Three BIG books. Three very big books: 230 pages; 330 pages (+ notes); 1,067 pages (including Notes and Index). Really, what do we make of big books, what CAN we make of and do with these great books? What does it make sense to say about them?
We can create simple summaries and easy labels: one book involves selections of poems over the span of 46 years, a selection of Jewish poems. (What is a Jewish poem?) Another might be called a 40 years creation of a radical feminist poetry and poetics. The third might be called an ecopoetry and ecopoetics, or a Buddhist American poetry, or Beat poetry that became something else. The labels don’t really help very much (because they do not establish any granular sense of the poetry itself).
Such big books are a kind of career-marker. In a grim joke, these books are sometimes called tombstones, or doorstops, or memorials. Clearly, these three poets merit large collections as a fitting tribute to their ongoing (as well as historic) importance.
This essay-review must, of necessity, be absurdly brief in touching upon so much poetry produced over so many years. I do want to be honest: really, how do we read such books? What do we do with them? I’m assuming that they are not books that will be read – perhaps rarely – cover to cover. Are they simply reference books and honors bestowed in late career? What exactly is their vitality? Truly, what are they for as they arrive to us as huge gifts to be opened slowly, with pleasure and curiosity over many months. They are not quick reads. Opening a big book is a different aesthetic and readerly experience, more daunting, than holding and reading individual smaller books that are building blocks for these large books. (I must, though, sing the praises of the beautiful design and readability of the Chax Press edition of Rachel’s Selected Poems.)
And for those of us of a similar age as these three poets, their books will inevitably evoke memories of our own lives in poetry and the many intersections with their writing.
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Rodger Kamenetz’s book, the first version of The Missing Jew, kept growing into bigger books, a process of accretion and addition, midrashim (commentary and emendation), a book that is also a question:
“At some point in the early 1980s I returned to the material in the original The Missing Jew and wrote midrashim on lines of my own poems. I was trying to recover for myself a sense of Jewish poetry that did not rely only on Jewish content. What would it mean to make a poem that was intrinsically Jewish?”
One way to read Rodger’s book is as an ongoing and varied manifestation of what an intrinsically Jewish poem might be. Reading the first poem in the book, my response was not that the poem required addition, revision, and commentary. The first poem of the first book was, to my mind, good enough, excellent. Maybe it never got any better? (Maybe our poems, over time, don’t get better?) Maybe there is no “better,” only more, or other, or in addition. That first poem:
The invisible is stronger than the visible.
The desert subtracted so many objects
there was nothing left but the wind.
Like all good ideas, God was stolen.
The Jews being superior thieves
removed all the markings.
The history of my family is
the history of breezes.
And the exodus, the getaway:
my grandfathers, one carrying
a barber pole, the other
a tailor’s needle.
*
I first met Rodger in 1999 or 2000. I had just written The New Spirit and gave a reading from it in New Orleans. Rodger responded to the new work, and we walked together after the reading and I turned the conversation to my recent “discovery.” While my Jewish studies were deepening (thanks to the guidance of my uncle Stan Goodman), I was also beginning my deepening commitment to Zen Buddhist practice, and I had noticed how many Zen priests/teachers were Jewish, including my friend and teacher (Zoketsu) Norman Fischer. Rodger, matter of factly, stated, “Yes, and I’m the world’s leading authority on that subject.” Somehow my ignorance and Rodger’s own chutzpah did not stand in the way of our developing a great friendship. He was, as he had claimed, such an authority, mainly from his time spent with the Dalai Lama and a range of major Jewish mystics/rabbis that resulted in the book The Jew in The Lotus (1994, and the subsequent book Stalking Elijah [1998]). I am grateful to Rodger for the range of his teachings and for his candid, smart sharing of his deeply alive Jewish practice.
I had a second tremendously formative conversation with Rodger a few years later. I think I was in town (New Orleans) for MLA, and I ended up in a group with Rodger for dinner. There was something troubling me a great deal, and I sought Rodger’s perspective (somehow, in a noisy sociable meal finding the right moment for a very pressing but brief exchange). My renewed Jewish practice had been primarily textual – reading/writing of poetry, reading a range of texts. Though I was a member of our local temple in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I could in no way sustain a meaningful institutional relationship with Jewish practice, and I felt bad about it, felt it as a failure on my part. When a moment presented itself, I asked Rodger what I could do about this sense of isolation, this inability of mine to find a sustaining institutional Jewish practice. He looked at me and said, “How do you know that God has not placed you exactly where you need to be?” My sense of any guilt over a failure to attain an institutional practice of my Judaism vanished (and has not returned). Or, as I might now phrase it via the Tao Te Ching: the Way is always the Way.
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Like DuPlessis’ poetry, Kamenetz’s poetry, too, has a great capacity to blend a reference-derived essayistic quality of analysis/description into the poem itself, as in one of his very finest poems, “Another Rothko,” which begins:
Marcus Rothkowitz, 1920, Portland, Oregon.
You came each Monday to Lincoln High, your diary:
the sad thought of a week’s hard work in mind.
A long road, rough and bumpy with milestones
called days. The last one is far, far away, beyond
that point where the horizon meets the earth.
