because of mistreatment by Euro-Americans, is in danger of
death. . . . 'She' is Turtle Island, and she has been raped and ravaged by the American 'He';
his appendages still push into her last wilderness and continue the assault" (224).

The death of the "continental She" to whom Folsom alludes can come in many forms.
Snyder often makes use of the metaphor of cancer in describing unchecked human
intrusion upon nature. Not surprisingly, he chooses to describe the strip-mining of coal on
Indian lands as breast cancer: "The cancer is eating away at the breast of Mother Earth in
the form of strip-mining" (Turtle Island 104). The breast cancer image is applied in the
opening stanza of "Front Lines" as well, a poem which condemns rapid and wasteful land
development:

The edge of a cancer

Swells against the hill-we feel
a foul breeze-—

And it sinks back down.

The deer winter here

52

A chainsaw growls in the gorge. (Turtle Island 18)
As the poem continues, the form of the "cancer" is made clear. The unwelcomed weekend
intrusion of real estate speculators and land developers into Snyder's home region presages
acts of rape and other violence upon the landscape:

Sunday the 4-wheel jeep of the

Realty Company brings in

Landseekers, lookers, they say

To the land,

Spread your legs.

A bulldozer grinding and slobbering

Sideslipping and belching on top of

The skinned-up bodies of still-live bushes

In the pay of a man

From town. (18)

Snyder is well aware of the power which such images of violence against women
possess. If, for Snyder's readers, the equation suggests that nature equals woman, then
violence against nature in some way corresponds to violence against women—and thereby
gains the force of a powerful social taboo. Bulldozing trees in the name of "progress" will
hardly rattle the American ethos--but the bulldozing of mothers, daughters, and sisters
clearly will. But "Front Lines," like many of the poems within Turtle Island, and like
many Snyder has written in the twenty years since it publication, does far more than simply
decry American acts of violence against "Mother Earth." The poem's concluding lines,
"And here we must draw I Our line" (18), are resolute in their determination to dig in and
defend the "Magna Mater" against the opponents of wilderness at all costs. Snyder's

"Mother Earth" is the source of much more than mere sympathy for the environmentalist

53

cause; she is also the wellspring of its joyous determination, as he demonstrates in the final
stanza of the poem, "Tomorrow's Song":

At work and in our place:

in the service

of the wilderness

of life

of death

of the Mother's breasts! (Turtle Island 77)

"Naked Comfort, Scant Fear"

The ongoing quest for an intimacy, a oneness, with nature continues to be a central
focus of Gary Snyder's poetry as he enters his mid sixties. And a major component of this
quest to "know Nature" continues to be the reintroduction of the human body into an
eroticized poetic landscape, as the poet strives to broaden the boundaries of American
nature writing to include elements of the sensual and the erotic. A poem from his most
recent collection No Nature, entitled "The Sweat," makes clear that though the poet may
be aging, his interest in portraying the unclothed human form as a part of the natural world
remains unflagging.

Set in a steam bath in an island off the Alaskan coast, which Snyder shares with several
middle aged women, "The Sweat" is a joyous revisitation of the situation, and many of the
same themes, presented in Snyder's earlier poem "The Bath" from Turtle Island. The
decades which separate the two poems have a profound impact on the speaker's point of
view. Whereas in "The Bath" Snyder has considered the mysteries associated with his
youth—among them sexuality, birth, and familyuhis later poem "The Sweat" examines
many of the same themes but from the perspective of middle age. As the poet sits naked

in the steaming sauna, "socks and glasses tucked into my moccasins, IWearing only

54

earrings and a faded tattoo—-" he marvels at the physical aspects of the women who
accompany him:

The women speak of birth at home.

Of their children, their breasts hang

Softer, the nipples darker,

Eyes clear and warm.

Naked. Legs up, we have all raised children

I could love each one,

Their ease, their opened--sweet--
olden-still youthful-
womanly being bodies— (364)

This loving attention to the physical beauty of his female friends is paired equally,
however, with Snyder's tribute to the womens' intellects. If Snyder's poem "The Bath"
was an exploration of the sensual aspects of one's youth, then perhaps "The Sweat" could
be viewed as an exploration of both the sensual--and cerebral-pleasures to be enjoyed in
life's second half. As the poet and his companions finish their sauna and gather, still
naked, on the beach to talk, he turns his attention away from the merely physical, and
begins to focus on the mind as well as the body:

And outside, naked, cooling on the deck
Midsummer's far northern soft dusk eve,

Bare skin to the wind;

Older is smarter and more tasty.
Minds tough and funny-many lovers--
At the end of days of talking

Science, writing, values, spirit, politics, poems-

55

Different shoes and shirts,

In little heaps--sit naked, silent, gaze

On chests, and breasts and knees and knobby feet
in the tide smell, on the bleached deck planks,
Like seals hauled out for sunning, (365)

Freed from the urgent and ever-present sexuality evidenced in "The Bath" and other
early works, "The Sweat" achieves a level of comfort with the human body which is
unparalleled among Snyder's poems. The nude figures relaxing on the beach are as
comfortable with themselves as "seals hauled out for sunning," as much a part of the
landscape as the smell of the ocean tide or the "bleached deck planks." Oblivious to their
own nudity, the groups' conversation revolves around their studies, their careers, and their
relationships:

Crinkles by the eyes,

Lirnber legs crossed,

Single mothers--past parenting-

Back to college--running a business-

Checking salmon for the Fish & Game,

Writing a play, an article, a novel,

Waitressing and teaching,

In between men friends, teen-aged son-

Doing a dissertation on the Humpbacked Whales,
Doing tough-assed poems-— (365)

The introduction of the groups' daily concerns into what for many would be an
erotically charged situation (Snyder himself acknowledges his sexual attraction for the
women), underscores the ease and comfort with which the group disrobes; they are

comfortable with this intimate conversation because they are naked, Snyder shows us, not

56
in spite of it. The poem ends with Snyder rejoicing in his own nudity, as he happily and
fearlessly claims his own place in the world. As his poetry has done for more than four
decades, Gary Snyder's "The Sweat" fuses the natural world and the naked human form,
joining them together so seamlessly as to make us wonder how the two elements were
ever put asunder.
Naked comfort, scant fear,

Strong soul, naught to hide,

This life:

We get old enough and finally really like it!
Meeting and sweating

At a breezy beach. (No Nature 365)

57

NOTES
1 Snyder also plays a role in Kerouac's 1962 California novel, Big Sur, under the
pseudonym of "J arry Wagner."
2 There are some exceptions, such as Snyder's early poems, "Cartegena" and "T-2 Tanker
Blues" (both included in Riprap 1959), in which he experiments with the long, open line,
characteristic of Whitman and Ginsberg.
3 The poem J aphy Ryder reads from here is Snyder's "A Berry Feast" from The Back
Country (1968). Snyder has said, on several occasions, that although fictionalized,
Kerouac's Dharma Bums presents an essentially accurate depiction of both the characters
and events of the period.
4 This very broad term requires definition. As Thomas J. Lyon points out in "A
Taxonomy of Nature Writing," in This Incomperable Lande, what I will refer to as the
genre of "nature writing" has three main dimensions: "natural history information, personal
responses to nature, and philosophical interpretation of nature" (3). Clearly, Snyder's
work fits nicely into each of these dimensions. "The fundamental goal of the genre," Lyon
notes, "is to turn our attention outward to the activity of nature" (7).
5 For a more complete discussion of Beat censorship trials, see Lawrence Ferlinghetti and
Jacob Ehrlich's Howl of the Censor, which includes excerpts of court transcripts from the
Howl trial. The 1966 Grove Press edition of Burroughs's Naked Lunch includes the
valuable preface "Naked Lunch on Trial," which includes a brief history of the case as well
as some key excerpts from the trial's testimony. Lee Bartlett's interview with Michael
McClure, "Writing The Beard," included in McClure's collection, Lighting the Comers:
On Art, Nature, and the Visionary, provides background on the censorship challenges
faced in the play's early productions.
6 In a 1994 interview with me, Snyder argued that the fact that his work escaped the

attention of censorship challenges, while that of his peers did not, is due to the lesser

58

degree of "objectionable" material in his poetry: "There's a good reason why my work has
never been subjected to legal challenges: it is simply not as shocking, nor does it push the
bounds of decency, anywhere near as far as does that of Burroughs, Ginsberg, or

McClure." See Appendix B.
7 Mail interview. See Appendix B.

8 In a mail interview with me in September 1994, Snyder acknowledged his reading of
DH. Lawrence as one of the sources for his erotic view of nature, while at the same time,
surprisingly, disavowing the influence of Walt Whitman: "As for the eros I bring to nature,
I guess I must have gotten a push in that direction from Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and
Flowers, but I doubt much came from Whitman." See Appendix B.

9 The word "erotic" may be too limited for the scope of my examination of Snyder's
writing. I mean it to include not only the sexually erotic, but also the raw, the
scatological, and what had generally been accepted as "obscene" the American literary
establishment of the 1950's and 60's. '

10 Mail interview. See Appendix B.

11 The extra quotation marks at the end of this anecdote may indicate that it was an often-
told story among the Forest Service crews Snyder worked with.

12 Snyder engages in this type of cross-cultural examination of attitudes towards nudity
elsewhere as well. See his poem "The Public Bath" in The Back Country (4142)
concerning Japanese attitudes towards nudity. See also "A Journey to Rishikesh &
Hardwar" in Earth House Hold for Snyder's description of East Indian attitudes towards
nudity: 83-89.

13 Shiva: the Hindu god of destruction and reproduction, usually depicted as a scantily
clad and barefoot goddess.

M Snyder uses this term in his essay "Re-inhabitation" in The Old Ways, 58.

15 See Appendix B.

59

16 Similarly, Snyder has written about hunting as a loving exchange between predator and
prey. See the section entitled "Making Love With Animals" in his essay "Poetry and the
Primative: Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique," collected in Earth
House Hold (117-30).

17 Snyder's colleague, the California poet William Everson (Brother Antoninus), has
written of a similar impulse to view the landscape in terms of the female form. See his
essay "Landscape and Eros" in Birth of a Poet: The Santa Cruz Meditations: 171-80.

18 See chapter 5 of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums.

III. KEROUAC'S "VIRTUOUS DESERT":
THE ROLE OF NATURE IN THE DHARMA BUMS

"[M]y companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take
pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order,»
not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a

still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The chivalric and

heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside

in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,--not the Knight,

but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church

and State and People."

Henry David Thoreau, "Walking" (1851)

As the jacket notes from the current Signet edition of Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel, The
Dharma Bums, indicate, the fast paced, jazz and drug inspired action of his 1957 triumph
On The Road casts a long shadow on the writer's subsequent works:

[B]y the man who launched the hippie world, the daddy of the swinging
psychedelic generation, JACK KEROUAC author of ON THE ROAD . . .

Here are the orgiastic sexual sprees, the cool jazz bouts, the poetry love-ins,
and the marathon hinges of the kids who are hooked on Sensation and looking for
the high «TI-IE DHARMA BUMS

Too often, readers of Kerouac's fiction-—from high school freshmen to established critics--
have viewed his later novels as mere footnotes to a single great work: echoes of the now
familiar (and often sensationalized) Beat generation mentality which drove Sal Paradise

and Dean Moriarty to crisscross the continent, in an attempt to escape or subvert what

60

61

they saw as a false and restrictive American society through drugs and alcohol, fast cars
and free love.

Such a reading of Kerouac's fiction is a tremendous oversimplification; there is much
more to Jack Kerouac than meets the eyes of those readers who only venture as far as On
The Road will take them. The "Delouz Legend," as Kerouac came to call the body of
fiction which chronicled his real life experiences, contains a variety of responses to
American life which have gone unnoticed by critics because of their overemphasis on the
author's role as progenitor of the "psychedelic generation." One such area long neglected
by critical attention is Kerouac's extensive treatment of the subject of nature in such works
as Lonesome Traveler (1960), Desolation Angels ( 1965), and most importantly, The
Dharma Burns (1958).

Each of these works deal, at least in part, with the period in the mid 1950's when
Kerouac was most concerned with the natural world. Kerouac's slim volume of travel
sketches and essays, Lonesome Traveler, contains his beautifully detailed portrait of his
job as a brakeman on California's railroads in the early fifties, "The Railroad Earth," a
sketch filled with glowing descriptions of the California countryside. The collection also
contains his sketch "Alone on a Mountaintop," which details the author's daily existence as
a fire tower lookout in the Washington Cascade Range during the summer of 1956. The
opening chapters of Desolation Angels deal fictionally with the same period, and contain a
number of wildly beautiful, sublime descriptions of the mountain landscape written in the
long, flowing, jazz-like cadences that readers of On The Road would recognize as
Kerouac's characteristic spontaneous prose style.

But it is in Kerouac's earlier Dharma Burns that the writer's talents in describing the
landscape are most fully realized, and it is in this novel that his attitudes towards nature
are best articulated; more importantly, perhaps more than any other novel of the period,
Kerouac's Dharma Bums prefigures the awakening ecological consciousness of 1960's

America. Just as On The Road and the earlier The Town and the City (1950) established

62

him as the forerunner of counterculture Beat writers such aS‘Allen Ginsberg and William
S. Burroughs, Dharma Bums establishes Kerouac in a much older tradition of writers who
had looked to the natural world for the raw material of the their art. It is fitting that
Kerouac he recognized for helping to establish a new and truly different literary direction
by fostering the Beat movement. But it is equally fitting that he he placed among other
American writers, in a tradition spanning from Henry David Thoreau up through Gary
Snyder, who have concerned themselves with finding meaning in nature.

Kerouac's broad reading of earlier writers who dealt with the natural world has been
well documented. His biographer, Ann Charters, notes a lifelong fascination with the dean
of American nature writers, Henry David Thoreau. Kerouac was well versed in the earlier
writer's work, and returned to it often throughout his life; but the author's high regard for
his predecessor went beyond a simple admiration for Thoreau's writing. Often in
conversation Kerouac voiced a desire to emulate the earlier writer's experiment at Walden
Pond (Charters 21, 200-201). Such an identification with Thoreau's life and work is
understandable-especially given the surface similarities between the lives of the two
authors. Both men were of French-Canadian descent (although Kerouac's ethnicity was
much more pronounced than Thoreau's), and more importantly, the two shared the same
home region. Kerouac was born hearing what he later referred to as the "roars of
Merrimac" (Dr. Sax 17). His home town, Lowell, Massachusetts, is less than twenty miles
from Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, and one hears in Kerouac's Lowell novels (Dr. Sax,
Visions of Gerard, and Maggie Cassidy) the echoes of many familiar places described in
Thoreau's work.

In the introductory vitae which serves as the preface to his 1960 collection of travel
sketches, Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac further identifies himself with a tradition of
American literature which, like Thoreau, suggests a closer link to nature: that of the hobo

1

or traveling adventurer. In a list of his life's most important events, he reports that he ". .

. read [the] life of Jack London at 18 and decided to also be an adventurer, a lonesome

63

traveler" (v). Later in an essay in the same collection, entitled "The Vanishing American
Hobo," in an effort to lend dignity to what he sees as the American hobo's "idealistic lope
to freedom" (172), Kerouac recalls other American writers whom he places in this
"lonesome traveler" category:
John Muir was a hobo who went off into the mountains with only a pocketful
of dried bread, which he soaked in creeks.
Did Walt Whitman terrify the children of Louisiana when he walked the open
road? (174-75)

Kerouac ends his introduction to lonesome Traveler with a final wish for an end to his
travels on the road, and a return to a Walden of his own. He list his "final plans" as
simply: "Hermitage in the woods, quiet writing of old age, mellow hopes of Paradise. . .
(vi). The author was of course unaware, as he wrote these words in 1960, that his most
idyllic days of "quiet writing" away from civilization were already behind him. He had
come as close to realizing his Thoreauvian fantasy as he ever would during the year-long
period from August 1955 to September l956--the period chronicled by Kerouac in
Dharma Bums.

Like many of his novels, Dharma Bums is a thinly veiled roman-a-clef constructed
around actual people and events in Kerouac's life. Set mainly in the San Francisco area in
the mid 1950's, the novel's cast of characters is a who's who of what later came to be
called the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. The action of the novel centers around
protagonist Ray Smith (Kerouac's fictional personae), a poet of sorts who travels West to
live with his old friend Alvah Goldhook (Allen Ginsberg). Early in the novel, Smith
encounters the poet / Buddhist scholar / outdoorsman Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder), who
quickly becomes one of the book's central figures. Playing more minor roles in the story
are Beat era luminaries Warren Coughlin (Philip Whalen), Rheinhold Cacoethes (Kenneth
Rexroth), Ike O'Shay (Michael McClure), Arthur Whane (Alan Watts), and Smith's old
friend from his days on the road, Cody Pomeray (Neal Cassidy).

64

It is largely through the character of Japhy Ryder that Ray Smith is introduced to
nature, and from the beginning of the novel Smith's treatment of Ryder is that of a revered
teacher. Ryder is first described as "the number one Dharma Bum of them all" (lO)--the
term referring to one who travels the world searching for the dharma, or the ultimate
truth. From the outset, Japhy is seen in terms of his outdoor heritage, "a woods boy, an
axman, farmer, interested in animals and Indian lore. . . " (10). Smith's first view of Japhy
is that of a city-dwelling woodsman--a type he would later refer to in The Subterraneans
as "urban Thoreaus" (15). His visage as Smith first sees him on the street is more
characteristic of a mountain climber than a college student studying Oriental languages at
Berkeley:

I saw J aphy loping along in that curious long stride of the mountain climber,
with a small knapsack on his back filled with books and toothbrushes and whatnot
which was his small "goin-to-the-city" knapsack as apart from his big full rucksack
complete with sleeping bag, poncho, and cook-pots. . . He was wiry, suntanned,
vigorous, open, all howdies and glad talk. . . (10-1 1)

As John Tytell has noted, Japhy Ryder seems to represent "a fulfilled version of Dean
Moriarty" (170). Ryder does share a number of similarities with Kerouac's hero from On
The Road. Both characters are energetic, exuberant, working class heros--seemingly
irresistible to women and full of whnder at the possibilities that life presents. But while
Dean Moriarty continually expresses a desire to become a writer and put his life into some
kind of order, his restless nature won't allow him to do more than dart from one dangerous
and chaotic situation to another. J aphy Ryder, in contrast, is much more serious and
dedicated about his life's ambitions. He is portrayed as a diligent scholar of Eastern
languages, Buddhism, and American Indian culture, a hard working writer and translator,
and unlike Moriarty, a solid and dependable friend (T ytell 170-71).

Beyond these initial contrasts which Tytell suggests, however, there exists a much

more fundamental difference between the two characters. By replacing Dean Moriarty

65

with Japhy Ryder as the central hero of his fiction, Kerouac moves away from the fast-
paced, urban way of life which Moriarty represents, and embraces the much more
balanced, nature-centered world of Ryder. In announcing that "Japhy Ryder is a great
new hero of American culture" (28), Kerouac signals a change from the automobile to the
backpack, a sharp turn off the road and onto the mountain hiking trail.

Ray Smith's attendance at a San Francisco poetry reading featuring Alvah Goldbook
and Ryder provides him with his first glimpse of Japhy as a creative artist. The poems he
reads, with their sources in the natural world, make a strong impression on Smith and
provide the would-be poet with an inkling of the power of nature as subject matter.
Although the reading described in Dharma Bums is actually the now famous Six Gallery
reading of October l955--the event made famous by Ginsberg's first reading of "Howl"—
Kerouac chooses to underplay Alvah Goldbook's magnum opus "Wail." Noting that he
found several of the evening's readers to be "either too dainty in their aestheticism, or too
hysterically cynical to hope for anything, or too abstract and indoorsy" (14), Smith instead
focuses at length on Ryder's unique poetry and its sources in nature, Native American and
Eastern philosophy, and anarchist politics:

And he had his tender lyrical lines, like the ones about bears eating berries,
showing his love of animals, and great mystery lines about oxen on the Mongolian
road showing his knowledge of Oriental literature even on to Hsuan Tsung the
great Chinese monk who walked from China to Tibet, Lanchow to Kashgar and
Mongolia carrying a stick of incense in his hand. Then J aphy showed his sudden
barroom humor with lines about Coyote bringing goodies. And his anarchistic
ideas about how Americans don't know how to live, with lines about commuters
being trapped in living rooms that come from poor trees being felled by chainsaws
(showing here, his background as a logger up north). His voice was deep and
resonant and somehow brave, like the voice of oldtime American heroes and

orators. (14)2

66

As J aphy befriends Smith and takes him under his guidance, the two begin to plan
Smith's first real encounter with the wilderness: an expedition to climb Mt. Matterhorn in
the California Sierras. As the trip begins, Kerouac invokes the images of a number of
"oldtime American heroes," establishing J aphy (and less directly, himself) in the lineage of
great outdoorsmen and nature writers of the past. "You know old John Muir used to go
up into these mountains where we're going. . ." J aphy tells Smith (30—31). As the climb
progresses, Kerouac broadens his list of J aphy's models: "[H]is heroes are John Muir and
Han Shari and Shih-te and Li Po and John Burroughs and Paul Bunyan and Kropotkin"
(44). With this passage, Kerouac makes clear just how diverse the influences on Japhy
and his view of nature have been. In addition to the two Americans on the list--writer and
wilderness advocate John Muir and nature essayist John Burroughs-~Kerouac cites a trio
of early Chinese poets as well as Peter Kropotkin, the Russian biologist and author of
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, a classic of anarchist thought. Filling out the list is
Paul Bunyan, mythical lumberjack of the American forest. The forces represented by
these figures-~myth, science, anarchism, Buddhism and Taoism, all linked by a reverence
for nature-combine to make up the burgeoning ecological consciousness displayed by
Japhy Ryder.

The climb up Mt. Matterhorn continues, with J aphy, as usual, in the role of teacher
and Smith as apprentice. "Japhy, I'm glad I met you," Smith tells his new companion
during their morning hike, "I'm gonna learn all about how to pack rucksacks and what to
do and hide in these mountains when I'm sick of civilization" (45). Impressed with Smith's
willingness to hike long distances and his ready grasp of Buddhist philosophy, Ryder tells
him at the end of their first long day's climb:

There's nothing wrong with you Ray, your only trouble is you never learned to
get out to spots like this, you've let the world drown you in its horseth and you've
been vexed. . . (56)

67

Smith apparently takes Ryder's observations to heart, and as he drifts off to sleep on
his first night in the mountains he muses on the shortfalls of his life of "drinking and
disappointment" removed from nature. In a crucial turning point in the novel, Smith vows
to himself to follow the course offered by Japhy and "begin a new life," one in which he
will "tramp with a rucksack and make it the pure way" (62). The night's sleep which
follows Smith's decision is a serene one, filled with "pure cold dreams like ice water,
happy dreams, no nightmares" (62).

The next morning--the day of the final assault on the Mt. Matterhorn summit--brings a
sense of rebirth and rejuvenation to Smith. "I felt like I did when I was a boy and it was
time to get up and go play all day Saturday, in overalls," he says. But the day which
awaits Smith, Ryder, and Henry Morely3, the third member of the climbing party, is far
from Smith's initial vision of it as child's play. The final climb to the summit is an
exhausting and dangerous one. Similar in tone to Thoreau's description of his experiences
atop Mt. Ktaadn in Maine Woods, Kerouac's description of the mountain's landscape is a
dark and foreboding one. As J aphy and Smith struggle towards the summit after leaving
an exhausted Morely behind, Smith is struck for the first time by both the danger of his
predicament and the sublimity of his surroundings:

At every few steps it seemed we were going higher on a terrifying elevator, I
gulped I turned around to look back and see all of the state of California it would
seem stretching out in three directions under huge blue skies with frightening
planetary space clouds and immense vistas of distant valleys. . . (65)

The "happy dreams" of the previous night's romantic vision of a life in harmony with
nature are now dramatically reversed as Smith's fears keep him from gaining the summit:

"I began to be afraid of being blown away by the wind. All the nightmares
I'd ever had about falling off mountains and precipitous buildings ran through my
head in perfect clarity" (66).

68

As darkness falls, Smith lags behind Japhy and gives up on reaching the mountain's peak.
Paralyzed with fear, all he can do is cling to a level spot in the mountain face and scream
"This is too high!" as his friend climbs successfully to the t0p.

Smith's reactions to the harsh realities of the mountain wilderness bear a striking
similarity to Thoreau's on Mt. Ktaadn. Faced for the first time with the raw wilderness of
Ktaadn, he felt "the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man" (645), and was
forced into a critical moment of reevaluation of his place in the natural world. For
Thoreau, this first real exposure to wilderness led him to question his earlier views of the
natural world as false and contrived--the product of genteel museum observation rather
than first-hand experience: "What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of
particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its
home!":

I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so
strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,--that my body might,»
but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of
me? Talk of mysteries!--Think of our life in nature,--daily to be shown matter, to
come in contact with it,--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the
actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?
(646)

Similarly, Smith faces a moment of horrified anguish at the realities of nature which
now face him as he cowers on the steep mountainside--a moment in which he too
reevaluates humanity's role in the universe:

I nudged myself closer into the ledge and closed my eyes and thought "Oh
what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can
have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains
and rock and empty space," and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying,

"When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing." The saying made my hair

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stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah's straw mats. Now it
was enough to make my heart pound and my heart bleed for being born at all. (67)

In both passages the speakers move from a state of romantic innocence concerning
nature to a terrified and uncomfortable vision of its reality. As the old, comforting
sources for a beneficent model of nature fall away (Thoreau's museum observation, and
Smith's "cute poetry"), they are replaced by the "hard matter" which now shapes their
view of the world (Thoreau's "rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!" and Smith's "huge
mountains and rocks and empty space").

Nineteenth century wilderness advocate John Muir, a writer well known to Snyder,
Welch and others in Beat circles (and one who is mentioned several times in Kerouac's
novel), told of a similar moment of crisis in his 1894 classic The Mountains of California.
Muir's essay "A Near View of the High Sierra" describes a dangerous predicament the
author faced while mountain climbing in the same region that Kerouac and Snyder
ventured into more than an half century later. Having climbed as far as he could up a
steep rock face, Muir found himself trapped, "with arms outspread, clinging close to the
face of the rock, unable to move hand or foot either up or down" (51). "My doom
appeared fixed," he wrote. "I must fall" (52).

But Muir's fear of death by falling passes in an instant, as an unexplainable force
restores his abilities and seems to grant him a "new sense"of his own competence and well
being:

But this terrible eclipse lasted only a moment, when life blazed forth again
with pretematural cleamess. I seemed suddenly to become possessed of a new
sense. The other self, bygone experiences, Instinct, or Guardian Angel--call it
what you will--came forward and assumed control. Then my trembling muscles
became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through a

microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with which I

7O

seemed to have nothing at all to do. Had I been home aloft upon wings, my
deliverance could not have been more complete. (52)4

Likewise, Smith's dark and frightening view of nature is short lived, as a vision of
Ryder coming back down from the mountain's summit provides the frightened climber
with his own "new sense"--a moment of Zen satori or enlightenment which seems to
reassure him of his abilities and the beneficence of nature:

Then suddenly it was just like jazz: it happened in one insane second or so: I
looked up and saw J aphy running down the mountain in huge twenty foot leaps,
running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bouncing five feet
or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the
sides of the world and in that flash I realized it's impossible to fall off mountains
you fool and with a yodel of my own I suddenly got up and began running down
the mountain after him doing exactly the same huge leaps, the same fantastic runs
and jumps. . . (68)

The moment is one of great importance for Smith; unsuccessful in his first try at
mountain climbing, he has still learned from Japhy what he calls "the final lesson of them
all, you can't fall off a mountain" (69). While he has not triumphed over the mountain, as
he set out to do at the beginning of the climb, Smith has faced, and vanquished, his own
fears concerning nature. "I felt really proud," Smith says of the experience a short time
later, "I was a Tiger" (69).

The descriptions of nature which follow Smith's satori on Mt. Matterhorn are among
the most beautiful in Dharma Bums. With Smith's fears behind him, the hard-edged,
foreboding landscape of the morning's climb takes on an almost supernatural beauty as the
climbers descend in the moonlight:

The moonlight poured through thick foliage and made dapples on the backs
of Morely and J aphy as they walked in front of me. With our packs we got into a
good rhythmic walk and enjoyed going "Hup hup" as we came to switchbacks and

71

swiveled around, always down, down, the pleasant downgoing swinging trail
rhythm trail. And that roaring creek was a beauty by moonlight, those flashes of
flying moon water, that snow white foam, those black-as-pitch trees, regular elfin
paradises of shadow and moon. (72-73)

On returning home, Smith finds that his chronic phlebitis (a condition which in real life
plagued Kerouac for years) was suddenly gone: "I had worked the blood clots right out of
existence," Smith says, "I felt very happy" (75). The healing powers of nature manifested
here point to an essential theme in Dharma Bums: the contrast between the unhealthy
"drinking and disappointment" of life in urban America and the "new life" of health and
beauty to be found in nature. Again and again, Kerouac invokes the nineteenth century
Romantic imagery of the city as the place of drunkenness, sexual perversion, ill health, and
insanity, while portraying the natural world as the locale of health, chastity, clear-headed
and productive meditation, and sanity.

Such a dichotomy between the "evils" of the city and "virtues" of nature could hardly
be called original in Kerouac's day. It is the same force which pushed Fenimore Cooper's
Natty Bumpbo across the prairie in the early nineteenth century, the same force which led
Henry Thoreau to begin his twenty-two month experiment at Walden Pond in 1845, the
same force which drove Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams to the banks of the Big Two-
Hearted in the years following the First World War. But for Kerouac, this dichotomy
meant much more than merely paying lip service to a time-wom Romantic convention; it
represented a very real personal struggle for physical and mental health. Alcohol and
other drugs such as Benzedrine and Morphene had presented a problem for Kerouac
throughout much of his career--a problem which only seemed to grow worse with the
sudden fame which followed the publication of On The Road. Written in 1957, in the
midst of the author's newfound celebrity and the increased dependance on alcohol which

accompanied it, Dharma Bums chronicles a time less than two years earlier when nature

72

had actually presented a healthy alternative to the heavy drinking which was beginning to
take control of Kerouac's life.

Perhaps the most clear cut example of this dichotomy of good and evil represented by
wilderness and urban landscapes comes in Kerouac's description of an "insane day" spent
by Smith in the border town of Juarez, Mexico. Following an ecstatic night of camping
alone in the remote desert outside of town, Smith stashes his pack and hikes into town.
After an afternoon of "a few too many to drink" in the local taverns, Smith falls in with "a
bunch of evil Mexican Apaches" for a "long evil afternoon smoking marijuana" (122-
23).5 Smith's new companions pilfer items from his bag, and one of them, a young
homosexual, falls in love with Smith. Uncomfortable with the situation, he leaves,
remembering the "perfect white sand gulch" of his campsite. Smith's admirer, however,
follows him relentlessly through the streets of Juarez as he attempts to elude him. Finally
breaking away fiom his pursuer at the border, a clear line between Smith's old life and the
"new life" that lay before him, he leaves behind what he calls the "evil city," noting with
relief that "I had my virtuous desert waiting for me" (123). As he heads back to his camp,
Smith reflects on his newfound freedom and security in nature:

I walked anxiously over the border . . . my feet making that lonely thwap thwap of
Japhy's boots and I realized that I had indeed learned from J aphy how to cast off
the evils of the world and the city and find my true pure soul, just as long as I had
a decent pack on my back. ( 123)

Kerouac's presciption for physical, spiritual, and mental well being is not limited to his
protagonist, however; early on in the novel it is clear that what is good for a troubled
individual also the right medicine for a troubled American society. J aphy Ryder, spurred
by reading Walt Whitman's lines about the role of the bard being "to cheer up slaves and
horrify foreign despots," presents the beginnings of his prophetic vision of "a world full of
rucksack wanderers," leading away from American consumerism and towards a happier,

more ecologically centered future. Ryder envisions:

73

. . . a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the
general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the
privilege of consuming, all that stuff they really don't want anyway such as
refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and
deodorants and general junk you always see a week later in the junk anyway, all of
them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work produce, consume,
I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young
Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray. . .

(7 7-78)

Passages such as this one point to an awakening ecological consciousness in Kerouac's
writing, one which while in an early stage of development, still seems to be a force in the
novel. Almost always, these premonitions of the ecological awareness which would
follow a decade later are voiced by J aphy Ryder--the fictional counterpart of Gary Snyder.
Coming as it did, a year before the publication of Snyder's first collection of poems,
Riprap, Kerouac's Dharma Burns provided readers with their first encounter with many of
the ideas put forth in Snyder's later work.

Many of these views come to light in the section of Dharma Burns dealing with a
hiking trip in the Mt. Tamalpais region taken by Smith and Ryder just before Japhy is set
to depart for extended study in Japan. The trip follows a wild, three day, going away
party for J aphyua party which leaves both hikers feeling spent and depressed. As usual,
however, the wilderness provides the needed cure for what ails them; as they set out,
Ryder comments on his feeling of relief at escaping from the party and returning to nature:
"Godth it feels good to get away from dissipation and go in the woods" (157).
Smith's remarks on leaving the revelry behind display a similar sentiment; "It was going to
be a great day," he says as the two set off on their hike. "We were back in our element:
trails" (157).

74

The trip provides a time for reflection and looking ahead for the two friends, and in
their remarks there is a strong sense of prophesy--both about Kerouac and Snyder's later
careers and America's changing attitudes about nature spurred by a new understanding of
Eastern philosophy. "East'll meet West anyway," J aphy predicts:

Think what a great world revolution will take place when East meets West finally,
and it'll be guys like us that can start the thing. Think of millions of guys all over
the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country and
hitchhiking and bringing the word down to everybody. (160)6
Already securing to possess the bioregional focus of much of Snyder's later work, J aphy
refers to the "Pacific coast mountain and ocean land" as "the future home of the Dharma-
body" (157). Ryder is even more explicit about his tribal vision of the future, as he and
Smith pause to admire the California horizon:
Ray, by God, later in our future life we can have a fine free-wheeling tribe in these
California hills, get girls and have dozens of radiant enlightened brats, live like
Indians in hogans and eat berries and buds. (158)

Ryder also lays out for Smith his future plans for a body of poetry quite unlike
anything which has come before it in American literature--with sources in nature, history,
the sciences, Eastern thought, and ecology:

Know what I'm gonna do? I'll do a long poem called 'Rivers and Mountains
Without End' and just write it on and on on a scroll and unfold on and on with new

surprises and always what went on before forgotten, see, like a river7

, or like one
of them real long Chinese silk paintings that show two little men hiking in an
endless landscape of gnarled old trees and mountains so high they merge with the
fog in the upper silk void. I'll spend three thousand years writing it, it'll be packed
full of information on soil conservation, the Tennessee Valley Authority,

astronomy, geology, Hsuan Tsung's travels, Chinese painting theory, reforestation,

Oceanic ecology and food chains. ( 157) 8

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While J aphy's plans for his own life seem clear-cut (and surprisingly accurate when
one examines the later career of Gary Snyder), he remains uncertain about the long term
effects that his actions may have on society. Yet he remains optimistic about the
consequences of his life's convictions, telling Smith, "I know somethin good's gonna come
out of all this" (165). The "somethin good" J aphy points to is a distant goal, involving a
more bio-centered view of life. He tells Ray:

You and I ain't out to bust anybody's skull, or cut someone‘s throat in an economic
way, we've dedicated ourselves to prayer for all sentient beings, and when we're
strong enough we'll really be able to do it too, like the old saints. (165-66)

Following the hiking trip, Japhy sets sail for his long period of Buddhist study in a
Japanese monastery, having arranged for Smith to take over his old job as a fue lookout in
the Cascades. "As though Japhy's finger were pointing me the way," Smith begins the trip
north to his new job (170). His reaction to the landscape of the Pacific Northwest as he
travels up the coast is described in some of the novel's most lyrical passages, and rates, in
Kerouac's own view, as some of the best writing of his career (Nicosia 564). His
description of the coast near Seattle, like much of the description which makes up the final
section of the book, is seen in terms of Japhy's vision-~in this case a bioregional view of
the Pacific coast:

And suddenly I saw that the Northwest was a great deal more than the little vision
I had of it of J aphy in my mind. It was miles and miles of unbelievable mountains
grooking on all horizons in the wild broken clouds, Mount Olympus and Mount
Baker, a giant orange sash in the gloom over the Pacific-ward skies that led I knew
toward the Hokkaido Siberian desolations of the world. (173-74)

The description of the landscape continues in this vein, more often than not juxtaposed
with Smith's recollections of his teacher J aphy: "'And this is Japhy's lake, and these are
J aphy's mountains,’ I thought, and wished Japhy were here to see me do everything he

76

wanted me to do" (180). Often, the natural world is depicted in mystical terms, as in this

view of the Skagit River region:
It was a river wonderland, the emptiness of the golden eternity, odors of moss and
bark and twigs and mud, all ululating mysterious visionstuff before my eyes,
tranquil and everlasting nevertheless, the hillhairing trees, the dancing sunlight. As
I looked up the clouds assumed, as I assumed, faces of hermits. . . Everything was
everlastingly loose and responsive, it was all everywhere beyond the truth, beyond
emptyspace blue. (177)

With little to do during his time as a fire lookout, Srrrith finds ample time for
meditation, and while the final section of the novel, with its highly personal and
impressionistic qualities, is somewhat ambiguous concerning the exact nature of Smith's
mystical enlightenment, it is clear that the natural world is its source. At times, Srrrith's
enlightenment seems closely related to the Zen Buddhist concept of enlightenment through
"do nothing"--the emptying of the mind in an effort to return to one's original nature: "I
didn't know anything any more, I didn't care, and it didn't matter, and suddenly I felt really
free," Smith says after long days meditating in the mountain landscape (188-89). But
immediately following this statement, Kerouac invokes a traditional Christian symbol of
salvation and regeneration as he witnesses a rainbow from his cabin window:

What is a rainbow, Lord?
A hoop
For the lonely.

It hooped right into Lightening Creek, rain and snow fell simultaneous, the lake
was milkwhite a mile below, it was just too crazy. I went outside and suddenly my
shadow was ringed by the rainbow as I walked on the hilltop, a lovely-haloed
mystery making me want to pray. (189)

This struggle between Kerouac's Catholic upbringing and his strong interest and

devotion to Buddhism was a internal battle which the author waged for much of his adult

77

life, and one which can been traced throughout his work. Attempts to reconcile the
conflict between the two religious traditions are found often in Kerouac's writing--
attempts which all too often failed to produce a satisfying synthesis. In a poem from the
late fifties entitled "My Views on Religion," Kerouac tries to envision a theology which
can account for both religions, yet a hierarchical order imposed in the final lines of the
poem seems to place Buddhism above Christianity:

Buddha is God, the Father of Jesus Christ

AND GOD IS GOD (Pomes All Sizes 102)

Yet at other times, Kerouac depicted his devotion to Buddhism as secondary to his
Christian beliefs-~a phase of his search for meaning which had passed. In the opening
pages of Dharma Bums, Kerouac's protagonist Smith, recalls the period chronicled in the
novel as the high point in his belief in Buddhism:

I was very devout in those days and was practicing my devotion almost to
perfection. Since then I've become a little hypocritical about my lip-service [to
Buddhism] and a little tired and cynical. . . . But then I really believed in the reality
of tranquility and wisdom and ecstasy, and I believed that I was an oldtime bhikku
in modern clothes wandering the world. . . (6)9

This tension between Buddhism and Christianity has long been noted in Kerouac's
writing, but what separates Kerouac's religious vision in Dhamra Burns from that of his
other works is its source in the natural world. Whatever religious tradition Ray Smith
subscribes to-the homocentric worldview offered by Christian Catholicism, the more
biocentric teachings of Buddhism, or some highly individualized synthesis of the two—it is
clear that the raw material for his enlightenment, as well as the symbols he chooses to
describe it, come from the natural setting around Mt. Desolation. Near the end of his stay

on the mountain, Smith recalls:

Linc

78

Sixty sunsets had I seen revolve on that perpendicular hill. The vision of the
freedom of eternity was mine forever. The chipmunk ran into the rocks and a
butterfly came out. It was as simple as that. (190-91)

It seems appropriate that the final vision that Smith should have while on the mountain
would be of Japhy Ryder, the teacher that made his journey possible. Facing the end of
his summer job in the mountains, and the inevitable "sadness of coming back to the cities"
with "all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upside down in the
void" (191), Smith conjures up the image of his fellow dharma bum Japhy, a final symbol
of the health, salvation, and beauty to be found in nature:

And suddenly it seemed I saw that unimaginable little Chinese bum standing
there, in the fog, with that expressionless humor on his seamed face. It wasn't the
real-life Japhy of rucksacks and Buddhism studies and big mad parties at Corte
Madera, it was the realer-than-life J aphy of my dreams, and he stood there saying
nothing. "Go away, thieves of the mind!" he cried down the hollows of the
unbelievable Cascades. (191)

Reassured by this vision of his mentor and friend, Smith heads down the mountain,
"on down the trail back to this world" (192). Before departing, however, Smith offers a
prayer to his surroundings as J aphy had taught him to do:

And in keeping with Japhy's habit of always getting down on one knee and
delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the
others in Marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean's shack
the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned
and knelt on the trail and said "Thank you, shack. " Then I added "Blah," with a
little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what
that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world. (191-92)
As Gerald Nicosia has noted, the final seemingly nonsensical remark "Blah" offered to the

landscape indicates just how personal the connection between Smith and the mountain has

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become. The bond transcends language and becomes one of direct communication
between man and nature (563).

Kerouac's own journey "back down the trail to this world" after the period captured in
Dharma Burns was permanent; never again after his rapid rise to fame following the 1957
publication of On The Road would he venture out into the wild for any extended period of
time. Gary Snyder's long absence from the US. while he studied in a Japanese monastery
may have been a factor. Without his hiking companion and mentor present, Kerouac may
simply have lost interest in the outdoors. Kerouac's biographers have noted an increased
problem with alcohol on the writer's part during the months following publication of On
The Road, a problem which may also account for this change away from the more nature-
centered mode of existence described in Dharma Bums (Nicosia 557-58).

Kerouac's own writings suggest yet another possible reason for the author's turn away
from the natural world. In his essay, "The Vanishing American Hobo," published in 1960
as the final piece in Lonesome Traveler, the writer talks about his own life as a traveling
hobo on the "highways, railroad yards, sea shores, river bottoms, embankments and the
thousand-and-one hiding holes of the industrial night" ( 172). The essay laments the
passing of "a definite special footwalking freedom going back to the days of Jim Bridger
and Johnny Appleseed," caused, according to Kerouac, by an increasingly intrusive urban
society, determined to inflict itself on those who would find sanctuary in the wilderness:

Great sinister tax-paid police cars (1960 models with humorless searchlights) are
likely to bear down at any moment on the hobo in his idealistic lope to freedom
and the hills of holy silence and holy privacy. (172-73)

Instead of the "rucksack revolution" which the author had prophesied in 1957's
Dharma Burns, a revolution which he hoped would bring American youth back into nature
by the thousands, the first year of the new decade is marked from Kerouac's perspective as
a final closing of the frontier, and the end of wilderness as a Romantic sanctuary from the

forces of urban civilization: "There's something strange going on," he notes, "you can't

80

even be alone any more in the primitive wilderness" (182). The author's solution is grim

acceptance:
As far as I'm concerned the only thing to do is to sit in a room and get drunk and
give up your hoboing and your camping ambitions because there aint a sheriff or a
fire warden in any of the new fifty states who will let you cook a little meal over
some burning sticks in the tule break or the hidden valley or anyplace anymore
because he has nothing to do but pick on what he sees out there on the landscape
moving independently of the gasoline power army police station. (182)

The writer's final word on the subject is a bleak one; even the new state of Alaska,

admitted to the union that year, is in Kerouac's view tarnished by its contact with the

burgeoning police state. Kerouac's tone is one of utter resignation to his fate: "I have no

ax to grind: I'm simply going to another world" (182).

The essay ends with a further reversal of the Romantic vision of the hobo's open road.
Driven from their traditional haunts in the American countryside, the once-great legions of
traveling hobos in the tradition of Whitman and Muir are reduced to a life of urban
poverty as "the poor hum of the skid row" (183). "There he sits in the doorway, back to
the wall, head down, " Kerouac writes, describing this new urban variation of the hobo,
who sits waiting "for the wheels of the city to roll," but still longs for "the emerald
mountains beyond the city" ( 183). But the essay's powerful one sentence paragraph
makes it clear that for Kerouac a life lived on the trail in "the emerald mountains beyond
the city" was fast becoming an unobtainable dreamna dream spoiled by what he saw as the
intervention of the "evil city" into the "virtuous desert." Bitterly, he concludes:

"The woods are full of wardens" (183).

Less threatening, but equally disturbing for Kerouac, was the rapid extinction of the
hobo's way of life as the middle class automobile vacation usurped the traveling hobo's
right to the landscape. In his 1962 novel, Big Sur, Kerouac notes that "things have
changed in America, you can't get a ride anymore" when hitchhiking (44). In place of the

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free spirited, hitchhiking protagonist of Dharma Bums, Ray Smith, Big Sur offers the
grimly cynical Jack Duluoz, who bemoans what he sees as the commercialization and the
sterilization of the outdoors. Standing by the roadside, rucksack in hand, Duluoz muses
on the situation of the middle class fathers who drive the family station wagons which pass
him by:

But the P.T.A. has prevailed over every one of his desires by now, 1960's, it's no
time for him to yearn for the Big Two Hearted River and the old sloppy pants and
the string of fish in the tent, or the woodfire with bourbon at night---It's time for
motels, roadside driveins, bringing napkins to the gang in the car, having the car
washed before the return trip-«And if he thinks he wants to explore any of the
silent secret roads of America it's no go, the lady in the sneering dark glasses has
now become the navigator and she sits there sneering over her previously printed
blue-lined roadmap distributed by happy executives in neckties to the vacationists
of America who would also wear neckties (after having come along so far) but the
vacation fashion is sports shirts, long visored hats, dark glasses, pressed slacks and
baby's first shoes dipped in gold dangling from the dashboard. (45)

In the decade of the sixties, the commercialization of nature and governmental
encroachment into the wilderness, similar to the kind Kerouac alludes to in "The
Vanishing American Hobo," and Big Sur would become key concerns among many
American nature writers and wilderness advocates such as Gary Snyder, and especially,
Edward Abbey. 10

Whether Kerouac's alienation from the natural world in the final years of his life was
actually due to the incursion of the growing forces of commercialization and governmental
authority into the wilderness, as he indicates in his later writings, or was due to other
factors, such as his growing problem with alcohol, or a shift back to Catholicism from
Buddhism, is uncertain. But what is clear is that for a brief period in the artist's career

during the mid-1950's, nature did matter to Jack Kerouac and it occupied a central place in

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his fiction. The Dharma Burns was a dramatic departure from Kerouac's major work, On
The Road, but in many ways the novel's major themes are the same as the earlier book's: a
quest for freedom, a quest for the self, and a search for new (and sometimes old)
alternatives in post-war America. It is appropriate that Gary Snyder, the real—life
counterpart of Kerouac's "great new hero of American culture" J aphy Ryder, should have
the last word in this matter: "In a way," he says, "the Beat Generation was a gathering
together of all the available models and myths of freedom in America that had existed
heretofore, namely Whitman, John Muir, Thoreau, and the American bum" (quoted in
McLeod 491). The Dharma Bums represents Jack Kerouac's effort to place himself in this
lineage, and to enter into one of the oldest of these "models and myths" in American

literature: that of the writer's quest for meaning in the natural world.

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NOTES

1 At least one other critic has noted the importance of the hobo in Kerouac's fiction. See
Frederick Feied's No Pie in the Sky: The Hobo as American Cultural Hero in the Works
of Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack Kerouac. New York: Citadel Press, 1964.
Unfortunately, Feied does not deal with any of Kerouac's hobo sketches from Lonesome
Traveler however; he limits his chapter-length discussion of Kerouac to On The Road and
Dharma Burns.

2 The poetry which Kerouac refers to here can be found in Snyder's Myths & Texts. See
section 2 of "Logging," 3-4.

3 Morely's character is based on California poet, author and wilderness advocate John
Montgomery (1919-1992), whose recollections of his days with Kerouac are contained in
his book Kerouac West Coast: A Bohemian Pilot Detailed Navigational Instructions (Fels
& Firn Press 1976).

4 Gary Snyder also deals with this passage from Muir. See "John Muir on Mt. Ritter"
(section 8 of "Burning") in Myths & Texts, 43-44.

5 Despite the great emphasis placed on the subject in the novel's early reviews, this is one
of the few instances in which illicit drug use is mentioned in the novel.

6 Ryder's remarks here are strikingly similar to Snyder's later essay "Buddhism and the
Coming Revolution," contained in Earth House Hold (1969).

7 Kerouac may also be commenting indirectly on his own composition method here--his
trademark technique of typing entire novels on a single long role of Teletype paper.

8 Gary Snyder, Japhy's real life counterpart, has in fact pursued this epoch poem for nearly
three decades, publishing sections from it on several occasions during his career as a
writer. See: Six Sections From Mountains and Rivers Without End (Four Seasons

Foundation 1965).

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9 In a 1994 interview with me, Kerouac's friend PhilipWhalen (Warren Coughlin in
Dharma Bums) characterized Kerouac's interest in Zen Buddhism as "deep but not very
lasting." Japhy Ryder seems to concur, chiding Smith near the end of their time together:
"Oh, don't start preaching Christianity to me, I can just see you on your deathbed kissing
the cross like some old Karamozov or like our old friend Dwight Goddard who spent his
life as a Buddhist and suddenly returned to Christianity in his last days" (159).

10 See Abbey's chapter "The Heat of Noon: Rock and Tree and Cloud" in Desert Solitaire
(1968), in which he argues "[T]he wilderness should be preserved for political reasons.
We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a
refuge from authoritarian government" (130). For Abbey's comments on the
commercialization of nature via the family automobile vacation, see his chapter "Polemic:

Industrial Tourism and the National Parks," also in Desert Solitaire.

IV. "THE JOURNAL OF A STRATEGIC WITI-IDRAWAL":
NATURE AND THE POETRY OF LEW WELCH

"But for my children, I would have them keep their distance
from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the

monster's feet there are left the mountains."

Robinson Jeffers "Shine, Perishing Republic" (1925)

"I am a poet," wrote Lew Welch in 1964:

My job is writing poems, reading them out loud, getting them printed, studying,

learning how to become the kind of man who has something of worth to say. It's a

great job.