Beyond the point where the horizon meets the earth
shines the last thin band of day, a grim smile
where we step into darkness, and the earth rolls away.
And later, in a passage at once applicable to Rothko but that also provides a more general sense of the particular relationship of word, image, and thing central to Jewish writing and art-making:
Something hides behind each thing. Some word.
– in a language where word and thing are one.
Not our words, but a life. Or nothing?
Another name is light. Again, not light that’s seen.
All words are wrong names. All images, idols.
Jews distrust images, painters words. A Jewish
painter has a problem. You emptied your paintings,
made them huge, surrounded us in a field, till we too
stripped off shape and story, number and name.
As we will see later in this essay-review, this slippery relationship of word and thing is also a crucial consideration in Snyder’s poetry.
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Rodger’s Author’s Note at the back of The Missing Jew is a tremendously smart poetics. An articulation of the complex path of being a Jewish poet. At one point, he writes:
“Many of these poems are an act of mourning. They are against death. Not just mourning for my grandparents, their immigrant generation the lost sense of close knit family that was my childhood experience … but also of the lost world of Jewish Europe after the Shoah, and further back – of the ancient world behind that in our texts – all of these have gone missing especially in the wider literary world. I continue to be astonished though I shouldn’t be, that Jewish culture, on which so much of Western culture is based, is completely missing from the broader intellectual curriculum. To cite a Buddhist text is cool – and I’ve done plenty of that – but to cite a Talmudic text or introduce a midrash into a general discourse is nearly considered a faux pas. A friend back in the ‘70s warned me, calling a book The Missing Jew would be a literary disaster. So I did just that.”
Rodger’s view of his own trajectory as a poet is that …
“After the early poems of personal identity, family identity, after all the pride and sorrow of the past, all the mourning, and all my quarrels with poets living and dead, I’ve come after forty years of wandering to value more and more the still small voice that is mine and not mine.
So this book ends with psalms that were trying to sing themselves through me all along.”
Rodger’s praise of “the unique qualities of the psalm as a personal expression of a profound sense of connection to the source of all connection” sounds to me like what in Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen terminology would be big mind (as opposed to small mind). So, it’s not especially surprising that the author of The Jew in the Lotus might sound quite Buddhist (as well as Jewish) as he does in passages in the final poem, a prose poem, of this newest version of The Missing Jew, “An Empty Closet”:
If there’s a secret to being known is there a secret to being unknowable? Either way I would like to step into a closet and change not just my clothes – my face my hair my eyes. I would like to change my hand to touch you. I would like to change my jokes into praye … Unknown I could be your path … I would lay my eyes like cufflinks in a tray. But then how would I see you?
The same way I hold the knob of an invisible door and walk out toward emptiness and you.
Through emptiness to you.
Perhaps non-dualistic thinking is at once characteristically Jewish and Buddhist?
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Rodger’s earliest writing begins in a mixture of affinity and conflict, anger and a different way to write:
“Initially I had been influenced by Robert Duncan who I’d first met in San Francisco in 1973, as well as by a lucky personal encounter with Charles Reznikoff. His objectivism offered me a tikkun – even a healing – for I had been deeply wounded as a teenager when I came to understand that the early poets I admired and imitated – Eliot and Pound – were both sick with the disease of Jew-hating, which they inserted into their verse like a poison pill that could neither be swallowed nor ignored. Reznikoff, who had come of age as a poet when those giants walked the earth, had discovered a different path that was modernist but that still connected him to his immigrant Jewish experience. He became my poetic grandfather. (Jerome Rothenberg’s Poland 1939 was another important influence – I’d call him my poetic uncle.)”
To varying degrees, this story plays out in the writing lives of all three poets: initial affinities that one grows toward, into, and against. The narrative is not so much the struggle to find a distinctive personal voice; more so, how to find a satisfyingly ethical engaged way to write.
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In a phrase that might apply to both Kamenetz and DuPlessis, Rodger writes about the colliding and colluding voices of poetry: “voices echoing against each other, arguing with passion and love, with precision and zeal, the voices that make a Jewish mind not so much a site of meditative calm as of a family argument.”
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As noted earlier, Kamenetz’s midrashim create pathways and new poems to reconsider, mend, extend, reinhabit the poem at another moment of time and consciousness, midrash itself being “a uniquely Jewish form which engages with a previous text through its damages and flaws, misspellings and again – with what is missing. Through midrash, filling in the holes with new imagination.”
Some poems merit multiple midrashim – and why not? The midrashim are not so much explanations as an addition, a continuation, more akin to a jazz riff that takes off from the initial melody. For example, the first poem of the initial volume of The Missing Jew, “the invisible is stronger than the visible,” gets two midrashim, the first of which ends in speaking to and about the invisible:
When I am speaking
to it, my lips
move as in prayer
repeating a formula
or incantation
The holes I
often experience
are plugged with fear
To unclog them
the remedy is not
logic but song
And the second midrash (in its entirety):
The invisible is stranger
than the visible
And how do we treat
the stranger? Like
someone to be feared?