Naturally I'm starving to death. (How I Work 3)

A poetic career which spanned two decades earned Lew Welch little fame and almost no
income. His collected poems, Ring of Bone, remained unpublished until two years after
his death in 1971. Aside from Aram Saroyan's slim, loosely structured biography, Genesis
Angel: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation, almost no serious study of the
poet and his work has yet been undertaken.

This is unfortunate, since in the poet's brief forty-four years, he was able to produce a
finely crafted and innovative body of work which Samuel Charters has rightquy called "a
group of poems that are among the purest and most precise of all the Beat creations"
(539). Welch wrote in a variety of forrns--poems, songs, fiction, one act plays-~on topics
which reflected his varied life experiences as he strived to subsidize his art: ad man,

commercial fisherman, cab driver, dock worker, teacher. But more often than not, these

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creations dealt with nature and humanity's place in it, for Welch was a writer who
struggled with, and reveled in, this theme for much of his career. As his friend Gary
Snyder noted in his introduction to Welch's posthumously published Selected Poems
( 1973):
Ultimately, Lew's poems are devotional songs to the Goddess Gaia: Planet Earth's
Biosphere: and he is truly one of the few who have Gone Beyond, in grasping the
beauty of that ecstatic Mutual Offering called the Food Chain. (ii)

Indeed, much of Welch's work can be seen as a reflection of a life-long discomfort
with modern, urban America, and a yearning to find his place as what he referred to as "a
Native of a World" (Ring 108). In the preface to his collected poems, Ring of Bone,
Welch pointed to the tension between life in the urban, human-centered world and the
world dominated by nature as a central point of balance in his writing:

The shape of Ring of Bone is circular, or back and forth. Naturally such a form
never ends. The principle characters are The Mountain, The City, and The Man
who attempts to understand and live with them. The Man changes more than The
Mountain and The City, and it appears he will always need both. (3)

Although this balance between Man and Mountain, city and wilderness, is a constant in
Welch's writing, there can be little doubt which side of the scale the poet favored; as he
wrote to James Wilson: "Enlightenment, as I see it, is a process whereby a person
gradually resigns from the world that is man, and thereby becomes a member of the world

that is not man."l

Beginnings
Lewis Barrett Welch was born in Phoenix, Arizona on August 16, 1926, the son of a
wealthy, highly intelligent mother, and an inattentive, often absent, father. His parents'
marriage was short-lived, and in 1929 Welch's mother, Dorothy Brownfield, took him and

his sister west, where they spent the next fifteen years in what the poet would recall as

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"dozens of little California towns, never in one place three years" (IR 11,129). Welch
rarely saw his father, Lew "Speed" Welch, again, but seems to have credited his brief
relationship with his father with instilling in him an enduring love for hunting, fishing, and
the outdoors. "This is the one thing Lew gave me," he wrote later in a letter to his
mother:
By the one thing Lew gave me I mean that when a boy knows his father is good at
something that's male and easy to understand, and that everyone can admire, then,
whether or not he does it with the guy, he has the built-in right to it. I came to
guns not as a stranger. And, you know, in all fairness, a great many men get far
less from their fathers. (IR 1, 87)

During his school years, Welch's family continued to move often, never allowing him
to spend more than two or three years attending the same school. One of the few
constants in his early life was his love of reading, and here too, a developing fascination
with nature can be noted. Ernest Thompson Seton, the turn of the century naturalist /
author of works such Lives of the Hunted and Wild Animals I Have Known was among
Welch's favorite writers in junior high school. When Welch began to read poetry during
his early teens, the poet he was most drawn to was Robert Service, whose tales of the
Alaskan wilderness, such as those captured in The Spell of the Yukon, earned him a
permanent place in Welch's library (Meltzer 200).

After finishing high school in Palo Alto, Welch enlisted for a brief stint in the US. Air
Force, but quickly rejoined civilian life a year later when the Second World War ended.
He then attended Stockton Junior College, where his interests in literature and writing
began in earnest. In 1948, Welch transferred to Reed College in Portland, Oregon as an
English major (Samuel Charters 542). It was here that the writer would make some
acquaintances who would change the course of his career.

In the spring of 1949 Welch rented a house near campus with a room-mate be

deemed, in a letter home, "one of the finest people I've ever known," an undergraduate

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anthropology major named Gary Snyder (IR I, 1). In January of the following year, the
two were joined by a third room-mate, an ex-G.I. undergraduate with an interest in
literature and Oriental languages, Philip Whalen (Christensen 556). The three students
were all aspiring writers, and a strong friendship based on this shared craft quickly
developed-a friendship which would last as long as Welch lived.

By his senior year, Welch was already beginning to publish his first poems in Janus,
the little magazine he co-edited with other Reed students. The first of these, a brief
imagist poem entitled "Skunk Cabbage," foreshadows the poet's life-long fascination with
close observation of the natural world:

Slowly in the swamps unfold
great yellow petals of a
savage thing, a

tropic thing--

While no stilt-legged birds watch,
no monkey screams,

those great yellow petals,

unfold.

Rank plant. (Ring 37)

Many of Welch's early poems, like this one, bear a strong resemblance to the work of
William Carlos Williams: short powerful lines, an insistence on common language, and
stark yet bold imagery. This is no coincidence; Welch knew and respected the poetry of
Williams-especially the older poet's epic, Paterson.2 During Welch's final semester at
Reed College, Williams came to the college to read his work. When he arrived, he was
met by Welch, Whalen and Snyder, who each brought with them drafts of their poems for

his examination. In addition, Welch showed Williams his senior thesis on Gertrude Stein,

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which he read enthusiastically. Williams recommended that Welch try to revise and
publish the manuscript, and offered to arrange for a reading of the text with an editor at
Random House (IR 1, 40-41).

The help and encouragement offered by Williams provided Welch with the needed
impetus to think of himself as a writer; he jokingly signed a letter to his mother describing
his meeting with Williams "Lew (the voice of the latter half of the 20th century)" (IR 1,
42). Following his graduation, he set off to New York in order to visit Williams and to
continue work on the Stein book. He rented an apartment on West 82nd Street, found a
job as a clerk in a large department store, and spent his off hours researching and revising
the Stein manuscript in the rare book room at the New York Library, but be abandoned
the project after only a few months in the city. In April 1951 he wrote to his mother, in
what would be the first of many statements concerning the claustrophohia he felt in large
cities:

New York I'm afraid is nothing more than a noisy rock.
I can't breathe in it even.

It whupped me.

Therefore leave. (IR 1, 52)

Chicago: In The Heart of the "Murean Machine"

Abandoning, at least temporarily, his ambitions as a writer, in the Fall of 1951, Welch
applied for admission to the University of Chicago's graduate school, majoring first in
History of Philosophy, and then switching after a semester, to English. He found some of
his courses stimulating, but as a whole, Welch found the experience-and the setting-
difficult to endure. He wrote to Snyder, who was preparing to enter graduate school at
Berkeley:

What are you goin' to do in that Western province. I ought to go with you. This
place has me stifled already. And I tried. Honest. Three weeks in a literature

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course and not one (1) word have I heard about literature. . . . These people hate
pomes [sic]. (IR 1, 65)

After several semesters of graduate work at the University of Chicago, Welch left the
school, but stayed on in the city, taking a job with Montgomery Ward's retail advertising
department.3 For a time, it seemed that Lew Welch could live happily within the city; a
new marriage to native Chicagoan Mary Garber, and the promise of a high salary for his
work as an advertising copy writer made Chicago seem, he wrote, "more bearable all the
time" (IR I, 76). Weekend hunting trips into the countryside outside of Chicago even
yielded occasional glimpses of beauty, although Welch clearly longed for his native West.
In a 1957 letter to his mother, he notes:

But the farm country of Illinois is beautiful if you give it a chance. It's silly to keep
expecting the land to look like the Rockies. All you accomplish is a blindness to
the flat, gold, low-skied beauty that's all over the Midwest. (IR 1, 87)

But such observations became increasingly rare in the months that followed, as
Welch's growing unhappiness and discontent with Chicago—and the modern city in
general-again rose to the surface. What had a few years before appeared as a lucrative
job as an ad writer now was seen by Welch as a prostitution of his talents. "It finally got
through to me that this is humiliating. . . ." he wrote to Gary Snyder on April 22, 1957,
"We are paid for pieces of pride" (IR 1, 90). That same day, Welch wrote to Philip
Whalen about his "intolerable daily life" in Chicago, advising him that he was "putting
everything together into a poem about cities" (IR 1, 91). Enclosed with the letter were
five pages of poetry, some of which later became part of Welch's urban collage "Din
Poem." In it, the poet puts forth what would become a recurring image in his poems and
essays- the modern city as an artificial construct imposed upon the landscape of the
natural world:

I am on top of the Empire State Building leaning on the

railing which I have carefully examined to see if it's

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strongly made. The sound of it comes all that way, up,
to me. A hum. Thousands of ventilators far away. Now
and then I hear an improbable Clank. The air, even up

here, is warmed by it.

To the north a large green rectangle, Central Park, lies
flat, clean—edged, indented. A skin has been pulled off,
a bandage removed, and a small section of the Planet has

been allowed to grow.

I think, "They have chosen to do this in order to save

their lives." And then I think, "It is not really a section

of the Planet, it is a perfect imitation of a section of the Planet
(remembering the zoo). It is how they think it might look."

I am struck by their wisdom. Moved. (Ring 107)

To Welch's discerning eye, even those areas within the modern city which have
traditionally been seen as oases where nature is allowed to flourishuthe parks--are
themselves urban impositions on the natural terrain. "Flat, clean-edged," and "indented,"
Central Park represents for Welch not an effort aimed at preserving a "small section of the
Planet," but instead at preserving the sanity of the city's human population by means of
illusion and fantasy. The comment on the "wisdom" involved in such an arrangement in
the final line of the section's third stanza is likely ironic.

By the summer of 1957, Welch had come to realize that life in Chicago had become
unbearable for him. His drinking increased, as did his discomfort at life within the confines
of what he called "this dangerous city" (IR 1, 106). "This is how I live:" he angrily wrote
to Philip Whalen:

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The alarm clock starts me. I have a hangover. I am nauseated all morning. . . . I
can't keep down orange juice, toast, and tea. I chew gum and go to my car
dressed in a suit and a tie. I fight idiots who don't know how [to] drive on a
highway where thousands of cars go too fast and all the signs, streetlights, and
policemen are confused and wrong. . . . At the office I do the urgent, not the
important. A friend describes it as "pissing on small fires.". . . All day long I am
humiliated by inferior people who insist that I must do something in less time than
it takes. . . .Then I come home. The same idiots that can't drive are now as furious
as I am. We try to kill each other for 30 minutes. Then I am home. I have a
cocktail. I have 5 more. (IR 1,106)

Welch ended the letter with his plans to quit Chicago and return to graduate school, and

ultimately, a college teaching job in his native West: "Back to health. Back to friends.

Back to beautiful country" (107).

By the following October, Welch had realized part of this goal; Montgomery Ward
granted him a transfer to their Oakland, California office, and he and his wife relocated
there soon after. At long last Welch was back in his home region, and squarely in the
middle of the San Francisco poetry renaissance he'd read so much about in the national
press. His plan was to continue his advertising work for the firm long enough to pay off
his bills and then, as he told Snyder, "kick the Business Habit" and devote his time to
writing (IR 1, 116). He vowed to Whalen also that he was through with the "Murcan
[American]4 Machine," saying:

. . .[T]here is nothing for me to do except get out of it and make it as well as
possible and know finally and for all time that it's quite important not to help the
damnedthing...(IR1, 115)
If the path to enlightenment, for Lew Welch, meant gradually resigning "from the world
that is man," then this decision to leave the financial security offered by corporate America

marks an important step on that path; for the remainder of his life Welch struggled to feed

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and clothe himself by means of a variety of part-time occupations, but from this period
forward he identified himself, and his occupation, as writer.

Welch's "Chicago Poem," perhaps his most famous and most frequently anthologized
piece, is an eloquent statement in verse of the poet's mid-life change in direction away
from urban, corporate America. First drafted in June 1957, near the end of the poet's
residence in the Midwest, the poem begins with the first person narrator (presumably
Welch)5 recalling the gray, dismal landscape of mid-twentieth century Chicago:

I lived here nearly 5 years before I could

meet the middle western day with anything approaching
Dignity. It's a place that lets you

understand why the Bible is the way it is:

Proud people cannot live here.

The land's too flat. Ugly sullen and big it
pounds men down past humbleness. They
Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and
terrible sky. In country like this there
Can be no God but J ahweh. (Ring 10)

As an early San Francisco reviewer, Grover Sales, wrote in response to hearing Welch
read the poem: "This is not the Chicago of Sandburg but the Rome of Juvenal and the
London of William Blake" (IR 11, 141). In place of Sandburg's 1916 vision of Chicago as
"Stormy, husky, brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders," four decades later Welch portrays
a hopeless urban atmosphere where men "Stoop at 35" under the horrible weight of their
surroundings. And in place of Sandburg's romantic vision of a vital and expansive city
"proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and
Freight Handler to the Nation," Welch depicts a city fallen victim to its own industrial

CXCCSSCSZ

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In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago
passes its natural gas in flames

Bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high.
The stench stabs at your eyeballs.

The whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton
steel of a bombed-out town. (10)

The speaker's only solace is not found within the city, but in nature. Where Sandburg
had written of Chicago as being "cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness," the
narrator in Welch's poem finds his only moments of hope in the wild. After five years
inside the city, an alternative arises which allows him to "recognize the ferocity" inherent
in his urban existence: "Finally I found some quiet lakes / and a farm where they let me
shoot pheasant" (10). Away from the city while pheasant hunting or fishing, he is able to
differentiate between the man-made chaos of Chicago's south side, and what Welch might
call "the world that is not man":

All things considered, it's a gentle and undemanding
planet, even here. Far gentler
Here than any of a dozen other places. The trouble is
always and only with what we build on top of it. (1 1)

As the speaker returns to Chicago after a day in the farmlands, he is determined to
accept the modern city for what it is: a human creation which is no longer under human
control--a violent and dangerous monster who now threatens those to whom it once
offered shelter:

Driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gasses and I
knew again that never will the

Man he made to stand against this pitiless, unparalleled
monstrosity. It

Snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake like a

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blind, red, rhinoceros.

It's already running us down.

You can't fix it. You can't make it go away.
I don't know what you're going to do about it,
But I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm just
going to walk away from it. Maybe

A small part of it will die if I'm not around

feeding it anymore. (11)

The solution, according to Welch's speaker, is total resignation from the "monstrosity"
of urban, industrial, America: "I'm just / going to walk away from it." But the poem's final
stanza presents more than just a statement of dejection and defeat. It is a radical act of
individual civil disobedience which recalls Henry David Thoreau's statement in Walden
that "I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run 'amok' against
society; but I preferred that society should run 'amok' against me, it being the desperate
party" (155). In the mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau had urged Americans to let their
lives he a "friction to stop the machine" of an unjust and cruel society (644); but a hundred
years later, Welch seems to suggest, what he referred to as the "Murcan Machine" had
become unstoppable: "You can't fix it. You can't make it go away. " The best one could

hope for is to not be used as fuel--to let your absence be a friction to stop the machine.

San Francisco: Meditation at Muir Beach
When Welch arrived in the West with his wife Mary in the fall of 1957, he found a
California quite different from the one he had left more than a decade earlier. San
Francisco, long a haven for America's Bohemian population, now hosted a burgeoning

youth sub-culture: "Telegraph Hill with its children-type Bohemes was a real shock," he

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wrote to Whalen (IR 1, 118). Welch found San Francisco a welcome change from life in
Chicago, and enjoyed the thriving poetry and arts community which had sprung up in the
Bay Area. He took in readings by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, and Lawrence
Ferlinghetti during his first few months in the city, as well as jazz performances by Dave
Brubeck and others at clubs like the Blackhawk. "Everything is jumping here," he wrote
to Snyder, who was at sea aboard a Pacific tanker, "or so it seems to be in contrast to the
plain" (IR 1, 120).

Despite Welch's appreciation for San Francisco's cultural life, however, there are
signals in his letters from the period indicating a desire for an even deeper withdrawal
from urban life than his move from Chicago offered. Just after Christmas 1957, in a letter
to Whalen, he intimated his longing for a life uncluttered by all but the essentials: "There's
plenty of time left over after meeting the very gentle needs of the planet, the bowels, the
heart. The only overly demanding thing is all those people who try to fill their days with
something that can't possibly demand that much. Then they try to get us to do it too.
They stone us if we sit" (IR 1, 126).

The events of 1958 moved Welch closer to the kind of life he described to his friend
Whalen. In March he was fired from his job as an advertising writer with Montgomery
Ward, and in July his marriage to Mary Garber dissolved. Like the world of commerce,
the "American Homemaking Bit," as Welch referred to marriage, seemed to be just one
more mystifying institution for the poet. He wrote Whalen that "for me it's all soap and
machinery ritualized to a point beyond my understanding," adding that "1 bungle around
like a guy trying to play shortstop for the Giants while wearing the equipment for, and
observing the rules of, badminton. I've sent myself to the showers, I'm sure to the relief of
all concerned" (IR 1, 146).

His marriage over, his career as an ad writer behind him, Welch moved deeper into the
rapidly developing counterculture. He found work as a cab driver, and after a brief stay at

Gary Snyder's Mill Valley cabin, moved into San Francisco's East-West House, one of the

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city's early experiments in communal living.6 It was during this period that Welch first
seriously examined Zen Buddhism, which was then enjoying an unprecedented p0pularity
among American youth. In October he began a course of Zen practice (zazen) and
meditation under the guidance of Gary Snyder at Snyder's Marin-an cabin in nearby Mill
Valley. From the beginning, the poet appears to have been a sincere but at times skeptical
adherent to Buddhist practice. Soon after beginning his Zen studies he described the
routine to Whalen:
Mister Snyder has us sitting in his shack Japanese style all the while ringing bells
and smacking blocks of wood together. Then we run around the woods in pitch
darkness falling over fences and otherwise being foolish, return, sit, drink tea, sit,
and go home. (IR 1, 149)

Although Welch would later renounce Buddhism--and indeed all religion--as "mind
trash" (Meltzer 225), Zen practice does seem to lie at the root of a good deal of the poet's
thought during the late fifties and early sixties. The poet's long introspective piece,
"Wobbly Rock," which was published as Welch's first small chapbook in 1960, exemplifies
Welch's use of Buddhist sources in his writing during this period.7 The poem begins with
an epigraph which both dedicates the work to Snyder and quotes him: "for Gary Snyder I
'I think I'll be the Buddha of this place' I and sat himself I down" (Ring 54).

"Wobbly Rock" is a long poem, a meditation on nature in six sections, occasioned by
an encounter Welch had with a balancing boulder along the sea-shore at Muir Beach,
California. The poem's first section attempts to place the action of the poem, and the
reader it directly addresses, squarely in the physical world: "It's a real rock":

(believe this first)

Resting on actual sand at the surfs edge:
Muir Beach, California

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(like everything else 1 have

somebody showed it to me and I found it myself)

Hard common stone
Size of a large haystack
It moves when hit by waves

Actually shudders

(even a good gust of wind will do it

if you sit real still and keep your mouth shut)

Notched to certain center it

Yields and then comes back to it:

Wobbly tons (54)
The poet's precise choice of adjectives-"real, "actual, "common," and "certain"--can
leave little doubt that he intends the rock to be seen as genuine, a rock as real as words
alone can make it, to serve as the starting point for the meditative stream of consciousness

which follows throughout the remainder of the poem.8

The poem's sections are loosely
linked, leaping from one subject to the next, with only the ocean and the speaker's mind to
contain them. In the second section, the focus of attention is drawn away from the lone
balancing boulder, where the poem's speaker is seated, to the surrounding sea-scape,
which takes on the aura of a carefully constructed Japanese Zen garden as the speaker
attempts to empty his mind in meditation:

Sitting here you look below to other rocks

Precisely placed as rocks of Ryoanji:

Foam like swept stones

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(the mind getting it all confused again:
"snow like frosting on a cake"

"rose so beautiful it don't look real")

Isn't there a clear example here--
Stone garden shown to me by
Berkeley painter I never met 9

A thousand books and somebody else's boatride ROCKS
(garden)
EYE

(nearly empty despite this clutter-irnage all
the opposites cancelling out a
CIRCULAR process: F rosting-snow) (55)

The speaker's mind is a jumble of conflicting "clutter-irnage" as he strives to empty his
mind in meditation. The stones visible from his vantage point suggest another meditation
site on the other side of the Pacificuthe stone gardens of Ryoanji. This thought, in turn,
leads him to wonder at the authenticity of his own experience, having gained his
knowledge of Ryoanji second hand after reading an article on them "by a Berkeley painter
I never met." The inner life of the mind, experienced through "A thousand books and
somebody else's boatride," is juxtaposed against the reality he experiences at the moment:
"ROCKS."

In the next stanza, these "opposites" which the speaker holds in his mind (the sea-

scape and the stone garden, "Frosting-snow") become reconciled, as the "CIRCULAR

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process" of the speaker's thought becomes complete, and he realizes that the Japanese
stone garden is in fact an imitation of a natural sea-shore much like the one he occupies:

Or think of the monks who made it 4 hundred 50 years ago

lugged the boulders from the sea

Swept to foam original gravelstone from the sea (55)
The final lines of this portion of the poem further blur the distinction between Ryoanji and
Muir Beach, between nature and imitation. All that remain are rocks, "all rocks," and the
spaces between them.

And now all rocks are different and

All the spaces in between

(which includes about everything)

The instant
After it is made (55)

The poem's third section examines the role of nature in shaping and transforming the
individual, as the speaker reflects on his own life-long connections to the sea. "I have been
in many shapes before I attained congenial form," 10 he begins, "All those years on the
beach, lifetimes. . .":

When I was a boy I used to watch the Pelican:
It always seemed his wings broke
As he dropped, like scissors, in the sea . . .
Night fire flicking the shale cliff
Balls tight as a cat after the cold swim
Her young snatch sandy . . . (56)
Here, the sea become an integral part of the poet's autobiography--the backdrop for

earlier "lifetimes" on the beach as a child, the setting for a youthful sexual encounter,

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before the speaker separated himself from the ocean. The section's middle stanza speaks
of a return: "I have travelled/ I have made a circuit / I have lived in 14 cities" (56)

The speaker's "circuit" is of course a reflection of Welch's own life: a youth spent on the
California coast, the middle years spent removed from nature in Eastern cities, before
finally returning to the "congenial form" we now see meditating again by the ocean. The
section ends with a riddle, a koan, which asks: "Waves and the sea. Ifyou / take away the
sea I Tell me what it is" (56). Although the koan deals ostensibly with the unbreakable
bond between wave and sea, coming as it does at the end of this autobiographical section
of "Wobbly Rock," it is also suggestive of another unbreakable bond, between the poet
and the sea.

This question of one man's relationship to nature is broadened in the poem's fourth
section, which begins to explore the theme which preoccupies much of the second half of
Welch's "Wobbly Rock": humankind's relation to the natural world. From his vantage
point atop the rock, the speaker recalls the previous day's human activity at the beach:

Yesterday the weather was nice there were lots of people

Today it rains, the only other figure is far up the beach

(by the curve of his body I know he leans against the

tug of his fishingline: there is no separation)

Yesterday they gathered and broke, gathered and broke like
Feeding swallows dipped down to pick up something ran back to
Show it
And a young girl with jeans rolled to mid-thigh ran
Splashing in the rain creek (57)
But the idyllic picture from the previous day of humans enjoying the beach as naturally as

"feeding swallows" is short-lived, lasting only until something as trivial as a change in the

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weather again divorces them from the natural world. Only a lone fisherman remains in
contact with the non-human world, a reminder that in reality "there is no separation"
between man and nature.11
The long-distance perspective achieved by the speaker from his station on the faraway

rock allows for a viewpoint which is both detached and at the same time very intimate.
His focus shifts from a wide angle view of the mass actions of the crowd as "they gathered
and broke" like a flock of birds, to a close-up of a single young girl "splashing in the rain
creek." Yet throughout the section the observer's tone is decidedly isolated, as if he were
viewing his fellow humans as strange creatures to be pitied--as detached from them as they
are from the rest of nature. He asks them:

Did it mean nothing to you Animal that turns this

Planet to a smoky rock?

Back among your quarrels

How can I remind you of your gentleness?

Jeans are washed
Shells all lost or broken

Driftwood sits in shadow boxes on a tracthouse wall

Like swallows you were, gathering
Like people I wish for . . . (57)

In Welch's view, the weekend visitors who flock to the beach in good weather, only to
return to the "quarrels" of their human existence with their shells and driftwood, have
flirted with a potential not apparent to themuthe potential to realize their place in the
natural world. "Like swallows you were, gathering," the speaker laments, "Like people 1

wish for . . ."

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The poem's fifth section presents a view of humanity's role in nature quite different
from that of the fair weather tourist, as Welch's speaker recalls a fishing trip with two
companions, "3 of us in a boat the size of a bathtub" (58). His description of the life
surrounding him as the boat enters a small cove is stratified, with each stanza coming to
represent a different niche in the sea-side environment:

Below us:
fronds of kelp
fish
crustaceans
eels
Then us
then rocks at the cliffs base
starfish
(hundreds of them sunning themselves)

final starfish on the highest rock then

4 feet up the cliff a flower
grass

further up more grass
grass over the cliffs edge
branch of pine then

Far up in the sky

a hawk (58)
The passage is decidedly bio-centric, an ecological reworking of the medieval notion
of a " great chain of being" which placed God at the top of the philosophical ladder, above
angels, followed by man, and finally, the "lower" forms of animal life. Welch's depiction

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of the ocean eco-system works consciously to overturn such hierarchies by placing the
human figures inconspicuously afloat amidst eels, rocks, and starfish, with only the words
"Then us" to quietly give away their position. This section of the poem seems to possess
an ecological vision not unlike Aldo Leopold's notion of the "land ethic" presented in
Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949). "The land ethic," in Leopold's words, "simply
enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or .
collectively: the land." Under such an ethic, man becomes not a ruler or "conqueror of the
land-community," but instead, a "plain member and citizen of it" (204). Clearly, such a
reworking of humanity's place in the environment is at work in Welch's portrayal of the
Pacific eco—system.

The poem's fifth section ends with a view of the earth's biosphere which again calls
into question traditional Western views of humanity's place in the vast and finally
unknowable natural world:

Clutching to our chip we are jittering in a spectrum

Hung in the film of this narrow band

Green

to our eyes only (58)

Again, the human role is portrayed as diminutive, creatures invisibly struggling "in the film
of this narrow band" which makes up the Earth's surface. The final lines, "Green I to our
eyes only," serves as a final reminder that there exist many perspectives from which life on
Earth can be viewed-all but one of them non-human.

1n the final section of "Wobbly Rock," the poet returns to the theme of ecological
wholeness. He recalls an insight during an earlier moment of meditation which provided
him with a vision of complete unity with the natural world:

On a trail not far from here
Walking in meditation
We entered a dark grove

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And I lost all separation in step with the
Eucalyptus as the trail walked back beneath me (59)
The blurring of human and plant life, of the animate and the inanimate, in this stanza's final
lines, is carried still further in the poem's climax, in which all boundaries which separate
one form of matter or energy from another are erased: "Wind water / Wave rock /
Sea sand I (there is no separation)" (59). "Wobbly Rock" ends, as it began, with an image
of balancenan image made richer and more complex throughout each of the poem's six
sections:
Wind that wets my lips is salt
Sea breaking within me balanced as the
Sea that floods these rocks. Rock
Returning to the sea, easily, as
Sea once rose from it. It

Is a sea rock
(easily)

1am

Rocked by the sea (59)

"Step Out Onto The Planet"

Despite the publication of "Wobbly Rock" in 1960 at David Haselwood's Auerhahn
Press, and the inclusion of his poems in Donald Allen's ground-breaking anthology, The
New American Poetry, the year 1960 proved to be a traumatic one for Welch. Nearly a
decade of heavy drinking and overwork ended in a physical and emotional breakdown and

a bout with cirrhosis of the liver. The moment of crisis brought on by Welch's

deteriorating health rekindled the poet's desire for refuge from modern urban life. In a

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letter he wrote to Jack Kerouac in April, he described a moment of "satori" experienced
during his recovery: "It all seems so sillyupunishing my poor ole liver just because 1 can't
bear to see the absurd bastards tear this planet and each other apart. I'm just going to
stand back and watch from now on" (IR 1, 190). In July of the same year, he closed a long
letter to Allen Ginsberg by saying: "I seem to be entering the years of hermitage, and I
welcome them--almost long for it" (IR 1, 222).

A letter Welch wrote to his old college professor James Wilson during this period
clearly illustrates the poet's evolving determination to distance himself from what he saw
as a corrupt and false society. Immediately after noting to Wilson that he had been
"reading the works of John Muir," whom Welch terms an "incredible genius," he describes
the rationale behind his withdrawal from human concerns:

One way of dividing everything for purposes of thought is to separate the world
of man from the world that is not man. Since this came through my mind, many
things are now perfectly clear which used to be very confusing. . . . The world of
man is entirely arbitrary (i.e. arbitration, law) and illusory. The world that is not
man is chaos, void, discontinuous. (IR 1, 195)

After establishing such a distinction, and noting that "most men spend all their time in
the world of man," where their "feet only touch pavement," Welch reminds Wilson that
although the majority of humans may not acknowledge it, they are also part of a larger,
non-human world: "Now, of course, they are also in the world that is not manuall their
gestures are about this, or with this--but they are asleep to this" (195).

The alternative to this societal slumber, in Welch's view, is a rejection of the forces
which had imposed it, and the acceptance of, and the awakening. to, the natural world. He
tens Wilson: "Enlightenment, as I see it, is a process whereby a person gradually resigns

from the world that is man, and thereby becomes a member of the world that is not man"
(IR 1, 196). But, the poet adds, becoming a member of the non-human community in no

Way provides a Rosetta Stone for understanding nature: "Understand," he writes, "world

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that is not man, though seen as larger, is not seen by me at all. It is unimaginable,
inscrutable. I can only recognize timeless experiences 'with it' " (196).

Welch's poem from this period, "Step Out Onto The Planet" (later included in his
Hermit Poems collection) is a challenge for his readers to awaken themselves to the
wonders of their "unimaginable, inscrutable" surroundings. The poem was originally
published as a broadside to publicize a reading done in conjunction with Snyder and
Whalen in the early sixties. The leaflet featured a crude circle drawn in Chinese brush
style with the text of the poem written in calligraphy beneath it: ‘

Step out onto the planet.

Draw a circle a hundred feet round.

Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody's ever really seen.

How many can you find? (Ring 73)

The challenge offered in the poem--to face nature with a new and heightened sense of
wonder, and to rejoice in the attempt to know the unknowable--was one which the poet
took upon himself for much of the remainder of his life. By 1961, what he referred to as
his "hypersensitivity to the senselessness of human interference upon each other's easy
lives: the lead-pipe cinch made difficult," made even the relaxed, non-conformist routine of
San Francisco's East-West House unbearable for Welch (IR H, 31). That spring, at the
age of 35, he began what would be two years of the most meaningful work of his life, as a

Commercial fisherman.

Welch's writings from his days in San Francisco's salmon fleet indicate that what he

most valued in the work was not the paycheck (although the money was at times good),

but instead the closeness to natural forces. "The work," he wrote Snyder, "is connected

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with things I know are real: weather, animals, tides, fatigue, cranky tools" (IR 11, 34).
Describing the "state of near nirvana" be attained on the water, Welch told his mother:
"You float, wheel, through a universe so real as to make the human world even more
absurd & petty" (33).

In an essay he wrote later on his experiences aboard the Pacific salmon trollers, Welch
extoled the virtues of what he referred to as "real work," a phrase which Gary Snyder
would return to again and again in the decade to follow. For Welch, the term meant work
which placed one in close contact with the production of useful goods. "Real work"
describes the difficult, but often ecstatic experience of "how it is to go fishing, that is to
catch fish for the people to eat," versus what Welch called "the oppressive vision" he had
left behind in the world of corporate America, "what it is that a smart strong man might
devote his entire life to Post Toasties or Prudential Life Insurance" (IR 11, 44).

This first-hand experience with the rudimentary elements of the natural world had
benefits for the writer as well, Welch believed. He told Snyder that "there is something
very wrong with being a professional artist," who was a mere observer of natural events.
To be fully accurate and truthful, he contended, the artist must also be an active
participant:

[I]t seems to me that even Whitman is out of focus because it isn't the same
watching the wheat being harvested and actually getting the chaff in your
collarband & Hemingway never hunted as an Eskimo does, for the work of it, the
providing, & naturally he never hunted with the same depth & skill. (IR 11, 37)

For Welch then, the "real wor " of salmon fishing allowed him to fulfill a useful and

meaningful role in human commerce, as well as providing him with the kind of first-hand
exPerience he valued as an artist; but more importantly, it also provided him a means of
ECRnowledging his place in a much larger system. Embedded in his essay on salmon
fiShing, amongst the many colorful and exciting details of life on board a troller, is the

following paragraph:

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I have lived all my life with people who will laugh at all of this, being too
sophisticated to hear what I said except as "another plea to return to nature." But
nature is larger than that, expressible in the word-garne "Nature." It is all that goes
on whether we look at it or not. All-that-goes-on-whether-we-look-at-it-or-not
will always go on (though we almost never look at it) and we are in it, in this form,
for a little while at least. There is nothing to join since we are as much a charter
member as a jellyfish is, as the seasons are. The rest is what drives us mad. And
we all know what the rest is. (IR 11, 43)12

Like many of the endeavors in Lew Welch's life, his career as a commercial fisherman
ended abruptly. Economic factors, combined with environmental deterioration, pushed
Welch away from what he called "a dying industry," in "a dying sea" (IR H, 57). Only two
years before, he had seen a promising future in life as a fisherman, but by July 1962, his
vision of hope had turned to one of environmental ruin. He told Charles Olson: "It is all
over. You know it and I know it. I can't, here, tell you all about West Coast fishing, the
land which made me, as the coast you MADE, stand, has made you. It is over. All of it"

(IR II, 57).

"The Journal Of A Strategic Withdrawal": Hermit Poems
Following a severe breakdown in the summer of 1962, and the end of his two year

relationship with the poet Lenore Kandel, Welch's attentions turned inland. He told
Whalen of his plan to "go up to the Salmon River and live in a mining claim cabin & catch
big steelhead and never see people," at the same time "writing all truth into irnperishable
pomes [sic] " (IR 11, 59). By September he had made the plan a reality, taking over an
abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps cabin in a remote area near Forks of Salmon,
California. 13 After a lifetime of transience, the simple cabin be dubbed "Rat Flat," seemed
'50 the poet like his final destination; "I have finally taken to the woods," he wrote Charles
Olson, "I hope forever" (IR 11, 67). In November, he wrote to Donald Allen, then editor

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of Evergreen Review, telling him that he intended to write a prose work on his coming
"home" to his mountain cabin entitled "A Place to Put the Typewriter"; its subtitle was to
be "The Journal of a Strategic Withdrawal" (IR 11, 86).

The writings emerging from Welch's withdrawal into the California wilderness
comprise what Gary Snyder has called the "heart" of Welch's body of work, the poems
which comprise his small collection Hermit Poems (1965), and another sequence entitled
"The Way Back." Snyder notes in his introduction to Welch's Selected Poems, that in
these works, "Lew really achieved the meeting of an ancient Asian sage-tradition, the
'shack simple' 14 post-frontier back country out-of-work workingman's style, and the rebel
modernism of modern art" (ii). In addition, Welch's Hermit Poems and those in "The Way
Back" fit also into a tradition of American letters spawned by Thoreau's Walden and
carried into the late twentieth century by writers such as Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire,
1968) and Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974): that of the lone, isolated artist
learning from and sharing what Abbey called "a season in the wilderness." Welch's work
from the period resounds with Thoreau's stated purpose in Walden "to drive life into a
comer, and reduce it to its lowest terms" (82):

The hermit locks his door against the blizzard.

He keeps the cabin warm.

All winter long he sorts out all he has.
What was well started shall be finished.
What was not, should be thrown away.

In spring he emerges with one garment

and a single book. (Ring 76)

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Later, in a poem from the "Way Back" series, "HeThanlcs His Woodpile," Welch
places himself in the long lineage of writers who have chosen a life of lonely asceticism
over the comforts offered by society:

All winter long I make wood stews:

Poem to stove to woodpile to stove to

typewriter. woodpile. stove.

and can't stop peeking at it!
can't stop opening up the door!

can't stop giggling at it

"Shack Simple"
crazy as Han Shan as
Wittgenstein in his German but,15 as

all the others ever were and are
Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers

who walked away from it, finally,
kicked the habit, finally, of Self, of

man-hooked Man

(which is not, at last, estrangement) (Ring 84)
Welch denies that the ascetic hermit's life is one of "estrangement," since for him the
rejection of "man-hooked Man" makes possible the embrace of the non-human world. For

While the majority of the poems Welch composed at his Forks of Salmon cabin have only

112

one human subject-~the poet himself--they are set amongst a world which is teeming with
life and energy. In the poet's view, it is not he that has become estranged from humanity,
but rather it is humanity who has become estranged from the non-human world. The
opening stanzas for the preface to the Hermit Poems, a poem entitled "The Bath,"
describe a setting of tremendous beauty which has been abandoned as "obsolete" by its
previous human inhabitants:

At last it is raining, the first sign of spring.

The Blue Jay gets all wet.

Frost-flowers, tiny bright and dry like

inch high crystal trees or sparkling silver mold,

acres of them, on heaps of placer boulders all around me,
are finally washing away. They were beautiful.

And the big trees rising, dark, behind them.

This canyon is so steep we didn't get sun since late November,
my "CC" shack and I. Obsolete. The two of us.

He for his de-funct agency.

I for this useless art? (Ring 67)

In this passage, Welch refers to his shack as "he," with what might seem to be a
personification of an inanimate object with which he himself identifies. 15 Given the other
poems in the collection, however, it would be a mistake to view the reference to the shack
as a personification. It could more accurately be seen as an animation—the
acknowledgment of a common life force present in all matter. Rather than portraying the

landscape and creatures of Rat Flat in human terms, Welch attempts to depict all beings,
human and non-human, as sharing a common energy:

Apparently wasps

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work all their only summer at the nest,
so that new wasps work
all their only summer at the nest,

Ct CCtCI' a.

All my green lizards lost their tails, mating.
Six snakes ate all my frogs.
Butterflies do very odd things with their tongues.

There seems to be no escaping it.
I planted nine tomato plants and water them.
I replace my rotten stoop with a

clean Fir block.

Twelve new poems in less than a week! (Ring 71)

Here, the actions of the human-~tending a garden to feed himself, repairing his home,
and even producing art-are viewed in terms of the supposedly instinctive actions of
reptiles and insects engaged in similar tasks. While Welch's voice still harbors some
anthropocentric features (i.e. the stewardship of "his" frogs and lizards, and the use of the
judgmental word "odd"), there is in the poem a conscious effort to show the poet
gradually coming to grips (i.e. "Apparently" and "There seems to be no escaping it") with
a view of himself as one of many creatures from whom, as the speaker in "Wobbly Rock"

stressed, "there is no separation."

"The Way Back"
Welch's stay at Forks of Salmon was not permanent, as he had predicted it would be
early in 1962. By November, 1963, Welch decided to again pull up stakes and return to

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the San Francisco area, where he would live for the next seven years with Magda Cregg,
the new love in his life. The poems in Welch's "The Way Back" sequence chronicle his
final days at the remote cabin, and his eventual return to city life. Despite the sense of
failure and even, impending doom, which Welch must have felt in his return to the city,
there is, in these poems, a kind of missionary zeal, a desire to share the lessons of his
hermitage with others. The first poem in the sequence, "He Prepares to Take Leave of His
Hut," begins with the pilgrim's dutiful return to the city:

And They, The Blessed Ones, said to him,

"Beautiful trip, Avalokiteshvara.17

You never have to go back there again."

And he said, "Thank you very much, but I think I will.
Those people need all the help they can get." (Ring 81)

Although the poems in the "Way Back" sequence document what Welch calls "the
Mystical Return" of "The Mountain Man" to the human world (Ring 90-92), the focus of
most of the poems is still squarely on nature. The centerpiece of the sequence is a long
prose-poem entitled "He Begins to Recount His Adventures," a work which encapsulates
Welch's wholistic view of nature in clear but eloquent language. It begins:

1 can't remember seeing it any other way but whole, a big
round rock wheeling about the heavens and comin' on green to
crack sidewalks, gentle and undemanding, as if I saw it first,

approaching it from somewhere else.

Everything about it always seemed right. The roundness is
right. The way it spins. (Ring 94)
The portrait of the planet Welch paints is one of exquisite balance and intricate beauty,

one in which "Everything is right, clear down to the smallest parts of it" (95). The view

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of Earth as "a gentle and undemanding I planet" first posited in "Chicago Poem," is
merged with the poet's later ecological vision of the Earth as an inscrutable and mysterious
network of systems--"subworlds living off / further subworlds"--which he had first alluded
to in "Step Out Onto the Planet." The poem has only one human inhabitant--the lone
figure of John Muir:
Or John Muir waking in a Sierra meadow, in spring, and

finding, inches from his waking eye, a wildflower he, and nobody

else, had ever seen. Rising, he found himself in a field of delicate

color so complicated he spent the whole day in only ten square

feet of it, classifying and drawing pictures of hundreds of little

plants for the first time in the world. 18

An average of a ton of insects for every acre of a field like

that. Deer hoof crushing a flower. Rodents at the roots of it.

Birds diving and pecking at it. Big trees crowding it out with

their shade. Mushrooms in the warm fall rains. (Ring 95)
Welch's emphasis in the poem is on the "subworlds" which combine to make up what
Muir experiences as "meadow"-subworlds invisible until enlightened humans like Muir
can approach them with a "waking eye." While the term "ecology" is not present in any of
Welch's published writings or letters of the period, 19 passages such as this one make clear
that by the early 1960's the poet had come to view nature from an ecological perspectiv --

as an infinite number of intricate and interconnecting systems.

"Final City"
The middle years of the 1960's marked for Welch the beginning of his public
recognition as a writer. In 1964 several of the poems written at Forks of Salmon were

accepted by Poetry, then the nation's premiere literary journal, and in conjunction with

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Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, he took part in the very successful "Freeway Reading" of
June 12 of that year. 1965 brought with it the publication of his second chapbook, Hermit
Poems, and Welch began more often to read publicly the two decades of poetry he had
stored in his notebooks.

With the publication, in 1965, of his third collection of poems, On Out, which
included both "Chicago Poem" and "Wobbly Rock," Welch had become a well knownuif
not well paidumember of the San Francisco arts community. Although the poet was now
earning a significant part of his living as a teacher of creative writing at the University of
California Extension in San Francisco, and supplementing his income with fees from
readings, he still had to support himself and his writing mainly by working as a dock
worker and ship's clerk (Samuel Charters 552).

Despite his growing reputation as a writer within the San Francisco community,
however, Welch again began to grow uneasy within the city. By 1967, the Bay Area
counterculture in which he had placed so much hope was deteriorating rapidly, as the city
was shaken by racial violence and elements of organized crime moved in to take over
Haight-Asbury's profitable drug trade. What had begun as a self-styled utopian
experiment now had turned into a crowded scene of anger, violence and dangerously
powerful and impure drugs (IR 11, 145).

In a leaflet distributed in the Haight in early 1967, "A MOVING TARGET IS HARD
TO HIT," Welch predicted the immanent destruction of the district and its counterculture
by a repressive government afraid of the counterculture's mushrooming growth: "When
200,000 folks from places like lima chic and Cleveland and lompoc and visalia and
amsterdam and london and moscow and lodz suddenly descend, as they will, on the
haight-ashbury, the scene will be burnt down" (How I Work 6). Welch's advice to
members of the Haight community was not "to stand there and take it, as the poles did, . .

. with futile swords," but instead, to take refuge in the forests and mountains of California:

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Disperse. Gather into smaller tribes. Use the beautiful land your state and
national governments have already set up for you, free. If you want to.

Most Indians are nomads. The haight-ashbury is not where it's at--it's in your
head and hands. Take it anywhere. (7)

This vision of nature as a refuge from cultural apocalypse was further developed in
"Final City / Tap City," a 1968 essay Welch contributed to the prominent underground
publication, The San Francisco Oracle. In the essay, he contends that the ills associated
with the modern city--pollution, over-crowding, and a dangerous alienation from nature--
had created the youth counterculture: "a huge number of people who are Immigrants in
their own native land" (How I Work 19). Warning that "We face great holocausts, terrible
catastrophes, all American cities bumed from within, and without," the poet envisioned a
post-urban world in which America's countercultural "immigrants" will "slip away" until
nature reclaims the ruined landscape:

However, our beautiful Planet will gerrninate--undemeath this thin skin of City,
Green will come on to crack our sidewalks! Stinking air will blow away at last!
The bays flow clean! (20)

Until this green revolution could take place, however, Welch urged America's youthful
counterculture to remain patient and clear-headed, to return to wilderness and to what
Gary Snyder would later refer to as "the old ways":20

In the meantime, stay healthy. There are hundreds of miles to walk, and lots of
work to be done. Keep your mind. We will need it. Stake out a retreat. Learn
berries and nuts and fruit and small animals and all the plants. Learn water.

For there must be good men and women in the mountains, on the beaches, in all
the neglected and beautiful places, so that one day we come back to ghostly cities
and try to set them right. (21)

By the end of the decade, Welch was ready to take his own advice. In February 1970,
he wrote to Katharine George, an old neighbor from his days at Forks of Salmon, telling

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her of his life in San Francisco. In the letter, he marvels at his relative financial success as
a writer and teacher, noting "I'll make $6,000 this year as a poet!" (IR H, 167). Yet,
despite this long-sought financial reward, there is in the letter a longing to leave what he
refers to as "this madhouse of a Bay Area," and return to the land:
I'm sure (have checked it out) that the Bay Area is better than any urban area in the
world, but it just may not be good enough for those, like us, who are blessed with

the choice of moving away as a real possibility. I am still not bought. ( 166)

"Not The Bronze Casket But The Brazen Wing"

Despite the hard-won acceptance as an artist which Welch enjoyed in the late sixties,
the poet's life entered a tail-spin during the first months of the new decade. In May 1970
Welch resigned his teaching position at San Francisco's Urban School, citing as a reason
his feelings that he could better serve the anti-war and civil rights causes outside the
classroom. His life-long drinking problem worsened, and in December 1970 Magda
Cregg left him, ending the longest and most stable relationship of his life (IR H, 169-76).

In early 1971, Welch planned again to take to the woods. His friends Gary Snyder
and Allen Ginsberg offered to let him build a cabin at Kitkitdizze, a tract of land which
they jointly owned near Nevada City, California. Sober for the first time in years, as a
result of the prescription drug Antabuse, Welch selected a building site and began to
formulate plans for the small cabin which would be his hermitage in the woods, a simple
twelve by twenty foot structure with no electricity or running water (IR H, 186). It was a
task which the poet was ill prepared for--both physically and financially-but one on which
he placed the utmost importance. "I absolutely have to do this to survive," he wrote to
Magda Cregg, "It's hard but it's real, at last, and I'know it is the only way for me now" (IR
H, 183).

The forest cabin Welch envisioned was never completed. Physically drained by years
of hard drinking and the side effects of his Antabuse therapy, and depressed at the

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prospect of finding himself at 44, living on the kindness of his friends, on May 22, 1971

Lew Welch disappeared into the foothills of the Sierras, taking with him only a gun. He

left behind a note reading:
I never could make anything work out right and now I'm betraying my friends. I
can't make anything out of it-never could. I had great visions but never could
bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It's all gone. Don Allen is to be
my literary executor--use MSS at Gary's and at Grove Press. I have $2000 in
Nevada City Bank of America--use it to cover my affairs and debts. I don't owe
Allen G. anything yet nor my Mother. I went Southwest. Goodbye. Lew Welch.
(IR H, 187)

Despite extensive searching, Welch's body was never found, leading some to
speculate, hopefully, that the poet's last note signaled not a suicide, but a planned
disappearance--a twentieth century Huck Finn's plan to "light out for the Territory."
Albert Saijo, Welch's neighbor from his days at East-West House, eulogizes his friend by
wistftu denying his death ever occurred:

I sometimes believe you went into the mountains that last time and had a truly
illuminating experience. That there in the pine-oak woodland or coniferous forest
you reran your life and came out ahead of it. That then you crossed over the
mountains and descended to the Great Basin where you still are. Your hair has
gone completely white but you are younger in the face. You drink nothing but
water. You eat wild weeds, comb honey, and the fat larvae of the brine fly that
breeds in saline waters. (Trip Trap 1-2)

But such pleasant imaginings aside, the numerous references to suicide in Welch's
letters, as well as his fragile emotional state at the time of his disappearance, can leave
little doubt that the poet did take his own life. Welch's final collection of poems, a slim
chapbook published in 1969 entitled The Song Mt. T amalpais Sings, offers further
evidence that this is the case. The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings is a book which would serve

120

as both a tribute to the California landscape and the poet's final epitaph. The opening line
of the book's title poem--"This is the last place. There is no place else to go"--speaks to
both the time-wom notion of civilization's westward progression as well as the westward
path of the poet's own wanderings--including his final walk away from Kitkitdizze (Ring
12 1 ).

The eclectic volume contains a dozen small pieces in various formsua haiku, two
riddles which Welch refers to as "the first American Koans," a curse against ocean
polluters in a brief poem called "Sausalito Trash Prayer"--but the book's centerpiece is the
poem which serves as the writer's final statement: "Song of the Turkey Buzzard." The
poem is Welch's acceptance of the death of his human form, but more importantly, it is a
joyful embrace of his next form, as he envisions himself devoured by--and thereby
becoming—a buzzard.

"I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass 1 love, I If you want me again
look for me under your bootsoles," wrote Walt Whitman at the end of "Song of Myself,"
in 1855 (88). Since this fearless acknowledgment of death as a part of the chain of life,
numerous American writers had voiced similar sentiments. The most recent, and most
local example of this tradition, for Welch, was his fellow Californian Robinson Jeffers.
Jeffers's 1963 poem, "Vulture," features an encounter between the sleeping poet and a
vulture who circles above him, eyeing him as a meal, only to be frightened away when the
bird realizes his prey is not yet carrion. The poem ends with a reverie in which the poet
imagines a different outcome. "1 tell you solemnly," Jeffers writes:

That 1 was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten
by that beak and become part of him, to share those
wings and those eyes-

What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment:
What a life after death. (107)

121

In "Song of the Turkey Buzzard," Welch extends this fantasy of "enskyment"
expressed by the earlier poet, and demands it as his own final reality. Where Jeffers views
being consumed by a vulture as the "sublime end of one's body," a reworking of the
traditional Christian afterlife in heaven, Welch sees the experience not as an end, but as
what he calls a "continuance":

The very opposite of
death
Bird of re-birth
Buzzard
meat is rotten meat made
sweet again. . . (Ring 135)

The poem's frnal stanzas offer the poet's "last Will & Testament," the detailed orders
Welch calls the "instructions I for my continuance" in his new form. They harbor not the
slightest trace of sadness at the death of his own human form; on the contrary, the lines
are emphatic with the poet's sense of wonder at the beauty and efficiency of the food chain
he prepares to enter:

Let no one grieve.
I shall have used it all up

used up every bit of it.

What an extravagance!
What a relief! (Ring 136)

The stanzas which follow are the poem's darkest, an effect perhaps designed to make
the biological transformation from man to bird which will follow all the more exuberant.
The terminology is harsh and direct--the language of the slaughterhouse rather than the
funeral parlor. "On a marked rock. . .," Welch tells his attendants, "place my meat":

All care must be taken not to

122

frighten the natives of this
barbarous land, who
will not let us die, even,

as we wish.

With proper ceremony disembowel what I

no longer need, that it might more quickly

rot and tempt

my new form (Ring 136)
This macabre tone is quickly overturned in the poem's final section, as Welch rejects

the traditional trappings of the Western burial ritual, and ecstatically embraces his "new

form" and takes to the skies smrounding Mt. Tamalpais:
NOT THE BRONZE CASKET BUT THE BRAZEN WING

SOARING FOREVER ABOVE THEE O PERFECT
O SWEETEST WATER O GLORIOUS
WHEELING

BIRD (Ring 137 )
The death outlined in "Song of the Turkey Buzzard"-if indeed the term "death" can
be used at all in this case-is emblematic of Lew Welch's lifetime struggle to achieve
enlightenment by leaving behind "the world that is man," and becoming "a member of the
W0rld that is not man" (IR 1, 196). More than a decade after Welch's disappearance, Gary

Snyder dedicated a poem to his old friend, "For/From Lew," in which he comes to terms

with Welch's final decision:
Lew Welch just turned up one day,

live as you and me. "Damn, Lew" I said,

123

"you didn't shoot yourself after all."

"Yes I did" he said,

and even then i felt the tingling down my back.

"Yes you did, too" I said--"I can feel it now."

"Yeah" he said,

"There's a basic fear between your world and

mine. I don't know why.

What I came to say was,

Teach the children about the cycles.

The life cycles. All the other cycles.

That's what it's all about, and it's all forgot." (Axe Handles 7) 21
In Lew Welch's view, and in Gary Snyder's, the poet's final act on that day in 1971 when
he walked off into the Sierra foothills may not have been to take his own life, but to give
it, to what Snyder has called "that ecstatic Mutual Offering called the Food Chain"
(W elch, Selected Poems ii).

124

NOTES

1 I Remain: The Letters of Lew Welch & The Correspondence of His Friends. Ed. Donald
Allen. 2 vols. Bolinas CA: Grey Fox Press, 1980. p. 196. Subsequent citations within the
text and chapter notes will be abbreviated IR.

2 In a letter to William Carlos Williams dated 14 August, 1951, Welch told his mentor: "I
read Paterson IV, and I tell you I was drunk with it" (IR 1, 58).

3 Apparently not all of Welch's advertising copy took the same positive stance towards
nature as his later writing. Aram Saroyan credits him as being the writer responsible for
the pesticide slogan "Raid Kills Bugs Dead!" (Genesis Angels 109).

4 This substitution of the colloquial "Murcan" or "Murca" for American or America seems
to have been a standard feature of the correspondence among Welch, Gary Snyder, and
Philip Whalen.

5 Welch tells his readers in the preface to Ring of Bone that "The poems are
autobiographical lyrics" (3). Although it would be incorrect to accept this as true for all of
the poems contained in the collection, it is quite safe to say that in the majority, including
"Chicago Poem," Welch himself is the speaker.

6 Also referred to at times as "Hyphen House."
7 In a letter dated 2 May 1960, Welch told James Wilson that "the whole poem meant to

Carry most of what I‘ve learned from Zen, expressed in an American vocabulary" (IR 1,
l 94).

8 A letter Welch wrote to Robert Duncan conclusively demonstrates that the poem's rock
is intended as genuine. Complaining of those who found his poetry too difficult, he wrote:
"And still to get ((from Wobbly Rock))! ! l! the cry 'I don't understand it. Why don't you
Write so that everybody can understand it. ?'

It

is

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a
real
rock

My God!!!" (IR H, 53—54).

9 A letter dated 22 September 1960 from Welch to Will Petersen identifies him as the

"Berkeley painter" (IR H, 9). Welch had seen Petersen's article on Ryoanji, "Stone

Garden," in Evergreen Review 4, 1957.

10 Welch claims that this section's opening line is from Taliesin, an old Welsh epic. The

borrowing is a subtle joke, says the poet, since "this is the history section of this poem,

and it's Old Welch." See How I Work as a Poet & Other Essays, 82.

11 Welch was an enthusiastic fisherman for much of his life, so it seems only natural that
he would select the figure of a fisherman to stand as a symbol of interconnectedness
between man and nature.

12 Thirty years later, Welch's friend Gary Snyder would echo his views on "the word-
game 'Nature'" in his explanation of the title of his 1992 volume of collected poems No
Nature:

No Nature. Human societies each have their own nutty fads, mass delusions, and
enabling mythologies. Daily life still gets done. Wild nature is probably equally
goofy, with a stunning variety of creatures somehow getting by in all these
landscapes. Nature also means the physical universe, including the urban,
industrial, and toxic. But we do not easily know nature, or even know ourselves.
Whatever it actually is, it will not fulfil our conceptions and assumptions. . . .
There is no single or set "nature" either as "the 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. ("Preface" unpaginated)

126

13 A town Welch described as "only a Post Office and a gradually rotting Oldsmobile

under a tree" (IR H, 87).

14 A Western term for those suffering from "cabin fever."

15 Han Shan: Chinese hermit poet of the seventh century whose "Cold Mountain Poems"

Welch's friend Gary Snyder had translated. Ludwig Wittgenstein: (1889-1951) Austrian I

British philosopher who, in the years following the First World War, dedicated himself to

a life of strict asceticism. Welch had read his Philosophical Investigations (Meltzer 196).

16 As does Jack Kerouac's Ray Smith in Dharma Bums. See the novel's final paragraphs:

192.

17 Identified later by Welch as the "Buddha of Compassion" (Ring 82).

l 8 Welch may be referring here to a passage from John Muir's essay "The Bee-Pastures"
(1894) in which he discusses sleeping amidst "countless forms of life thronging about me":
"And what glorious botanical beds I had! Oftentimes on waking I would find several new
,species leaning over me and looking me full in the face, so that my studies would begin
before rising" (The Mountains of California 260).

19 The term's first appearance in Welch's writings comes in a letter to Jim Koller dated 23
January 1971, about an oil tanker spill in San Francisco Bay: "Here there is the panic of
those who realize it's all over, that all that ecology stuff was true. . . (IR H, 175).

20 See Gary Snyder's essay, "Re-inhabitation," in The Old Ways: Six Essays, 57-66.

21 More recently, in Gary Snyder's collection No Nature: New and Selected Poems, the
poet again pays tribute to his old friend with the poem "For Lew Welch in a Snowfall"
(380). Also, see Michael McClure's tribute to Welch, "A Spirit of Mount Tamalpais," in
his 1974 collection September Blackberries: 107.

V. "LET US THROW OUT THE WORD MAN":
MICHAEL McCLURE'S MAMIVIILIAN POETICS

"If there shall he love and content between the father
and the son and if the greatness of the son is the exuding
of the greatness of the father there shall he love between
the poet and the man of demonstrable science. In the

beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science."

Walt Whitman, introduction to Leaves of Grass (1855)

"Science walks in beauty."

Gary Snyder, "Towards Climax" from Turtle Island (1974)

Beat writers of the 1950's and 60's took a variety of approaches in their attempts to
reconnect with the natural world, among them Gary Snyder's emphasis on the physical
body and its place in the world, Jack Kerouac's romantic rucksack quest for truth and
solace in nature, and Lew Welch's anti-urban withdrawal into the wilderness. Often, these
approaches utilized older models--what Gary Snyder has referred to as "the old ways"-as
vehicles in this reconnection: Buddhism and other forms of ancient Eastern thought,
American Indian religion and myth, as well as the Romantic traditions of eighteenth and
nineteenth century English and American literature.

Poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist Michael McClure shares these interests in "the

old ways" with several other members of the Beat circle, often relying on them as both

source and background for his own literary efforts. More often, however, the primary

127

128

vehicle in McClure's nature poetry is not seventh century Buddhism or nineteenth century
Romanticism, but instead the twentieth century scientific disciplines of biology and
ecology. More than any other writer within Beat Movement, McClure relies on the
scientific disciplines of the present as a means of discussing environmental issues and

1 Despite the many modern scientific

forging his own reconnection with the natural world.
sources of his poetry however, McClure's journey as a writer has taken him even further
back into history than those of his colleagues within the Beat circle; his is a journey whose
ultimate goal is the "recovery" of what he has referred to as "the biological self" (Mesch 5)
and "the frightening and joyous" acknowledgment of a visceral "undersoul" which unites
all of nature (Surface 26). "My interest in biology," McClure notes, "has remained a
constant thread through my searching" (Surface 11).

The author of more than forty volumes of poetry, fiction, essays, and plays, Michael
McClure has become known as one of the most prolific and enduring figures to emerge
from the Beat Movement. He shares a long and rich history with Allen Ginsberg, Jack
Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Robert Creely, and many
other writers of the San Francisco Beat period. As one of the youngest members of the
Beat circle, McClure played an important role as a bridge between writers and artists of
the Beat Movement and the region's youth counterculture during of 1960's, and has been
a close friend and collaborator with figures such as Richard Brautigan, Bob Dylan, and
Janis Joplin.2 For nearly four decades, what Lawrence Ferlinghetti once called
"McClure's lush green ideas" have been a highly visible and controversial topic of both

American literary and environmental discourse.3

"The Fields of Kansas"
Born in 1932 in Marysville, Kansas, Michael McClure divided his early childhood
years between the farmlands of Kansas and the Pacific rain forests of Seattle, Washington,

where his interest in nature was heightened by time spent with his maternal grandfather,

129

physician and naturalist Ellis Johnston. Poems such as his "MEMORIES FROM
CHILDHOOD" (included in his 1983 collection, Fragments of Perseus), recall the writer's
formative years, and an early awareness of a clash between the human and non-human
worlds:
I REMEMBER THE FIELDS
of Kansas and the laws

that made

them flat and bare

I know when and where

the field mouse died.

I watched the rivers tried

for treason,

then laid straight,

and the cottonwood and opossum

placed upon the grate
of petroleum civilization! (43)

Educated first. at the Universities of Witchita and Arizona, McClure gravitated
westward towards San Francisco during his senior year. Following his marriage to Iowa
Kinnison, he enrolled at San Francisco State College in 1954. It was here that McClure's
long-standing interest in poetry was sparked by a writing course with a poet who would
be a mentor to many of the Bay Area's new voices, Robert Duncan. Despite his new

teacher's efforts to introduce him to free verse, McClure's early poems display a rigid

130

formal structure which is absent in much of his later workuthe result, perhaps, of his
intensive study of Milton, Blake, and Yeats during his undergraduate education. His
earliest published poems, which appeared in the prestigious journal Poetry when McClure
was only 23, are two villanelles dedicated to Theodore Roethke, a fellow Midwestemer
also much enamored with the natural world. Even in these early formal poems, there is
evidenced a strong desire on the poet's part to experience the world not as a "civilized "
human, but on a more instinctual level, as other life forms must. The first of the
villanelles, "Premonition," speaks of the poet's desire to see life as a bird views it, and his
frustration at finding himself bound to Earth; the final stanza reads:

The skin and Wingless skull I wear grow tight.

The echoes from the sky are never clear.

My bones ascend by arsenics of sight.

Beginning in the heart, I work towards light. (218) 4

As he matured as a writer, the form, as well as the subject, of McClure's poetry from

the mid 1950's onward became reflective of his growing interest in biology and nature.
The stiff, imposed structures evidenced in the iambic measures of early poems, such as the
villanelles for Theodore Roethke, gave way to innovative free-verse poems which were
centered on the page, a form which has become a recognizable trademark of McClure's
verse, and one which, according to the poet, "gave the poems the lengthwise symmetry
found in higher animals" (Rebel Lions vii).

The Six Gallery and Hymns for St. Geryon: Unveiling the "Undersoul"
McClure's friendship with Duncan quickly led to associations with others in the rapidly
emerging San Francisco poetry community, including Kenneth Rexroth and the mystic
surrealist poet Philip Lamantia (King 383-84). In early 1955, he met Allen Ginsberg at a
party given in honor of visiting poet W.H. Auden, where Ginsberg told him of his

intentions to organize a poetry reading featuring himself and several other young pOets

131

from the area--the event which later become known as the Six Gallery Reading. Here,
McClure, along with Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg,
helped to launch the Beat Movement, and his presence at the event helped to instill in the
fledgling movement his life-long fascination with the natural world. The poems which
McClure selected to read at this, his very first public reading, are indicative of his early
environmental concerns. They include "For The Death of 100 Whales," a powerful poem
which condemns the slaughter of a pod of Icelandic killer whales by the United States
military (and in doing so, predates by more than a decade the many calls for protection of
marine mammals which would emerge in the late 1960's), and "Point Lobos: Animism," a
poem which provides an early glimpse of what the poet would later refer to as the visceral
"undersoul" through which all of nature is united. The poem's final stanzas read:

(I knelt in the shade

By a cold salt pool

And felt the entrance of hate
On many legs,
The soul like a Clambering

Water vascular system.

No scuttling could matter
Yet I formed in my mind
The most beautiful of maxims.
How could I care
For your illness or mine?)

This talk of bodies!

It's impossible to speak
Of lupines or tulips

132

When one may read
His name
Spelled by the mold on the stumps

When the forest moves about one.

Heel. Nostril.
Light. Light! Light!
This is the bird's song.
You may tell it
To your children. (Hymns 4-5)
In his 1982 essay "Scratching the Beat Surface," an essay in which McClure argues
that nature and ecology were a central theme to many of the poems read at the Six Gallery
as well as to many other Beat texts, he recalls his visit to Point Lobos, and his motivation
in writing the poem:
I wanted to tell of my feelings of hunger, of emptiness, and of epiphany. I hoped
to state the sharpness of a demonic joy that I found in a place of incredible beauty
on the coast of Northern California. I wanted to say how I was overwhelmed by
the sense of animism--and how everything (breath, spot, rock, ripple in the
tidepool, cloud, and stone) was alive and spirited. It was a frightening and joyous
awareness of my undersoul. I say undersoul because I did not want to join Nature
by my mind but by my visceraumy belly. The German language has two words,
Geist for the soul of man and Odem for the spirit of beasts. Odem is the
undersoul. I was becoming sharply aware of it. (26)5
Although couched in the philosophical terminology of animism, the ancient notion
which holds that all natural phenomena and objects—whether animate or inanimate-
possess an innate soul, McClure's early intuitive attempts to "join Nature" seem to draw

more from science than from philosophy. McClure has written of "the important, yet

133

little known reaching out from science to poetry and from poetry to science that was part
of the Beat movement" (Surface 11).6 Clearly, such a "reaching out" to science has
manifested itself in both the sources and subjects of McClure's own work. Although the
majority of his associates during the 1950's in San Francisco were mainly other poets and
painters, his closest friend during the period was Sterling Bunnell, a scientist whom'
McClure terms "a visionary naturalist" (Surface 11). Bunnell shared McClure's interest in
both nature and consciousness (he would later work in conjunction with Dr. Timothy
Leary), and the poet credits him as being the person responsible for his first close look into
the biological wealth which Northern California offered: "With him," McClure recalls, "I
was able to watch coyotes and foxes and weasels and deer, and walk through savannah
country, hike through foothills, go over the mountains, and to the seashore and look into
tidepools" (Lighting 3).

McClure's first collection of poems, Hymns for St. Geryon, published by his friend
Dave Haselwood's Auerhahn Press in 1959, and which contains both "For the Death of
100 Whales," and "Point Lobos: Animism," exemplifies the writer's early application of
biology to poetry. As William R. King has noted, "Geryon was Dante's beast of
falsehood, a fair face atop a dragon's body. For McClure, St. Geryon was the
apotheosized conflict between the social facade and instinctual desires" (387). Hymns for
St. Geryon attempts to bridge this gap between the social facade (i.e. the cerebral
trappings of all human culture) and instinctual desires (the body, and what McClure would
later refer to as aspects of the "biological self"), and in doing so, the poems make readers
aware of the possibility of unifying both aspects of their beings. As McClure notes in the
title poem, "Even Geryon (as Geryon) is beautiful but not if you look / only at the head or
body" (Selected Poems 7). Often, this task is accomplished by means of a microbiological
perspective which forces us to view ourselves in close relation to "lower" forms of life, as
in the poem entitled "Canticle":

We who do not make way for creatures

134

OUR CREATURE

Warm blooded we move in a cold sea denying-

-our guts cousins filling the cracks of the earth,
sleeping at the bottom.
Amphioxus, rotifers, arrow-worms hunting their prey,7
predators in bodies
of translucence and color, formed
by the element they move about them
AND

hunger!!!!!!

I put off my feelings today let the language

move me tomorrow. A lie

I say! The thing comes out moved
by the man inside me who is a creature sprung
from the chain. Let me regain it. (24-25)

The "thing" to be regained is the poet's own biological identitynan acknowledgment of
his role as fellow "creature" and "cousin" to the microscopic organisms the poem
describes. Like many of the poems in Hymns to St. Geryon, "Canticle" yearns for a
biological wholeness, or what McClure has called "the monism of nature," exemplified by
both the ancient Taoist view of the universe as a single uncarved block, and by modern
scientific theories of ecology. Under such a view, the "arnphioxus, rotifers" and "arrow-
worms" are not "lower" forms of life, but are, instead, valuable and even "divine"

expressions of a common life force. McClure explains:

135

Ernst Haekel and Alfred North Whitehead believed that the universe is a single
organism-~that the whole thing is alive and that its existence is its sacredness and
its breathing. If all is divine and alive--and if everything is the Uncarved Block of
the Taoists--then all of it and any part is beauteous (or possibly hideous) and of
enormous value. It is beyond proportion. One cannot say that a virus is less
special or less divine than a wolf or a butterfly or a rose blossom. One cannot say
that a star or cluster of galaxies is more important--has more proportion--than a

chipmunk or a floorboard. This recognition is always with us. (Surface 27).

Meat Science

McClure's poetry can often be difficult, and the poet has at times adopted the abstract
expressionist painter Clifford Still's dictum that "Demands for communication [in art] are
presumptuous and irrelevant" (Surface 26).8 Although always present (yet not always
easily decipherable) in his early poetry, McClure's biological and ecological notions are
first clearly described in his 1961 collection, Meat Science Essays. The eight essays
contained in this slim volume cover a diverse range of subjects-from detailed and vivid
descriptions of the author's early experiments with mind-altering drugs, to essays in
response to the French surrealist writer Antonin Artaud and the existentialist philosopher
Albert Camus. But a common thread which finds its way into each of the essays, as the
book's title indicates, is the notion of a shared biological connection among all creatures,
human and non-human: "that all," as McClure notes, "are finally creatures of Meat and
Spirit" (44).

The Meat Science Essays mark for McClure a turning point, as he begins to move
from the vision of universal interconnectedness (i.e. the "uncarved block" of Tao) first
posited in the St. Geryon poems, to a refined and somewhat more narrow view of his role
as "mammal." While he in no way abandons his earlier monistic view of nature (and

would, in fact, occasionally return to it throughout his career), as McClure notes in his

136

essay "Reflections After a Poem," the complex differences between humans and creatures
vastly different from ourselves prevent humans from fully knowing or understanding them.
After first pointing out "our kinship with all creatures," he reserves his true feelings of
empathy for species more closely related to humans:
We feel close to all living creatures here . . . but we feel the most close and the
most joined with the warm blooded. We cannot know the universal and
philosophical consciousness of deep seas animals. We fill the universe in our
sympathy for all being, but moments of extreme vision and beauty swell us out so
that we feel immediately more related to a larger group than Man. We become
Mammals as we once were Men. . . . Omette Coleman9 is a mammal, the snow
leopard is a mammal, Schubert is a mammal. (Meat Science 79-80)
Asking enthusiastically "What greater thing is there than to fill out the fullness of being a
mammal?" (82), McClure adrnonishes his readers to reconsider their place in the world,
and their relationship to the rest of nature. "LET US THROW OUT THE WORD
MAN !," he urges, and seek in place of this limited role the "mammalian possibility" of "a
larger place"(79-80)-a_taxonornic broadening from the single species Homo sapiens to
full membership among the more than 15,000 species of the class Mammalia.
Experimentation with hallucinogenic substances was an important source for McClure's
evolving view of nature, as it was for other Beat era writers and artists. 10 The Meat
Science Essays contain several pieces detailing McClure's use of peyote, heroin, cocaine,
and the hallucinogenic psilocybin mushroom. Although the author has in recent times
cited drugs as being merely one source among many other influences on his thought and
writing, McClure's essay, Drug Notes, provides an insight into the central importance
which his drug experimentation played in shaping his view of nature. McClure himself
seems to acknowledge the centrality of his drug experimentation by describing making his

first use of peyote the topic of the opening sentence of Scratching the Beat Surface, the

137

book in which he explores the connection between his work and nature: "In 1958 I ate the
American Indian drug peyote for the first time" (5).1 l

The "adventure of consciousness" (6) which McClure entered into with his first taste
of peyote, may well be at the root of the poet's mammalian vision. In the section on
peyote in "Drug Notes," after noting that "We have learned to see by a code first invented
by Michelangelo and Da Vinci," McClure writes that to experience the world through the
drug's effects "is to know that you've lived denying and dimly sensing reality through a
haze" (26). When the aesthetic "code" imposed by human culture drops away, the author
finds in its place a universe in which all are "animals": .

All things beam inner light and color like a pearl or shell. All men are strange
beast-animals with their mysterious histories upon their faces and they stare
outward from the walls of their skin--their hair is fur--secretly far beneath all they
are animals and know it. Far underneath the actions they make, their animal
actions are still being performed as they walk and smile. . . (26)

McClure's essay, "The Mushroom," from the same volume, describes another drug
experiment into what the author calls the "Olympian universe" into which hallucinogenic
substances can offer a window (15). Although he notes that when using psilocybin-
mushrooms, one feels "utterly human and humane," McClure finds here too, a bridge to
the non-human world, and an acknowledgment of the "beastliness of mankind" (15). The
essay describes a long, mundane afternoon's simple activities--lunch, a drive, a trip to an
art museum--tumed into a dazzling psychedelic adventure through the use of the
mushroom. As he did under the influence of peyote, the poet experiences a vision of the
human body apart from the aesthetics of "Michelangelo and Da Vinci," but rather than
viewing them as "animals," as he did in the earlier peyote vision, he now views humans as
far simpler creatures: .

All of our notions of the human body's shape are wrong. We think it is a head

joined on a torso and sprouting arms and legs and genitals and breasts, but we're

138

wrong. It is more unified than that. It's all one total unity of protoplasm and our
ideas of its appearance are too much a matter of habit. (19)

As McClure and his companion enter a vacant church, the essay ends with one of the
poet's first experiments with what he calls "Beast Language," a guttural, growling form of
poetic "speech" divorced from human meaning and designed to further bridge the gap
between species. Standing at the church lectem, still high from the effects of the
mushrooms, McClure recalls, "I began to speak in the language of beasts" (21). The essay
ends with a poem describing the event, and exemplifying the poet's use of "Beast
Language":

By the stained glass windows
of dream hills and landscapes-I raised back my head
AND SANG
into the Olympian world, growling with the worshipping
and directing voice of Man-Beasts!
GROOOHOOOOR GROOOOOOOR SHARAKTAR
GRAHR GROOOOOOR GREEEER
SHROOOOOOOLOWVEEEEEEEEEE.
The white flecks of my spittle
floated like clumps of alyssum in the dimness
of the here, now, eternal, beauteous peace and reality. (21-22)12
N o doubt because of his life-long preoccupation with the natural world, nature seems
at the center of all of McClure's early drug experiments-even his experiments with drugs
which have not been traditionally seen as hallucinogenic or mystical. His recollections
concerning his first use of cocaine, for example, contained in his essay "Drug Notes,"
begin with a description of a late night ritual which would seem to preclude any topic

except nature from entering into the author's altered consciousness:

139

I had come from Walden Pond to New York City. In my hand was a new book
pressing an oak leaf from Thoreau's hearth. In the dim apartment a friend poured
water out of a bronze vial onto my head. The water was from the Ganges. . . . I
was very joyful, it was 3:00 in the morning, hot July, in New York City. Perhaps
the river water and Thoreau alone could have made me divinely high. (39)

The changes in perception which follow McClure's first cocaine experiment in some
ways parallel those which he had undergone while using peyote and psilocybin
mushrooms. What the poet now perceives as a facade of social construct falls away,
leaving in its absence a new vision, which in this case involves a view of wild nature
hidden beneath Manhattan:

All, all was reality. In the dark of morning by the East River I saw nature made
anew-was in any redwood forest of the West. The city becomes nature. The
streets of the lower East Side are pastoral and simple fields of summer haze. . . . I
saw through the rat's eyes. Grimy barges and ancient factories leaned into eternity.
If it shall be our nature to live this way we must know that Nature is here in a
strange garment. (40)

While much of McClure's early writing concerning nature seems to stem from an
intuitive, often Romantic, sense of empathy towards the natural world (an empathy which
was forcefully heightened by a series of intense drug experiences), his interest in biology
provided his imagination, and apparently his hallucinations, with a solid mooring.
McClure's essay, "Revolt," first published in Journal for the Protection of All Beings (a
journal which he co-edited along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and David Meltzer) and later
collected in Meat Science Essays, exemplifies the writer's use of biological imagery to
discuss philosophical, and even political issues facing humans. In the essay, McClure uses

the planarian worml3

as a biological "example of revolt" (57) living in "a smaller universe
of clearer beauty and simpler Good and Bad" (61). The author finds, in these small

worms, a "basic relevant meaning of revolt to us as many-celled meat-creatures," since the

140

planaria has the ability to "revolt" through asexual reproduction by dividing its head from
its body and forming two new beings. Humans, unable to simply split in half when the
head (or mind) and body are in discord, must choose other methods of revolt to maintain
the equilibrium between the high powered forces of the human intellect and the often
ignored and under-developed "subspirits" of the body (61). Too often in humans,
McClure notes, "The Head is Chief and the Body follows" (59). But, like Geryon in
McClure's earlier poem, the human form can only be seen as complete when viewed as a
whole composed of both head and body, and the "revolt" of the physical side of one's
nature (the biological self) in opposition to the powerful forces of the mind (the social self)
is an on-going part of this quest for this equilibrium:

At all times revolt is the search for health and naturality. Revolt is a desire to

experience normal physiological processes that give pleasure of fullness and

expansion (59).

"Politics is Dead and Biology is Here!"

The middle years of the 1960's marked a period of McClure's career in which he
placed more emphasis on drama than poetry. His most famous and most controversial
play, The Beard, was penned and first performed in 1965. The obscenity trials which
resulted from the production would occupy much of the writer's time and energy for the
next three years.

During this same period, McClure released a small but fascinating poetry chapbook
entitled Poisoned Wheat. Written as a protest against American involvement in the war in
Vietnam, the book's title refers to the wartime practice of poisoning grain fields in
Cambodia The poet mailed over 500 of the pamphlets to journalists and politicians whom
he felt might have some influence on American policy in Southeast Asia (King 394).

While in retrospect this seems a relatively naive and futile act, McClure's book was not

141

without its impact; the real importance, however, of Poisoned Wheat was not its small
stab at the American war machine, but in its radical merging of biology and politics.

In a poetic manifesto which would foreshadow much of the poet's writing for the next
three decades, McClure's Poisoned Wheat attempts to look for solutions to the world's
catastrophic problems outside the normal channels of politics and ideology. Although the
long poem deals ostensibly with the war in Southeast Asia, the war quickly becomes just
one symbolic symptom of a much larger malaise resulting from a corrupt society which
clings to political dogma rather than biological realities. McClure's response is to divorce
himself from the war and the misguided and cruel society which wages it:

I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE CREATED
AND / OR CAPTURED the CONTROL DEVICES
OF THE SOCIETY THAT SURROUNDS NIE!
I despise Society that creates
bundles of cruelties

and presses them en masse
against the helpless. (4)

McClure's staunch anti-war stance was a radical one in 1965, a time when opposition
to the Vietnam War was still largely smothered beneath Cold War rhetoric of the Iron
Curtain, the Domino Theory, and the rapidly accelerating arms race. But far more radical
is his insistence that we look beyond political rhetoric to the realization that the Vietnam
War was not about a political struggle between Communism and Democracy, but was
instead symptomatic of a much larger problem to which neither side possesses a solution.
McClure's poem attacks each of the world's prevailing political systems-capitalism,
communism and fascism-«for their failure to effectively address the problems of life on the
planet.

COMMUNISM WILL NOT WORK!

142

Communism will not create food in quantities
necessary for man's survival.
CAPITALISM IS FAILURE!

It creates overpopulation, slavery,

and starvation. (4-5)

Stating that "I have escaped politics," and that the "meanings of Marxism and Laissez
faire are extinct" (6), the poet rejects the political and social systems which have been
artificially imposed upon the biological realities of life. Just as he suggested in his earlier
essay "Revolt," as well as in the St. Geryon poems, the social. and intellectual forces of the
mind (in this case, the abstract notions of "politics" and "govemment") have repressed the
biological aspects of human life, often resulting in disastrous consequences.

In place of political issues, McClure points to the stark biological realities facing the
Earth-realities which have gone unaddressed by both Capitalism and Communism:

The population of the United States will double
by the year 2000. Certain South American
nations double each eighteen and twenty years.
There is no answer
but a multiplicity of answers created by men.
A large proportion of men are on the verge
OF STARVATION!
When density of creature to creature reaches
a certain degree
the ultra-crowded condition is a
biological sink. (6)
The results of the "biological sink" which McClure describes are starvation, exploitation of
world resources, and an increasingly repressive and war-like society which has already

fallen victim to its own suicide. The poem continues:

143

WESTERN SOCIETY HAS ALREADY DESTROYED ITSELF!
The culture is extinct! The last sentry
at the gate has pressed the muzzle to his
forhead and pulled the trigger!
The new civilization will not be communism!
POLITICS ARE AS DEAD AS THE CULTURE
they supported! (8)

In place of a culture governed by political theory, McClure offers what Allen Van
Newkirk has called a "bioculture" (22). In his brief 1975 analysis of McClure's work as it
relates to new frontiers of ecological thought, "The Protein Grail," Newkirk describes the
tenets of the bioculturist worldview:

. . . [B]iocultural thought . . . is distinguished by its emphasis on the wild realities
of the landscape as a field for discourse and action. Bioculturists assert a
biological interpretation of history; that the human situation is mammalian, that the
human mammal has over-domesticated itself and the landscape it utilizes, and that
wild nature contains economic and sensate possibilities overlooked by the inherited
civilization construct. (22)
With the poet's emphatic line, near the end of Poison Wheat, declaring that "NEW
SOCIETY WILL BE BIOLOGICAL!" (9), and further, that "POLITICS IS DEAD AND
BIOLOGY IS I-IERE!," McClure demands nothing short of a total reorganization of
society along these biolocultural lines. Tellingly, the long poem ends, as it began, with an
utterance of McClure's trademark beast language, a "Grahhr" symbolizing humanity's
mammalian pasta-and its mammalian future.

The Early Seventies: "The Shape of Energy"
In the late 1960's and early 70's, McClure spent a good deal of his time and effort on

prose works as well as drama. During this period, the content of McClure's writing

 

 

 

10 wri

144

became much more thoroughly anchored in biology, as his psychedelic experiences and his
early intuitive feelings of an interconnectedness with nature were bolstered by his reading
of several biological and ecological drinkers. "In the early seventies," he recalls in his
essay "The Shape of Energy," "the thinking of H.T. Odum, of Harold Morowitz in
biophysics, and of [Ramon] Margalef in ecological systems did much to clarify my
unorganized perceptions of the fifties and sixties" (Surface 95). 14 Feeling more certain
than ever "that it was no longer appropriate to continue the Descartian division of mind
and physiology" (Surface 88), McClure turned to science for support for his intuitions.

It was during this period that the poet began to view poetry as an "extension of
physiology" and further, to consider the possibility "that a poem could even become a
living bio-alchemical organism" (89):

The mind is inseparable from the body and too much energy has been spent
looking at the mind (whether shapely or not) 15 of poetry, and not enough at the
body. Similarly, the structure of poetry had often been looked at (though not
clearly), but such structure had never been looked at as an extension of physiology.
(Surface 89)
If the Cartesian split between mind and body can be unified, McClure argues, then
similarly, why couldn't a poem be seen as "an extension" of this unified "Bulk" of the
poet's mind and body: "extensions of myself as much as my hand or arm are extensions of
me" (Surface 89). Further, McClure began to envision a poem "that like a wolf or salmon .
. .could turn its head from side to side to test the elements and seek for breath. I wanted
to write a poem that could come to life and be a living Organism" (Surface 89).

As a way of understanding this "bio-alchemical" transfer of energy between poet and
poem, McClure began to investigate the writings of Ramon Margalef, particularly his 1968
work Perspectives in Ecological Theory. Margalef's section entitled "The Ecosystem as a
Cybernetic System" became especially important as "one of the wellsprings of exuberance"

in the poet's thought; Margalefs work became, for McClure, a way "to see energy in

145

action in the bundles and bodies that contain it" (Surface 92-3). Out of his reading of
Margalef, McClure began to view his own poems--and those of his colleagues in the Beat
circle--as biological extensions born of an "organic process" in which one life form (the
poet) transfers energy from "a powerful, complex, informed--ultimately stable substrate"
(the poet's life experience) to create yet another life form (the poem) (96). In McClure's
view, poets such as "Olson, Snyder, Creely, Duncan, Kerouac, Ginsberg, [and] Whalen"
(as well as, we are to presume, McClure himself) . . . ."develop the containment of
complex energy as they mature. They feed from the energy of the substrate around them
as it informs their senses. It is an organic process" (96). As McClure puts it in his essay,
"The Shape of Energy," in Scratching the Beat Surface, poetry thus becomes "an image of
the universe" in which:

Densified areas of greater organization [the poet] react with nebulous matter in

space [i.e. experience, ideas, inspiration] and are informed by it. There is further

densification [i.e. the creative process]. It reaches climax. It explodes [the poem

is created]-the material retains certain pieces of information and gains more

organization [the poem's content and structure] in the explosion--and so forth.

(94) 16

Another key scientific influence on McClure's work during the early seventies was

Howard T. Odum's study Environment, Power and Society (1971), a work which shares
Margalefs interest in the manner which energy functions in nature, and more importantly,
one which sparked the poet's interest in the notion of biological diversity. In Odum's
scientific text, McClure found ample justification for his earlier feelings of
interconnectedness with nature, since Odum's work often focused on the diverse and
inscrutable "species networ " which combine to form a healthy and stable eco-system. In
his section entitled "Complex and Beautiful Systems," in Environment, Power and Society,
Odum writes: "Nature reaches its most appealing manifestations of beauty, intricacy, and

mystery in the very complex systems: the tropical coral reef, the tropical rain forest, the

146

benthos-dominated marine systems on the west coasts of continents of temperate zones,
the bottom of the sea, and some ancient lakes of Africa" (quoted in Surface 83).

In the mysterious and interwoven fabric of such "complex and beautiful systems" as
Odum describes, McClure found the scientific support for the intuitive feelings of species
interconnectedness which he had been struggling with for more than twenty years. Here
was the "uncarved block" of Tao dressed in the garb of Western science--a scientific truth
as beautiful, all-encompassing, and terrifying as any peyote vision of the undersoul. All is
connected, Odum posited, but the message also carried with it a further caution, all must
be connected in order to ensure a healthy and stable environment.

McClure's poetry of the period bristles with a renewed intensity. No longer was it
simply enough to acknowledge humanity's kinship with nature's other life-forms, as the
poems in Hymns to Saint Geryon did. Odum's models of ecological systems made it clear
to McClure that not only were species interrelated, but also strongly interdependent; the
survival of one species--and indeed the entire eco-system--could very well hinge on
maintaining the diversity of other species within the system. Poems such as "Listen
Lawrence" from Fragments of Perseus (a piece aimed at converting poet Lawrence
Ferlinghetti from a Socialist to a biological world-view), approach the themes of
ecological interconnectedness and the need for a biocentric worldview with a reformer's
zeal, as he tells his friend:

OUR REAL BODIES ARE NOT DIVISABLE
from the bulks of our
brother and sister beings!
We're alarmed by the simultaneous extinction
and overcrowding of creatures (39)

The poem revisits the idea of a familial relationship between species first posited in
"Canticle" twenty years before-although the "cousins" of other species described in the
earlier poem have been brought closer into the family fold, and are now tellingly referred

147

to as "brother and sister beings." Just as "Poisoned Wheat" had done a decade earlier,
"Listen Lawrence" places the ultimate blame for the Earth's rapidly dwindling biological
diversity squarely on the shoulders of the world's political systems. What is needed to
fend off the loss of the planet's species, McClure argues, is not the Socialist reform which
Ferlinghetti favors, but a wholesale rejection of all politics: "ANY, ANY, AN Y /
POLITICS / is the POLITICS OF EXTINCTION!" (41):
We live near the shadow
AT THE NEAR EDGE OF THE SHADOW
((TOO NEAR! !))
of the extermination
of the diversity
of living beings. No need
to list their names
(Mountain Gorilla, Grizzly, Dune Tansy)
for it
is a too terrible

elegy to do so!

COMMUNISM,
CAPITALISM
SOCIALISM,

will do
NOTHING.
N OTI-HNG
to save the surge
of lifeuthe ten thousand

to the ten-thousandth, vast

148

Da Vincian molecule of which
ALL LIFE,
ALL LIFE
is a particle! (40)
The Eighties and Nineties: "Rebel Lions"

McClure's demand that his friend Ferlinghetti--and all humanity--"come out of the
closet-- / OUT OF THE CLOSET OF POLITICS / and into the light of their flesh and
bodies!" (Fragments 42) remains a constant in his message as the poet enters his sixties.
For McClure, the only means of survival is the rejection of political solutions, and the
embrace of a new, biologically informed, world-view. In his most recent collection of
poems, Rebel Lions (1991), McClure returns to the vision he has held since the Six
Gallery reading now nearly forty years ago. In a poem entitled "Mammal Life," the poet
again discusses the importance of this reconnection to what he has called the "biological
self":

The real mammal life
with its clear sensorium
and the wisdom of the gut
and the meat in the blackness
that stretches back in time
to the stars
through the bodies of strange
forefather beasts
is the powerful NEGATIVITY,
powerful negativity,
THAT WE USE FOR OUR REVOLT.
Mammal life is deep and luminous as the belly of a shark
or the white fungi on cedar trunks

149

in the cool rainforest 17

AND
it
is
me (109)

Acknowledging the "biological self," embracing humankind's mammalian "wisdom of
the gut," and envisioning the universal "undersoul" are the means of McClure's revolt
against the political forces he sees as leading to ecological catastrophe--and also his means
of reconnecting to the natural world. As he said in a recent interview, his is not a poetry
which provides the answers to the problems plaguing the environment; instead, he sees his
role as a visionary, aimed at providing "a new path" away from politics and towards
biology (Lighting 6). In his poem entitled "Villanelle for Gary Snyder," from his 1975
collection Jaguar Skies, McClure aligns himself (and supposedly, Snyder) with others
who he identifies as revolutionary visionaries:

IN TURN WE GIVE FLESH TO THE REVOLUTION
like Che,18 Darwin, and Francis Crick
creating visions not solution. (68)

Not surprisingly, McClure finds two of his intellectual compatriots among scientific
visionaries Charles Darwin and Francis Crick--the theorist who developed the concept of
species evolution, and the Nobel Prize winning scientist who first shed light on the double
helix structure of the DNA molecule. For above all, McClure is a poet concerned with
science, a poet whose knowledge and interest in biological and ecological issues provide
him with a rich scientific "substrate" which allows him to write in what his friend Gary
Snyder calls "a specific biological / wild / unconscious / fairytale / new / scientific /
imagination form."19

McClure's admiration of visionary scientists like Francis Crick is not unrequited. Crick
has been an admirer and close reader of McClure's poetry since the mid 1950's, when he

150

first discovered a copy of "Peyote Poem" in a San Francisco book shop, and he has paid
tribute to the poet's treatment of scientific issues in his essay "The Poetry of Michael
McClure: A Scientist's View." Unlike many other poets writing today who "are rather
ignorant of science" and even hostile to it, Crick notes that: "Michael McClure is so at
home in the fantastic world that science has conjured out of ourselves and our
surroundings . . . that he takes it all in stride" (23). Crick closes his homage to McClure
and his scientifically based poetry with a final tribute which can leave little doubt that he is
indeed a poet of science:
The worlds in which I myself live, the private world of personal reactions, the
biological world (animals and plants and even bacteria chase each other through
the poems), the world of the atom and molecule, the stars and the galaxies, are all
there; and in between, above and below, stands man, the bowling mammal,
contrived out of "meat" by chance and necessity. [H were a poet I would write

like Michael McClure--if only I had his talent. (24)

151

NOTES
1 Although the Beats have often been wrongly labeled as anti-intellectual and, at times,
anti-scientific, McClure is not alone, among Beat poets, in his use of scientific sources; his
friend Gary Snyder has also made extensive use of the scientific disciplines of biology,
ecology, and anthropology. See James I. McClintock's excellent discussion of Snyder's
scientific sources in "Gary Snyder: Posthumanist," collected in Nature 's Kindred Spirits:
Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder.
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994) 109-28. Also, see John Elder's discussion
of Snyder’s use of science in Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985) 185-206.
2 Among his many and diverse publication credits, McClure proudly lists "Mercedes
Benz," a humorous critique of America's quest for material goods, which he co-wrote with
Joplin, and which Joplin later recorded and made popular.
3 Ferlinghetti's remarks are contained in his introduction to McClure's first book of essays:
Meat Science Essays (1963): 3.
4 McClure's poem may have been intended as a response, or a compliment, to Theodore
Roethke's poem of the same name (included in his 1941 collection Open House). Both
poems utilize images of bone as a means of depicting human limitations and mortality.
See: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. New York: Anchor Press, 6.
5 The contrast with Emerson's notion of the transcendental "Over-Soul," which he refers
to as "the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related: the eternal
ONE," is implicit in this passage, yet McClure makes no direct mention of it until his 1985
collection of journal musings, Specks. See McClure's Lighting the Corners: 108, and "The
Over-Soul," in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of
America, 1983. 383-400.

152

6 As evidence of this "reaching out from science to poetry," McClure notes that Nobel
laureate Francis Crick, one of the scientists who first shed light on the double helix
structure of the DNA molecule, quoted from McClure's early "Peyote Poem" in his 1958
study, Of Molecules and Men:

THIS IS THE POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE

we smile with it (Hymns 42)

See Crick's tribute to McClure in "The Poetry of Michael McClure: A Scientist's View."
Margins 18 (1975): 23-24.
7 "Amphioxus": a primitive chordate organism, also known as the lancet. "Rotifer": a
minute, multicellular aquatic organism of the phylum Rottfera, possessing a wheellike ring
of cilia--also known as "wheel animalcule." "Arrow-worms": small, slender marine worms
of the phylum Chaetognatha, having prehensile bristles on each side of the mouth.
8 Poet Ed Dorn, commenting on the difficulty of making meaning from McClure's poetry,
has noted that readers must approach the work using biology as a key: ". . . contact, if it is
ever made," Dom writes, "is made with all the biological circuits plugged in" (Views 88).
9 Omette Coleman: (b. 1930) alto saxophone player and key member of the "Free Jazz"
school of the early 1960's.
10 See Allen Ginsberg's poem "Wales Visitation," a meditation on nature inspired by one
of the poet's many experiences with LSD, contained in Planet News: 1961-1967. See also
Clayton Eshleman's "Imagination's Body and Comradely Display," in Gary Snyder:
Dimensions of a Life, for an account of an LSD vision which provided the poet "an
interchange between inner and outer worlds" (241). The most complete discussion of the
use of hallucinogens among Beat writers can be found in Jay Stevens's Storming Heaven:
LSD and the American Dream: 100-120. LSD advocate Timothy Leary also recalls his
early hallucinogenic drug experiments with Ginsberg, Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, and Peter
Orlovsky in his 1983 autobiography, Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an
Era: 45-70.

153

11 Always the consummate naturalist, McClure's second sentence is "Peyote is, of course,
the cactus Lophophora williamsii--a small, spineless, flat-topped plant found mainly in the
vicinity of Laredo and Northern Sonora" (Sun'ace 5).

12 In the years to come, McClure would continue to make extensive use of "beast
language" in his work, including his first play entitled "! The F east! " (1960) written and
performed entirely in this invented idiom. A 1960 stage production of the play at San
Francisco's Batman Gallery featured a cast which included, among others, Robert
LaVigne, Ron Loewinsohn, David Meltzer, Philip Whalen, Joanna McClure and Kirby
Doyle (King 389). McClure's 1964 collection, Ghost T antras, includes ninety-nine poems
written in beast language.

13 A species, according to McClure, of "small flat black worms with triangular heads that
live in icy streams." Since they possess simple nervous systems, as well as eyes, and
utilize a simple process of digestion, McClure calls them "our farthest close—cousins"
(Meat Science Essays 57).

14 Gary Snyder has also acknowledged the influence which H.T. Odum and Margalef had
on his developing work. See Appendix B.

15 Probably a comment on Allen Ginsberg's dictum "Mind is shapely, art is shapely."

16 Others within the Beat circle also seemed in tune with McClure's view of poetry as
energy transfer. Gary Snyder calls a sequence of short poems in Left Out in the Rain
"Tiny Energies," a phrase taken from H.T. Odum's Environment, Power and Society.
McClure's good friend Richard Brautigan took a less scientific and more whimsical
approach to the question of poetry as an organic process of energy transfer with his
Please Plant This Book, a collection of poetry broadsides printed on packets of vegetable
seeds.

17 McClure notes that the "cool rainforest" he refers to here is Oregon's Olympic

Peninsula. Rebel Lions 115.

154

18 Che Guevara: 1928-67. Cuban revolutionary who was killed while taking part in a

popular revolt there.

19 Snyder's remarks come in an interview with Peter Chowka in The Real Work:
Interviews & Talks 1964- 79: 124. Snyder mentions McClure as one of a handful of

American poets whom he reads with interest.

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VI. CONCLUSION:
OFF THE ROAD

"And this is the age of Triumph of Beatnik Messages of Social
Foment Coded into the Clatter of the Mass Media over
20 Years Ago! Ha! Ha! Ha! How do we fall down to salute
with peals of Heh heh hehhh! That the Beats created change
without a drop of blood!"
Ed Sanders, "The Age" (1975)

"I know somethin' good's come out of all this!"
Japhy Ryder, in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Burns (1958)

"Range after range of mountains

Year after year after year.

I am still in love."
Gary Snyder, "On Climbing the Sierra Matterhorn Again
After Thirty-one Years" (1986)

While the four writers I have considered in this studquary Snyder, Jack Kerouac,
Lew Welch, and Michael McClure-present the most clearly defined examples of the Beat
penchant for a reconnection with the natural world, there were many other artists
connected with the Beat Movement who also found nature and ecology among their
central themes. The list of poets and novelists associated with the Beat Movement who
sought a closer connection to the natural world is a long and prestigious one. It includes

such writers as Ken Kesey, whose second, and arguably best, novel, Sometimes a Great

155

156

Nation (1964) examines the struggle of a family of loggers in the Pacific Northwest. Even
the most hardened, cynical and urban novelist in the Beat cadre, William S. Burroughs,
has at times demonstrated a yearning for a return to a more pastoral--and even, at times,
more primitive—existence. His slim 1963 volume, The Yage Letters (a book he co-wrote
with Allen Ginsberg), details his adventures as he travels through the jungles and tribal
villages of Central America in search Indian shamans who hold the key to the powerful
hallucinogenic plant Yage. The result is American literature's first psychedelic travel
narrative.

The list might also important include poets at the fringes of this discussion of the Beat
movementnpoets such as Amiri Baraka: who as Leroi Jones penned a number of powerful
anti-urban poems with ecological themes, such as his "A Contract for the Destruction and
Rebuilding of Patterson" (1964). Buddhist writer (1. a. levy, the nonconformist Cleveland
bioregionalist poet of the 1960's should be included,1 as should Joan Kyger, a poet who
critic Michael Davidson has seen as one of a handful of female writers central to the Beat

Movement.2

Kyger has also long concerned herself with nature as poetic subject matter--
though not to the extent as her ex-husband, Gary Snyder. Robert Creely, a poet
associated with both the Black Mountain School and the early Beat Movement, should
also be mentioned; many of his early poems, such as "Desultory Days," exhibit what his
friend Michael McClure has termed "awareness of living environment, oneness of time,
deepening of consciousness, and myriad-mindedness" (Surface 34).3 The work of three
writers of the Beat circle, however-~Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Kirby Doyle-
deserve more than just a cursory inclusion in this list; indeed, all three are no doubt
deserving of lengthier discussion in some future study.

Allen Ginsberg, the poet seen by many as the central figure of the Beat Movement
since its inception, came to his interest in nature and ecology somewhat later than some of

4

his literary colleagues. While many of Ginsberg's earlier poems, such as "How!" (1955)

and "Death to Van Gogh's Ear" (included in Kaddish, 1961) show pronounced anti-urban

157

and anti-technological tenancies, the poet's work refrains from an open embrace of nature
until the middle years of the 1960's, when his interest in an ecological view of the world
was crystallized by his use of LSD. Ginsberg's ecological breakthrough occurred in July
1967 while the poet was on a tour of the Black Mountain region of Wales near the
Llanthony Valley. Following a visit to the ruins of Tintem Abbey--the site of
Wordsworth's famous ode-Ginsberg spent an idyllic afternoon roaming the nearby valleys
under the influence of LSD (Miles 398). The result was a poem entitled "Wales
Visitation," a work which Ginsberg has said "mediates between psychedelic inspiration
and humane ecology." 5
"Wales Visitation" resonates with the poet's reverence and delight in the new-found

perspective on nature offered, ostensibly, by the drug, but more deeply, by the unifying
concepts of ecology:

Bardic, 0 Self, Visitacione, tell naught

but what seen by one man in a vale (in Albion,
of the folk, whose physical sciences end in Ecology,
the wisdom of earthly relations (Planet News 139)

Ginsberg's lyrical description of his wholistic view of the landscape builds in intensity as
the poem continues, shifting from a panoramic scale to a microscopic view in the course
of one stanza:

A solid mass of Heaven, mist-infused, ebbs through the vale,

a wavelet of Immensity, lapping gigantic through Llanthony Valley,
the length of all England, valley upon valley under Heaven's ocean
tonned with cloud hang,
«Heaven balanced on a grassblade. (140)
Finally this new vision of balance and wholeness becomes overwhelming, as the poet

openly embraces the Earth as "Mother" in a moment of ecological epiphany: "Fall on the
ground, 0 great Wetness, 0 Mother, No harm on thy body!":

158

I lay down mixing my beard with the wet hair of the mountainside,
smelling the brown vagina-moist ground, harmless,
tasting the violet thistle-hair, sweetness --
One being so balanced, so vast, that its softest breath
moves every floweret in the stillness of the valley floor, (141)

As the poem concludes, the tone shifts from the dramatic breakthrough of
consciousness to a more relaxed, meditative state in which the poet attempts to digest
what he calls "the vision of the great One" (142). As the effects of Ginsberg's drug vision
begin to leave him, they leave behind a scene of lone meditation which recalls the closure
of Lew Welch's earlier poem, "Wobbly Rock. "

Crosslegged on a rock in dusk rain,
rubber booted in soft grass, mind moveless,
breath trembles in white daisies by the roadside,
Heaven breath and my own symmetric
Airs wavering through antlered green fern
drawn in my navel, same breath as breathes thru Capel-Y-an,
Sounds of Aleph and Aum
through forests of gristle,
my skull and Lord Hereford's Knob6 equal,
All Albion one. (142)

While Ginsberg's first stirrings of ecological awareness may have begun with the
psychedelic experience described in "Wales Visitation," his interest in nature and ecology
remained a constant in his writing long after the drug's effects had worn off. In a poetic
career which has now spanned five decades, Ginsberg has been the Beat movement's most
visible member, and has often been elevated (at times against his will) to the role of
countercultural icon and spokesperson. A writer and cultural critic who has been at the

center of numerous political causes, Ginsberg brought a wholistic, planetary consciousness

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to a number of issues facing America in the sixties and seventies: the Vietnam War,
censorship, sexual liberation, and political repression. It is not surprising, then, that he
should add concern for environmental issues to this list.

Ginsberg's work from the period of the late sixties and seventies, as evidenced by
poems from collections such as Planet News (1968), The Fall of America, Poems of These
States (1973), and Plutonian Ode, Poems 1977-80, display the same anti-technocratic
fervor which had been present in the poet's breakthrough poem, "Howl." But in these
later pieces the rage against industrial America is informed by ecological precepts as well
as a new awareness of nature which resulted from Ginsberg's withdrawal into the pastoral
landscape of a run-down 90 acre farm near Cherry Valley in upstate New York. Here,
with his partner Peter Orlovsky, the poet took up residence in 1968, beginning a lengthy
experiment in rural living and organic farming (Miles 412).7 Farm life offered Ginsberg a
respite from the turmoil of the decade, just as it did for the many thousands of members of
the sixties' counterculture who fled the cities for rural communes across America. His
1968 poem, "Ecologue,"8 makes it clear that, for Ginsberg, the turn towards nature was in
part a political refuge from the kind of police state envisioned by Kerouac earlier in the
decade: ‘

Eldridge Cleaver exiled w / bodyguards in Algiers
Leary sleeping in an iron cell,
John Sinclair a year jailed in Marquette 9
Each day's paper more violent-
War outright shameless bombs
Indochina to Minneapolis--
a knot in my belly to read between lines,
lies, beatings in jail-
short breath on the couch--

desolation at dawn in bed--

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Wash dishes in the sink, drink tea, boil an egg--
brood over Cities' suffering millions two
hundred miles away
down the oilslicked, gerrn-Chernicaled
Hudson River (Collected Poems 544)
Although certainly less well known than Allen Ginsberg, poet Philip Whalen shares his
friend's interests in both ecology and Eastern thought. A Reed College classmate of both
Lew Welch and Gary Snyder, and one of the five readers at the 1955 Six Gallery Reading
in San Francisco, Whalen's early poems, like those of Welch,combine the sparse imagist
style of William Carlos Williams with an appreciation for nature and a sharp wit. His
poem "Further Notice" provides a good example:
I can't live in this world
And I refuse to kill myself
Or let you kill me

The dill plant lives, the airplane
My alarm clock, this ink

I won't go away

I shall be myself-
Free, a genius, an embarrassment

Like the Indian, the buffalo

Like Yellowstone National Park. (On Bear's Head 45-46)
Whalen's interest in nature and ecology date back to the period in the mid 1950's when
he, like several others in the Beat Movement, worked as a fire lookout in the remote

Skagit River region of Washington state. The poems from his days in the Washington

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wilderness, such as "Sourdough Mountain Lookout" (1956), like much of Snyder's Riprap
and many of Welch's Hermit Poems, portray the experience of the isolated writer
gradually reentering and becoming part of the natural world, as in this catalogue of field
observations from the lookout tower:

Ptarmigan hunt for bugs in the snow

Bear peers through the wall at noon

Deer crowd up to see the lamp

A mouse nearly drowns in the honey

I see my bootprints mingle with the deer-foot

Bear-paw mule-shoe in the dusty path to the privy (0n Bear's Head 47)

Philip Whalen's work, more so than any of his peers', is a poetry which focuses on the
external landscape in conjunction with the inner workings of the human mind. Merging
with the poet's own voice in "Sourdough Mountain Lookout" are the remembered voices
of Heraclitus, Empedocles, Buddha, and the poet's own father--voices which add an
intellectual and historical grounding to Whalen's wilderness observations, and which
provide a window into the poet's moments of meditative reflection, as the mind examines
itself, searching for the poet's place in Western history--and in the natural world:

Everything else they hauled across the Atlantic
Scattered and lost in the buffalo plains
Among these trees and mountains

From Duns Scotus10

to this page
A thousand years (On Bear's Head 47-48)

Although "Sourdough Mountain Lookout" takes its title and its setting from the actual
locale of Whalen's Forest Service post, the poem is steeped, as is so much of Whalen's
work, in the Buddhist concept that the natural world is illusory. "What we see of the
world is the mind's / Invention . . ." he writes (0n Bear's Head 51). As Whalen explained

to me in a recent interview, his nearly forty years of study of Buddhist texts have led him

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to a paradoxical view of the natural world which attempts to show compassion for all of

nature while at the same time denying its actual existence:
As I understand it the Buddhist approach to the natural world is paradoxical. On
the one hand life and the world are both impermanent and illusory. The world and
the self are one. Contrariwise one must take great care to give up all activity
which creates attachment to the self and to the world, to live in Enlightenment as
much as possible and to be of help to all beings. Delusion and Enlightenment
cannot exist independently. You are obliged to save the world and everything in
it--not only this world but the myriad worlds which also exist.

For Whalen, who since the mid 1980's has lived as a Zen priest working with both the
Santa Fe and San Francisco Zen Centers, the world is illusory and impermanent, yet
deserving of an abiding and all-encompassing love:

The sun itself! Dying

Pooping out, exhausted

Having Produced brontosaurus, Heraclitus
This rock, me,

To no purpose

I tell you anyway (as a kind of loving) . . .
Flies & other insects come from miles around
To listen

I also address the rock, the heather,

The Alpine fir (0n Bear's Head 48-49)

One of the most intriguing voices of the West Coast Beat period is also one of the
least well known. Poet Kirby Doyle, a writer who has worked on the fringe of obscurity
for more than three decades, has much in common with his friend and mentor, Lew
Welch-especially in regards to nature. Like Welch, Doyle's writing never garnered the

critical attention and mass appeal which many of his friends and associates in the Beat

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Movement enjoyed. And like Welch, he has at times experimented with a life lived close
to the natural world; he spent the twelve years from 1968 to 1980 in the California
wilderness, living alone near Mt. Tamalpais northwest of San Francisco (Foye 167).

The years he spent apart from civilization provided Doyle with what he has called "the
green key" (quoted on Foye 167) to his later work--a fresh and revitalized understanding
of nature as the central pivot around which all else revolves. Doyle's writing since his
return to civilization in 1980 has focused almost entirely on nature as the source of
American language and culture. Doyle's hundred page poem, "Pre American Ode," is an
attempt at rediscovering "Pre," the natural essence which Raymond Foye has described as
"the prime matter that existed prior to man—it is destiny--a genius inherent in nature, in
the landupreexisting" (167):

thy Genius

find thy tongue,

thy language,

thy speech;

find within thyself America,

America.

For America,

thou art th' West. (quoted in Foye 167)

Like Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End, Doyle's "Pre American Ode" is an
expansive and multi-faceted work, with diverse references to history, classical poetry, and
the sciences; the lyrics of Sapho, the tenets old Norse law, and the scientific discoveries of
American horticulturist Luther Burbank are all woven into a complex poem--a poem
whose subject and source is nature:

Nature, Burbank--11
freedom, genius,

vault & lock-

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Muir & Jack London

Th' American--

primordial verse & sacred!
Here American Earth
establishing no god,

just Nature, & nature (quoted in Foye 167)

The Beat Goes On: Voices of the Second Generation

Given the massive appeal of Beat writers among American youth of the 1950's and
60's, it is not surprising that the Movement had a broad stylistic and thematic influence on
subsequent generations of the nation's poets and novelists. 12 A number of writers, too
young to be fully involved with the inception of the Beat Movement in the mid 1950's,
nonetheless identified with the Beats, and in some cases, became their legitimate literary
heirs: poets such as Charles Upton, Antler, Robert Hass, Gary Soto (and some would
argue, "Language" poets such as Lyn Hejinian). In many cases, these younger, or second
generation, Beat writers shared the same veneration for the natural world expressed by
Kerouac, Welch, Snyder and McClure a decade earlier. Of this group of second
generation Beat writers, Richard Brautigan and Ed Sanders stand out as important links
between the Beat era and the counterculture of the 1960's-especially in regards to nature.

Sometimes referred to as "the last Beat," poet and novelist Richard Brautigan was an
integral part of San Francisco's free-spirited literary scene of the 1960's. A friend and
associate of Lew Welch, Robert Creely, Jack Spicer, and others in the Bay Area arts
community, Brautigan shared his close friend Michael McClure's fascination with nature
and landscape, but lacked McClure's exuberant vision of ecological wholeness. 13 Instead,
for Brautigan, nature--particularly American nature--was in a fallen state and showed little
or no hope of revival. A great deal of Brautigan's writing, as John Cooley has noted,

expresses "through irony, visions of pastoral loss, if not despair" (10). In Brautigan's

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America, technology and greed had commodified or destroyed what was left of the wild
landscape, and the notion that post-modem humanity could ever be reunited with the
natural world becomes the stuff of dark humor, as in his poem, "All Watched Over by
Machines of Loving Grace" from his 1968 collection The Pill versus the Springfield Mine
Disaster:

I like to think (and

the sooner the better!)

of a cybernetic meadow

where mammals and computers

live together in mutually

programming harmony

like pure water

touching clear sky.

I like to think

(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers

with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology

where we are free of our labors

166

and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,

and all watched over

by machines of loving grace. (1)

The loss of the wild and the pastoral is also the subject of Brautigan's best known
work, the quirky and elegiac novel Trout Fishing in America. The novel, which quickly
attained a cult following among American youth after its publication in 1967, is an offbeat
yet poignant elegy for the spirit of wild American nature, which Brautigan personifies as a
mythical—though almost fully developed--literary character called "Trout Fishing in
America" Brautigan's novel fairly wallows in grief over the fallen state of the natural
world since the death of "Trout Fishing in America," who dies early in the novel, the
victim of asphyxiation in a polluted stream (33). A maudlin humor pervades his
description of the ruined and commodified landscape (one chapter is entitled "A Walden
Pond for Winos"), culminating in the darkly hilarious chapter entitled "The Cleveland
Wrecking Yard," in which all of nature, including an entire trout stream eco-system, is
reduced to second-hand sale at a grimy salvage yard. When the novel's protagonist
inquires about purchasing the stream, the sales-clerk responds that he's selling it "by the
foot":

"We're selling the waterfalls separately of course, and the trees and birds,
flowers, grass and ferns we're also selling extra. The insects we're giving away
free with a minimum purchase of ten feet of stream."

"How much are you selling the stream for?" I asked.

"Six dollars and fifty-cents a foot," he said. "That's for the first hundred feet.
After that it's five dollars a foot.

"How much are the birds?" I asked.

167

"Thirty-five cents apiece," he said. "But of course they're used. We can't
guarantee anything." (104)

At the same time Brautigan was working and writing on the West Coast, New York
City poet Ed Sanders, another of the younger voices of the Beat Movement, was also
turning his talents--and his sense of humor--towards preserving the natural world.
Arguably the most political of the writers within the Beat Movement, Sanders has enjoyed
a long and very colorful career as both poet and radical political activist. As the owner of
New York City's radical Peace Eye Bookstore, the founding editor of the spirited avant
garde journal Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts (whose motto was "Total Assault on the
Culture")14, and the driving force behind the proto-punk / political folk-rock band, The
Fugs, Ed Sanders has long used his art as a political forum-«first for the nuclear
disarmament and anti-Vietnam War causes, and more recently, for the environmental
movement.

Since fleeing New York City after his wife was the victim of a mugging in 1974,
Sanders has lived a rural existence near Woodstock, New York where he has been active
in both local and national environmental causes. As the editor of The Sanders Report, a
newsletter focusing on the region's environmental, social, and political concerns (Peck
319-20), Sanders is a poet who, like Gary Snyder, is intimately involved with the issues
surrounding bioregionalism and the love of "place," and his poems, such as "At Century's
End," often deal with planetary environmental issues—such as global warminguby focusing
closely on their local impact:

In the
100 years

of warming

the birch grove
hobbles

168

across Route 28

& up the valley

toward the

Arctic Circle (Hymn 57)
At times, however, Sanders's poetic voice leaps beyond the role of chronicler of
environmental destruction, as the poet displays an intimate, at times overtly sexual,
relationship with nature. Poems such as "Spiritual Topography," from his 1993 collection
Hymn to the Rebel Cafe, often reflect an eroticized landscape similar to that which is
evidenced in so much of Snyder's poetry:

Blend your

spirit

into
the
rush

of your river

Let the

whirls of your brain
fit in with

the contours

of the ground you love

for
when the curves
of your spirit

flow out to embrace

169

the curves of the land

That's
love
That's
habitat
That's

the kissing

of landforms

with your soul. (27)

Often, Sanders blends this love of his local landscape with a much more pragmatic
message-one which warns his readers about the hidden costs of American industrialism,
and which calls for a reexamination of the nation's environmental policies. "The worst
drug," Sanders writes, in his poem "At Century's End," "is the culture of greed,
demolishment / & destruction of open land" (Hymn 53). For more than thirty years, the
primary target for the poet's scorn has been the American nuclear industry and its use of
nuclear materials for power, weapons, and in "harmless" industrial applications. 15
Sanders's poem, "The Chain," from his collection Thirsting for Peace in a Raging
Century, examine the long-term impact of a tiny chip of radioactive material on his
community:

For lS-thousand years
the plutonium

in the smoke detector

lay in the Woodstock dump

till the day

170

the grade-blader scraped it out
& smashed it to chiplets
the chipmunk pulled

to the pouch of his cheeks

& during
the next 200

years

it caused

6 cancers

in a skunk

a crow a deer

a dog a dog

and Johnny McQuaife (Thirsting 220)
From his position near Woodstock, Ed Sanders continues to write and agitate for the
cause of nature, making a reputation for himself as one of the most environmentally
conscious and politically vocal members of the Beat Movement. As the title of his
collected works indicates, Sanders is poet who is, like many of his friends and colleagues
within the Beat circle, "Thirsting for peace"--and environmental justice--"in a raging

century."

From Six Gallery to Earth Day--and Beyond
The decade and a half between the Six Gallery reading in 1955 and the fust Earth Day
celebration in 1970 saw a monumental change in American attitudes towards nature. The

new decade of the seventies brought a new ecological awareness to the nation, as well as a

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new sense of respect for nature. Interest in outdoor sports--camping, backpacking,
fishing, and birdingnwas at an all-time high, as Americans returned to the wild in record
numbers. Membership in conservation and environmental groups, such as the Audubon
Society and the Sierra Club, skyrocketed. New environmental legislation burst forth from
Congress at a pace unparalleled in American history: the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Wild
and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Federal Water Pollution
Control Act of 1972, and finally, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (Lyon, Lande 14).

American readers reflected this new green awareness with a renewed interest in classic
works which explored the complex relationship between humanity and the rest of the
natural world. Henry Thoreau's neglected 1854 classic, Walden, underwent a rediscovery
by American youth-in large part because of its message of non-conformity appealed to
the new counterculture, but also because of the author's urgent appeal for a reconnection
with nature. The essays of John Muir enjoyed a similar revival. Aldo Leopold's A Sand
County Almanac, a book which had enjoyed a relatively small readership since its
publication in 1949, now began to sell steadily as readers became more and more receptive
to its author's ecological reworking of the traditional Western view of nature, which
insisted that humans view themselves as "a plain member and citizen" of "the land
community" rather than the "conqueror" of it (240).

Often marginalized in the first half of the twentieth century because of its "quaint" and
"romantic" subject matter, writing which focused on nature began to enter the American
literary mainstream in the 1960's, beginning with Rachel Carson's 1962 warning of the
ecological hazards of pesticides, Silent Spring. Six years later, Edward Abbey published
his humorous, beautiful, and often vitriolic tribute to the wild lands of the Southwest,
Desert‘Solitaire. 16

In the 1970's, the groundswell of public interest in ecology went hand in hand with a
renaissance in American nature writing, as ecology, and the newest catch-phrase, "the

environment," found their way into dozens of best selling works. The decade saw the rise

172

to popularity of a score of new writers who focused on the natural world, among them
Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Edward Hoagland, Jim Harrison, and Peter
Matthiessen. In a manner unrivaled since the "nature craze" of the early twentieth century,
Americans were expressing a renewed interest in nature and environmental literature.
Evidence suggests that Beat writers like Snyder, McClure, Ginsberg, and Kerouac
may have played an important role in this shift in American attitudes towards nature--
especially among American youth. The widespread appeal of Ginsberg's poetry, and even
more importantly, Kerouac's early novels, gave hundreds of thousands of American youths
what may have been for many their first exposure to a literature which questioned the
values of American industrialism and took a positive stance towards the natural world.
While it is difficult to trace the impact of a particular novel or body of poetry on the
national mood, there is a tremendous amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest that a great
many men and women who would become environmental activists in the seventies
received their first jolt of environmental awareness from Kerouac's fiction, and that the
very real "rucksack revolution" of the 1960's prophesied in The Dharma Bums may well
have been made up of young people who carried a copy of the novel in their pack. "I once
had a friend who went around the world (abt. 1959) . . . ," wrote Lew Welch, "who said
that everyone he met on the road had got started through either Kerouac or Alan
Watts." 17 A first-hand account of the kind of transformation Welch describes comes from
Gary Lawless, a poet and Earth First! activist from Maine:
In 1967 I found a book on the rack in Palmer's Stationary. The cover blurb
claimed it was "The book that turned on the hippies--by the man who launched the
hippie world, the daddy of the swinging, psychedelic generation." The book was,
yes, The Dharma Bums. I had not heard of Jack Kerouac and didn't know what
the dharma was, but from the first page I had a new community, a new identity. I

had joined the "rucksack revolution." (122)

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Similarly, socio-linguist Suzie Scollon recalls her own 1960's rucksack odyssey,
traveling on foot through the forests of the Pacific Northwest "under the influence of The
Dharma Burns" and its hero Gary Snyder, the man Kerouac had deemed "a great new hero
of American culture." Her narrative indicates that, by the mid 60's, the Beat penchant for
a reconnection with the natural world, as expressed by Kerouac and Snyder, had already
become internalized as a part of the counterculture's oral tradition:

As I traveled around the continent with very little money, cooking rice and lentils
by Primus or campfire, I was playing out a trend started by Snyder and others
decades before. It was a tradition passed on largely by word of mouth. . . .

Snyder's contribution to culture was only beginning to be felt, vaguely, by a
generation dissatisfied by the postwar rush for prosperity--and a generation
suspicious of the old culture found in books. I suspect Snyder's influence was
spread as much by readings and talk as by print. (422)

Snyder's poetry and essays--whi1e not as popular in the early years of the Beat
Movement as the work of Ginsberg or Kerouac--no doubt ultimately proved even more
influential. Commenting on the impact of Beat literature on American attitudes
concerning nature, Snyder recently wrote:

Some of these Beat writings were available in the early days of the environmental
movement. My own work certainly contributed to the post-1970 rise of the
movement called "environmentalism." Myths and Texts was, and perhaps
continues to be, the only contemporary poem that addresses clearcutting and
logging in any detail. And then the "Four Changes" 18 which was widely circulated
as a booklet before being included in Turtle Island. Earth House Hold (1969) has
a number of ecological points to make. (mail interview)

The early writings of Snyder, McClure, Ginsberg, and others within the Beat
Movement have had repercussions far beyond the transformation of individual readers,

they have also been cited as a key source for environmental ethicists and philosophers such

174

as Arne Naess, Bill Devall and George Sessions--the chief proponents of the
environmental philosophy known as Deep Ecology. In a 1974 interview, Snyder recalled
that a central--although too often unaniculated--Beat complaint was that the industrial
America of the 1950's was dangerously out of touch with the natural world. "You must
remember," he said:
. . . that we [the Beats] never really articulated what we wanted except like what I
recall articulating in several conversations with Allen [Ginsberg] and Jack
[Kerouac] and possibly with Phil [Whalen] was a critique of the national state as
an unworkable entity, for one thing, and a critique of industrial civilization as being
self-destructive because of its lack of understanding of the nature of biological
systems. I remember working that out in the 505. (McKenzie "Moving the
World" 10)

The vision which Snyder recalls "working . . . out in the 50s" with other Beat writers,
is a rough, but remarkably accurate, thumbnail sketch of the Deep Ecology perspective
developed in the 1970's by the Norwegian environmentalist and philosopher Arne Naess.
Deep Ecologists, like Naess and his American counterparts Bill Devall and George
Sessions, take as their primary goal "Living as if nature mattered," and like the Beats, they
offer a critique of what they call "the dominant, modern worldview"-a critique which,
among other things, places more emphasis on biological, ecological, and community
concerns than on economic, industrial, or technological "progress" (Devall and Sessions
69).

The Deep Ecology agenda for the future of the Earth stresses harmony with nature
(rather than dominance over it), "biospecies equality" (rather than a view of nature as
human resource), and the adoption of reasonable limits on population growth and
consumption (rather than "material / economic growth for a growing human population"),
and bioregionalism (rather than a falsely imposed central government) (69).19 In addition

to these practical tenets, Deep Ecology also stresses a reworking of humankind's

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philosophical and spiritual framework in regards to nature, by encouraging exploration of
Native American and Far Eastern belief systems such as Zen and Tao.

In the twenty years since the Deep Ecology perspective has emerged, it has become
perhaps the single most powerful and pervasive philosophical foundation for the
environmental movementuboth in the United States and abroad. Devall and Sessions, the
two philosophers who have done the most to articulate the stance of Deep Ecology to
American audiences, have long credited Beat writers--especially Gary Snyder--as an
important source of the new relationship with nature which they champion. Their text, a
compendium on both the sources and the practical applications of the movement, entitled,
Deep Ecology: Living as If Nature Mattered, is dedicated to Arne Naess and:

Gary Snyder
poet, mountaineer,
student of Eastern and Native American traditions,
teacher, reinhabitant of the western slope, Sierra Nevada (v)
The authors' tribute to Snyder continues with numerous quotations from him throughout
the text. In the chapter entitled "Some Sources of the Deep Ecology Perspective," the
authors note that "Among contemporary writers, no one has done more than Gary Snyder
to shape the sensibilities of the deep ecology movement. In both his poetry and essays,
Snyder has been laying the foundation for the "real work" of reinhabiting this continent"
(83). In a later essay, "Gary Snyder: Post-modem Man," Sessions notes that Snyder's
greatest contribution to Deep Ecology may lie in his daily existence in what the poet calls
the "Shasta bioregion," and the "real work" of being actively involved with this
community. Snyder's life-as much as his writing--make him a living example of the
philosophy of Arne Naess, says Sessions: "Gary has essentially filled in the concrete detail
of spiritual bioregional living and political activity that is implicit in Naess' more abstract
philosophical articulations" (367).20

176

While Sessions and Devall single Snyder out as the most powerful literary influence on
their evolving thought, the two authors also cite other Beat writers as sources for Deep
Ecology. The pair credits Allen Ginsberg and Allan Watts, along with Snyder and several
other Zen adepts, with furthering the popularity of Taoism and Buddhism in America
during the 1950's and 60's--thereby furthering the work, begun by Emerson and Thoreau,
of exposing Americans to Eastern belief systems which advocate "organic unity" and
"biocentric equality":

In the 1950s, the so-called Beat poets such as Ginsberg and Snyder began
translating Japanese and Chinese poetry based on their own developing ecological
consciousness.21 The poems and prose of Dogen, Chuang-Tzu, Hua-yen and
other Indian, Chinese and Japanese classic writers were taken down from the dusty
shelves of libraries . . . and brought to groups of people engaged in the "real wor "
of cultivating their own ecological consciousness. (100-101)

Similarly, environmental historian Roderick Nash credits Beat writers-especially Kerouac
and Snyderuwith the 1950's swing towards Buddhist and Native American belief systems
and the resulting attitudes of biocentric equality and a oneness with nature (Rights 114-
15). While Devall, Sessions and Nash mention only Snyder, Ginsberg and Kerouac by
name in their discussion of Beat sources of the Deep Ecology perspective, it is clear many
other writers of the Beat period may also have had an impact on its formation, including

Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, and Denise Levertov. 22

"Moving the World a Millionth of an Inch"

It would be easy to overstate the centrality of nature to Beat literature, as I believe
Michael McClure does slightly, when he says, in Scratching the Beat Surface, that "Much
of what the Beat Generation is about is nature" (11). But there can be little question that
in the works of Snyder, Kerouac, Welch, McClure, and several others within the Beat

Movement, the quest to find meaning and oneness within the natural world became one of

177

the most important themes. As Gary Snyder notes, however, the Beat legacy may not be
merely a specific reverence for nature, but more generalized attitude of youthful revolt
which spilled over into the environmental cause:
The real influence of the Beats, worldwide, was to show young people that they
had the power and the language, their own language, to raise their concerns and
issues and come out fighting, in poetry and politics, outrageously, with humor and
information. Nature being only one of the territories. (mail interview)

In a 1974 interview on the occasion of the "City Lights in North Dakota" Writers'
Conferencena Beat retrospective featuring himself, Ginsberg, McClure and others-
Snyder was asked about the lasting impact of the Beat movement and its successes in
transforming the American consciousness. He responded:

. . . [W]hat Allen and I and the rest of us can say realistically, with absolute surety
and with great pride, is we have moved the world a millionth of an inch. But it's a
real millionth of an inch. That much happened. Not nearly as much as people
think, or would like to ascribe to it [the Beat Movement], but what it was, was real
. . . . If you can move the world a millionth of an inch, you've got a chance.
(McKenzie "Moving the World" 12-13)

Snyder's typical humility nearly masks his pride in being part of one of this century's
most important literary and social movements. Snyder and his colleagues did indeed
"move the world" in some very real ways, and they did so on a number of fronts. The
Beats were a crucial catalyst in cracking open the stifling conformity of the American
1950's, and an important foundation for the counterculture of the 1960's. Their open-form
poems, unconventional novels, and radical manifestos gave voice, in common speech, to a
powerful yet unexpressed undercurrent in American culture--one which questioned the
direction of post-war American life as well as its values. Their works questioned the
wisdom of America's military-industrial economy, sought a deeper spirituality through Zen

and experimentation with drugs, and broadened the boundaries of American literature with

178

a frank and open discussion of human sexuality--"For which," John Clellon Holmes has
written, "they were called nihilists, obscurantists, dope & sex fiends, and corrupters of
literary values" (10).

But, Holmes points out, despite their popular image as literary outlaws and artistic
innovators, Beat writers had deep roots in earlier literary traditions, what he refers to as
"older continuities," which allowed them to transcend or reject a contemporary society in
which they felt alienated: "Innovators? Yes. But like all the most consequential
innovators, these writers were concerned with the re-connection of broken circuits. . .

"( 10). For many writers of the Beat Movement, one of the most important of these "older
continuities" of which Holmes speaks was the ancient and world-wide literary tradition of
the quest for meaning, beauty, and wholeness in the natural world.

Writers like Snyder, Kerouac, Welch and McClure did indeed seek a reconnection
with the natural world, and in doing so, became an important part in a literary tradition
which spans from the Cold Mountain poems of Han Shan, to the Native American oral
tradition, and through the writings of Henry Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold. As
active participants in this tradition, Beat writers brought to it their own unique
sensibflities--ecology, Zen, the counterculture's openness towards sexuality, and what they
saw as the visionary possibilities of drugs. The result was a body of literature more
biocentric, more ecologically aware, and more spiritually attuned to nature than any which
had preceded it in American literature. Snyder, Kerouac, Welch, and McClure sought-
and achieved--nothing short of a new relationship with the natural world, and in doing so,

gave rise to one of Beat literature's most enduring contributions.

179

NOTES

1 See Gary Snyder's appraisal of this relatively unknown poet's work, "The Dharma Eye of
D. A. Levy" in The Old Ways: 49-55.

2 174. See Davidson's excellent discussion, "Appropriations: Women in the San Francisco
Renaissance," in his The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-
century: 177-99.

3 Even this, of course, is a woefully incomplete list. A more complete Beat / Nature roll-
call should include Ed Dom, Joanna McClure, Lenore Kandel, Philip Lamantia, John
Montgomery, Peter Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Anne Waldman.

4 Ginsberg's friend Gary Snyder recalls that the author of "Howl" was "still developing the
nature sensibility" as the time of the Six Gallery reading in 1955.

5 Jacket notes from Planet News: [961-67.

6 The name of a local geological formation.

7 Orlovsky has also written a number of poems dealing with life at the farm in Cherry Hill.
See his collection Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs: Poems 1 955-1977
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1978).

8 The poem's title is probably adapted from the Roman poet Virgil's Eclogues, one of the
earliest examples of the pastoral tradition.

9 Eldridge Cleaver: Black Panther Party Leader, who was at the time in Algiers evading
prosecution in the US. Timothy Leary: Harvard psychologist turned LSD guru, who
spent part of 1968 in prison on drug charges. John Sinclair. Michigan political activist,
also jailed in the late sixties on marijuana charges.

10 Whalen's ancestral home in Ireland.

11 Luther Burbank (1849-1926) American horticulturist and developer of many plant

varieties.

180

12 Actually, the influence of the Beats extends far beyond American borders; in the 1990's
there is probably even more interest in the Beats in Europe than in the United States. See
Inger Thorup Lauridsen and Per Dalgard's The Beat Generation and the Russian New
Wave (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990).

13 See McClure's recollection of his friend Brautigan, "N inety-one Things About Richard
Brautigan," in Lighting the Comers: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary , 36-68.

14 In its eleven issue run from 1962-65, Sanders's Fuck You /A Magazine of the Arts
published most of the writers associated with the Beat Movement and often featured
pieces with environmental themes, such as Michael McClure's environmental manifesto
"Poisoned Wheat."

15 Sanders's finest early poem, entitled "Poem From Jail," is the result of his 1961 arrest
for an act of civil disobedience which occurred when he and other activists attempted to
board a Polaris submarine to protest the proliferation of nuclear weapons (Butterick 473).
16 During this same period, American attitudes towards nature and wilderness began to be
seen as fitting subjects for serious historical study. Peter Mathiessen's 1959 book, Wildlife
in America, provided a comprehensive history of species extinction in North America, and
Roderick Nash'sl967 study, Wilderness and the American Mind, began to explore a new
branch of history which could accommodate human as well as non-human participants.

17 I Remain: The Letters of Lew Welch & The Correspondence of His Friends: Vol. II,
176.

18 "Four Changes" is a radical environmental manifesto written in the late 1960's by
Snyder, and later included in the "Plain Talk" section of his 1975 collection, Turtle Island.
Several other Bay area writers helped with revisions and suggestions, among them
Michael McClure, Richard Brautigan, Alan Watts, Stewart Brand, and Diane de Prima.

19 For a more complete discussion of the sources and goals of the Deep Ecology

movement, see Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith,

181

1985), especially chapters three and five: "The Dominant, Modern Worldview and Its
Critics" (41-50), and "Deep Ecology" (63-78).

20 Interestingly, in the same essay, Sessions recalls his first encounter with Snyder and his
ideasnas Japhy Ryder in Kerouac's 1958 novel, Dharma Bums (365).

21 Devall and Sessions are probably incorrect about this point, in part. While Ginsberg
has, without question, done much to extend the cause of Buddhism in America, unlike
Snyder he does not speak Chinese or Japanese, and he has not translated any poems from
these languages.

22 In a 1994 interview with me, Snyder indicated that he felt. the writings of Kerouac,
Welch, Ginsberg and Whalen were also in some way responsible for the shift towards a
Deep Ecological perspective. See Appendix B.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

1922:

1923:

1926:

1929:

1930:

1932:

1944:

1946:

1948:

APPENDIX A:

CI-IRONOLOGY

-Jack Kerouac is born in Lowell, Massachusetts.

«Philip Whalen is born in Portland, Oregon.

-Lew Welch is born in Phoenix, Arizona.

-Allen Ginsberg is born in Newark, New Jersey.

-Gary Snyder is born in San Francisco, California.
--The population of the US. is 122 million.

-Michael McClure is born in Marysville, Kansas.

--Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs meet in New York
City.

-William Carlos Williams's Paterson (Book One).

-Gary Snyder, Lew Welch and Philip Whalen meet at Reed College in Portland,
Oregon.

"Robinson Jeffers's The Double Axe.

”Theodore Roethke's The Lost Son and Other Poems.

182

1949:

1950:

1951:

1952:

1954:

1955:

1956:

1957:

183

«Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac.

«Population of the US. is 151 million.
«Kerouac's The Town and the City.

«Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us.

«John Clellon Holmes's Go.

«One hundredth anniversary of the publication of Thoreau's Walden.
«Scott and Helen Nearing's Living the Good Life.
«Joseph Wood Krutch's The Voice of the Desert.

«Six Gallery Reading in San Francisco first brings attention to the Beat movement.
«Snyder and Kerouac share a cottage in Mill Valley, California—the period
chronicled in Dharma Bums.

«Snyder leaves US. for a five year stay in Japan to study Zen and Oriental
languages.

«Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems.

«Robert Marshall's Arctic Wilderness.

«Kenneth Rexroth's In Defense of the Earth.

«Kerouac's On the Road.
«Alan Watts's The Way of Zen.

1958:

1959:

1960:

1962:

1963:

1964:

1965:

184

«Kerouac's Dharma Bums.

«Alan Watts's "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen."

«Lawrence Lipton's The Holy Barbarians.
«Peter Matthiessen's Wildlife in America.
«McClure's Hymns to St. Geyron and Other Poems.

«Snyder's Riprap.

«Kerouac's Lonesome Traveler.
«Snyder's Myths and Texts.
«Welch's Wobbly Rock.
«Whalen's Like I Say.

«Ginsberg travels to South America in search of the hallucinogenic plant yage.

«Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

«Kerouac's Big Sur.

«Burroughs and Ginsberg's The Yage Letters.

«McClure's Meat Science Essays.

«Snyder, Whalen and Welch take part in San Francisco "Free Way Reading."
«The Wilderness Act establishes a National Wilderness Preservation System.

«Kerouac's Desolation Angels.
«Snyder's Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End.

«Welch's Hermit Poems and On our.

1967:

1968:

1969:

1970:

1971:

1972:

1973:

185

«Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America.

«Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind.

«Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire.
«McClure's Hail Thee Who Play.
«Snyder's The Back Country.
«Welch's "Final City / Tap City."

«John Hay's In Defense of Nature.
«Snyder's Earth House Hold.
«Whalen's 0n Bear's Head.

«Jack Kerouac dies in St Petersburg, Florida.

«Snyder's Regarding Wave.

«"Earth Day" is first celebrated.

«The Clean Air Act of 1970 establishes national standards for air quality.
«The population of the US. is 205 million.

«Lew Welch disappears into the California foothills, the victim of an apparent

suicide.

«McClure and Snyder attend United Nations Environmental Conference in

Stockholm, Sweden.

«The Endangered Species Act becomes law.
«Welch's collected poems, Ring of Bone.

1974:

1975:

1977:

1980:

1982:

1983:

1984:

1986:

1987:

186

«Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

«McClure's September Blackberries.

«Snyder wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Turtle Island (1974).
«Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang.

«McClure's Jaguar Skies.

«Snyder's The Old Ways.

«Snyder's The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964—I979.

«Kirby Doyle begins work on "Pre American Ode."

«The population of the US. is 226 million.

«McClure's Scratching the Beat Surface.

«Snyder's Axe Handles.

«Whalen's Heavy Breathing.

«McClure's Fragments of Perseus.

«Ginsberg's Collected Poems 1947-1980.

«Snyder's Left Out in the Rain.

«Ed Sanders' Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century.

«Snyder's Practice of the Wild.

187

1991:
«Sierra Club publishes Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life to commemorate the
poet's 60th birthday.
«McClure's Rebel Lions.

1992:
«McClure's Lighting the Comers: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary.
«Snyder's No Nature: New and Selected Poems.

1995:

«Burroughs' Ghost of Chance

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX B:
AN INTERVIEW WITH GARY SNYDER

The following is a transcript of an interview with poet, essayist, Buddhist scholar, and
environmental advocate Gary Snyder which was conducted via the mail in July / August
1994 while Snyder resided at Kitkitdizze, his home near Nevada City, California, in what

Snyder refers to as the "Shasta Bioregion."

 

PHILLIPS: In his book Scratching the Beat Surface, Michael McClure notes an early and
strong interest in nature and ecology among the readers at the 1955 Six Gallery reading.
Did you also find this to be the case? How do you react to McClure's statement that the

Beats are "the literary wing of the environmental movement"?

SNYDER: It's hard to say how much interest the readers at the Six Gallery reading had in
nature. A finer definition in terms is called for. If by interest you mean one who
backpacks, climbs, does forest or range work, is a member of a conservationist
organization, is a naturalist, then Rexroth and I were the only ones. But of you mean a
sensibility open to nature, tuned to the landscape, then Philip Whalen is certainly included.
Michael McClure's interest was that of the naturalist and conservationist. Allen
[Ginsberg] and Jack [Kerouac] Lawrence [Ferlinghetti] were still developing the nature
sensibility.

I think one could make an argument that some Beat writers were the literary wing of
the environmental movement, but only by degrees. There was of course a movement prior
to 1970; it would have been called the conservation movement. I was a part of that, so

was Kenneth [Rexroth]. You can check the that history out if you haven't already in

188

189

Steven Fox's book The American Conservation Movement from the University of
Wisconsin Press. I had been a member of the Wilderness Society, the Mazamas, the Sierra
Club from early on, and had been a seasonal worker in both the logging industry and with
the US. Forest Service.

Some of these Beat writings were available in the early days of the environmental
movement. My own work certainly contributed to the post-1970 rise of the movement
called "environmentalism" Myths and Texts was, and perhaps continues to be, the only
contemporary poem that addresses clearcutting and logging in any detail. And then note
the "Four Changes" which was widely circulated as a booklet before being included in
Turtle Island. Earth House Hold (1969) has a number of ecological points to make.
Kenneth [Rexroth], Michael McClure, Philip [Whalen] to a lesser degree, Allen [Ginsberg]
somewhat later (after "Wales Visitation"). The real influence of the Beats, worldwide,
was to show young people they had the power and the language, their own language, to
raise their concerns and issues and come out fighting in poetry and politics, with humor

and information. Nature being only one of the territories.

PHILLIPS: You once told an interviewer that the Beat generation was "a gathering
together of all available models and myths of fieedom in America that had existed
heretofore, namely: Whitman, John Muir, Thoreau, and the American bum." In my
reading of your work, and the work of Jack Kerouac and Lew Welch, I've been struck by
the number of references to Thoreau and Muir. How has your reading of Thoreau and

Muir influenced your writing?

SNYDER: Has my reading of Thoreau and Muir influenced my writing? To some extent.
I read Thoreau the summer of 1953 while on sourdough Mountain lookout, and re-read it
again while working on a ship at sea in the late '50's. I read Muir as an adolescent, and

then read him again in the mid-80's when teaching "wilderness writing" courses at UC

190

Davis. Muir inspired me, as a lad, on the practical level of boldly going out and staying
longer in the wood with less gear; and having the nerve to do solo trips. So I did (for
example) some lengthy trips the summer of 1948 in the mountains north of Mt. St. Helen's
in the Washington Cascades, including some third-class rock scrambles. I felt that Muir's
prose style was a bit too un-self-critical and over-luxurious to want to be influenced by it,
though. As far as an influence from Thoreau, his effect hung fire some decades until I
started the essays in The Practice of the Wild, where his influence can be seen from place
to place. I avoid trying to sound like Henry, I feel his Walden style is too acerbic, too
willfully balanced and paradoxical, too precocious. I have the same criticism of Annie

Dillard who has taken on some of his mannerisms.

PHILLIPS: With its call for an ecologically based system of ethics and a life grounded in
place, Aldo Leopold's 1949 Sand County Almanac seems to share many of your concerns.
When did you become familiar with Leopold's work, and has it been an influence on your

own thought and writing?

SNYDER: Aldo Leopold. I didn't read Leopold until I came back to the United States in
1969, and first read Sand County Almanac. I enjoyed the writing and certainly the ideas,
but I don't think it influenced my work. (A lot of what we're talking about here is a large
scale cultural movement, which does not only involve literature but various kinds of

activism and cultural transformation.)

PHILLIPS: Although you've often rejected the label of "Beat poet," it seems undeniable
that you share some common aesthetic points with other writers within the Beat
movement. One of these, it seems, is a penchant for pushing the bounds of what some
might call "literary decency." Ginsberg's Howl, McClure's The Beard and Burroughs's
Naked Lunch all faced obscenity trials which helped to liberalize and broaden the bounds

191

of poetry, drama, and the novel. Although your poetry hasn't faced legal challenges, your
work also openly and honestly discusses the naked, the erotic, the scatological, and it has
often done so within one of the most traditionally genteel of American literary genres:
nature writing. I'm referring here to poems such as "Song of the Taste," "Song of the
Tangle," and "Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills, Your Body," among others.
Thomas Lyon has said that you brought "the bright clean air of the mountains" to the
subculture; might it also be said that you brought to the mountains, and your description
of them, the subculture's openness towards the body and sexuality? Do you think of
poems, like the ones I've just mentioned, which merge erotic elements with description of
nature, in the tradition of American writers such as Whitman and Lawrence, or are they

the product of Chinese or Japanese poetic traditions?

SNYDER: There's a good reason why my work has never been subjected to legal
challenges; it is simply not as shocking, nor does it push the bounds of decency, anywhere
near as far as does that of Burroughs, Ginsberg, or McClure. My work reflects in some
cases simply the vernacular of the rowdy working class. As for the eros I bring to nature,
I guess I must have gotten a push in that direction from Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and
Flowers, but I doubt much came from Whitman. And I do feel that nature writing in
earlier times was much captured by "gentility." Now of course everybody is talking about
the erotic of this and that so now there will be the erotics of nature. And for me I guess

nature is just naturally sexy.

PHILLIPS: In his new book, Kindred Spirits, J arnes McClintock points to three twentieth
century scientists who seem to have influenced your poetry: Eugene Odum, Howard T.

Odum, and Ramon Margalef. Are there others?

192

SNYDER: Scientists who have influenced my more recent work (that of the last 25
years). Indeed the Odum brothers and obliquely the wonderfully technical works of Dr.
Margalef. Also, G. Evelyn Hutchinson and his neat little volume The Ecological Theater
and the Evolutionary Play. More recently the work of conservation biologist Michael
Soule, an eminent figure in the field of conservation biology; the work of a biophysicist
from Yale, Harold Morowitz; and I'm going to take a detour here through some social
scientists and political philosophers: Karl Polanyi, Ivan Illich, Carolyn Merchant, Joseph
Needham's work on China, William Cronon's environmental history, Donna Haraway,
Noam Chomsky«and back to biological science--the landscape ecology/forestry work of
people like Larry Harris with island biogeography theory; the ethnobotany of Kat
Anderson and Tom C. Blackburn; the ethnobotanical work of Gary Paul Nabhan. James
Gleik's Chaos. Stewart Kauffman's The Origins of Order (which I don't find easy) and
also right now I'm reading How Monkey's See the World by Cheney and Seyfarth, really
good animal behavior work, that I got onto while I was in Africa in April visiting with one
of their students, Ryne Palombit, who is in northern Botswana living with a baboon band

and learning exactly what they do together.

PHILLIPS: In recent years, Buddhist attitudes concerning reverence towards the natural
world have become a mainstay of American environmental philosophy, as well as an
important source for the Deep Ecology perspective. Do you think that your Buddhist-
inspired writings, along with those of Kerouac, Welch, Ginsberg, Whalen and others

within the Beat circle, can, in part, account for this?

SNYDER: The answer is yes. The deep ecology books quite clearly credit where they
think they got it from, you can check it out: but in George Sessions' Deep Ecology I don't
think you'll find much mention of Beat writers other than myself. A review I just read in

Audubon magazine of the recent biography of Ed Abbey says that the book shows that

193

Abbey was a student at Stanford at that time, went upito San Francisco, and was

influenced by the Beat scene.

APPENDIX C

APPENDIX C:
AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP WHALEN

The following interview with poet, novelist, and Zen priest Philip Whalen was
conducted via the mail in March 1994 while the poet resided at the San Francisco Zen
Center. The answers to the questions I posed to Whalen arrived with a brief hand-written
note dated March 27, 1994, which read:

Dear Mr. Phillips,

Your questions are very difficult. I've done the best I can to find answers for
them. Difficulties are multiplied by the necessity of having to dictate my answers
and having them read back to me several times over since I can't actually see well
enough to write for you myself. I hope what I have come up with will help you.

Yours faithfully,
Philip Whalen

 

PHILLIPS: I'm interested in the connections between Beat writers and work which took
them outdoors, since work so often becomes the raw material for poetry. How did your
time as a fire watch in the Skagit River country during the mid fifties affect you as a

writer?

WHALEN: Living where you must chop wood for the stove and carry water to cook and
clean with is enough to change anybody's point of view, writer or otherwise. Sometimes
you don't carry water, you carry snow and melt it. A great deal of snow is necessary for
the purpose. After all the chores are done there is time to re-read all of Shakespeare,

Chaucer, and some of the longer 18th century English novels and a few of the larger

194

195

Russian ones. Such reading supplies one's vocabulary with words which are not generally
used in current newspapers and magazines. The contemplation of nearby lakes and
mountain peaks simultaneously stimulates and calms the mind and imagination as do
frequent encounters with wildlife«bears, deer, marmots, etc. It was during this period of
time that I learned I could write in my own way rather than to follow academic

prescriptions as to form, composition, metrics and diction.

PHILLIPS: To the best of your recollection, what did you read at the Six Gallery reading?
In Scratching the Beat Surface, Michael McClure notes a fascination with nature and
ecology as a dominant theme among the poets at the reading; did you find this to be the

case?

WHALEN: I can only remember a poem called "Martyrdom of Two Pagans" which does
not appear in any of my books. Now that I think of it I must have read "The Roadrunner"
and "If You're So Smart, Why Ain't you Rich?" Other people who were present might
remember whatever else I read. I would agree that there was a common concern among
us about the values of protecting and preserving the natural world. I don't believe I

thought of myself as anything like an ecologist.

PHILLIPS: How and when did you come to Buddhism?

WHALEN: I felt that I could make a real commitment to Buddhist study and practice after
having read the three volumes of Essays in Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki, The Diamond
Sutra, Zen Teaching of Huang Do, The Zen Teaching of Hui Hai, The Lankavatara
Sutra, and The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. I had practiced various forms of
meditation since 1946 but it was not until the 1950's that I became interested specifically
in zazen practice which I pursued in a haphazard way. I didn't begin formal Zen study

196

with a teacher until February 1972 when I became a member of the San Francisco Zen

Center under the direction of zentatsu Richard Baker-roshi.

PHILLIPS: I've been puzzled by Lew Welch's relationship with Buddhism. Much of his
work (i.e. "Wobbly Rock" and many of the poems in Hermit Poems and The Way Back)
seem firmly rooted in Buddhism, yet in an interview with David Meltzer in 1969, he
referred to Buddhism, and other religions, as "mind trash" and seemed to reject it, favoring
instead a view of God in nature. In your view, as someone who knew Welch well, was his
devotion to Buddhism a serious one, or was it of more of a passing nature, as Kerouac's

seems to have been?

WHALEN: Both Welch and Kerouac had a very deep but not very lasting interest in Zen
Buddhist practice. Welch however actually put in a fair amount of effort trying to practice
zazen. After several years he said: "You don't have to sit with your feet all folded up in
your lap to understand anything. All of us already see and know what it's all about
anyway." As far as I know Lew never talked about God in this connection.

PHILLIPS: A very big, very general question: How do you think the Buddhist beliefs held
by yourself, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac impacted on your

writing about nature?

WHALEN: As I understand it the Buddhist approach to the natural world is paradoxical.
On the one hand life and the world are both impermanent and illusory. The world and the
self are one. Contrariwise one must take great care to give up all activity which creates
attachment to the self and to the world, to live in Enlightenment as much as possible and
to be of help to all beings. Delusion and Enlightenment cannot exist independently. You
are obliged to save the world and everything in it«not only this world but the myriad

197
worlds which also exist. But you mustn't suppose that "I" am saving or losing anything.
[Crossed out: What you call the "impact" of this teaching is upon my writing] The way I
write is to show as clearly as possible what I see without getting entangled in false
sentiment or synthetic excitement. I am not trying to sell Buddhism or anything else. I
call it poetry because that's how it feels to me. When I am working at a poem or whatever
I can sometimes experience the feelings I receive from reading the old masters. Some
people enjoy reading what I write. Some who have read it say that they enjoy hearing me
read it at which time it becomes more accessible to them. Several millions of people don't
know or care whether I have written anything or not. I only write when I feel like I have

tO.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Brautigan, Richard. Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine
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Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1966.

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