No, like a guest
*
Rodger successfully negotiates a tricky path. He knows – by reading, learning, by practice, by upbringing, be becoming a serious student – Jewish traditions, while being deeply engaged equally in the necessity of reinvention and reinscription. He continues to ask what it means to be a Jew and a Jewish poet. Neither succumbing to a flat-footed essentialism nor a post-Jewish cosmopolitanism, Rodger’s poetry, perhaps by means of its self-questioning and midrashim, offers an exemplary Jewish path.
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I turn now to Rachel’s big book, with Drafts at the heart of it, a massive work with the chutzpah and intelligence and persistence to challenge, critique, and respond to Pound’s Cantos, to write a replacement work. And all along, at the forefront of ambitious Drafts, she writes a profoundly lyrical questioning and answering: what is a poem?
Often, Rachel’s poems feel like prologues – prologues to what is possible. Of course, drafts/Drafts are provisional and preliminary. They are rough versions suggesting what they might be. Her poems become a calling out to what might be, to what a poem might become; in her thinking toward what might be, the sought for poem itself begins to come into being. This process – poem as thinking of the poem – reminds me of the writing of Edmond Jabès, whose poetry often exists as a fully imagined hypothetical, often in the form of text and commentary, or a dialog.
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For Kamenetz, DuPlessis, and Snyder, each individual poem finds its way into a book. And with these collections, each individual book is assembled into a larger book. In the case of a Collected, there is an automatic nature to that collection – an aggregating (typically in chronological order) of all the books. In the case of Rodger’s, The Missing Jew and Rachel’s Selected, a new book, a new structure is imagined and made. Previous poems and books are reconsidered and reassembled into something else.
*
These three big books amount to wisdom texts. They are not so much exercises in a refined and refining craft – though these three poets, in different ways, write with greatly honed craft – rather these books teach us and show us how to live a life in poetry, how to reside for many years in textuality, in the life of words. It is, like the Tao Te Ching, the telling (and the making) of a path. This kind of depth of engagement – full of its own ethical and worldly dimensions – I believe comes from a vow and a submission: to the act of poetry itself as a practice, not dissimilar from a lifetime commitment to Zen meditation. These books are product of – to use a contemporary term about which I am quite ambivalent – mindfulness. The writings of Rodger, Rachel and Gary each constitute an exemplary, rich path. A life-writing that is coincidental with the life-lived.
In each case, the writing-life is in deep conversation with the writing lives of others (living and dead).
*
Over the years, Rachel’s writing and our periodic correspondence have taught me a great deal, perhaps nothing more formative than her steering me to Susan Handelman’s great book The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory.
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Rachel exemplifies a scholar-poet fusion – perhaps paradigmatic for a certain generation of American poets (names that come to mind most quickly are Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Jeanne Heuving, Aldon Nielsen, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Schultz, Norman Finkelstein …). Perhaps now these functions – the “creative” and the “critical” or “scholarly” – as promulgated in academic institutions are more decisively separated, so that to merge or experience as overlapping and perhaps congruent “poet” and “scholar” (or “critic” or better yet “essayist”) is to say two things that now exist with more distance between. Rachel’s writing has always been both. Her big project Drafts can also be seen as a critical, philosophical inquiry into the nature of poetry, both as embodied in the poem itself and as its own deeply internal questioning and self-questioning. Thus, a kind of midrash, but of a different tonality and source material than Rodger’s, though both, arguably, profoundly Jewish. Or, as Susan Handelman summarizes: “Thus interpretation is not essentially separate from the text itself — an external act intruded upon it – but rather the extension of the text, the uncovering of the connective network of relations, a part of the continuous revelation of the text itself: at bottom, another aspect of the text” (p.39 – in the chapter “Rabbinic Thought: The Divinity of the Text”).
Thus, Rachel’s poetry may often feel discursive and explanatory, or engaged in an ongoing self-address that (for me) makes the poem feel prefatory. As if the poem were prologue to the poem that might subsequently come into being based on what has been said and written about its possible nature. Though, of course, that process itself makes and is a poem. Rachel’s poems often engage in a description of their own process and poetics – another way in which her poetry is continuous with and perhaps appropriately almost indistinguishable from her equally impressive critical enterprise, which includes the ground-breaking trilogy of The Pink Guitar (1990, 2006), Blue Studios (2006), and Purple Passages (2012).
I first became hooked on Rachel’s poetry with her early long poem “Writing” (which includes handwritten marginalia / a simultaneous second column of poetry). Anyone who knows my work knows of my excessive fondness for art/poetry involving handwriting (from outsider/folk art, to Cy Twombly’s work, to Hannah Weiner’s to Robert Grenier’s to Stephen Vincent’s to William Blake’s). With “Writing” – which I wrote about extensively, in what began as a brief review and became a 40+ pages essay which Lee Hickman published complete in Temblor – Rachel cleared the way for Drafts, creating a polyvocal space for the poem. A poem including history, but perhaps even more significantly for that critical moment in time (when the creative writing MFA industry was growing exponentially and increasing opposition to “abstract” or philosophical thinking [critical theory]), a poem including philosophical thinking. I was drawn to Rachel’s work for reasons similar to my initial engagement with Language poetry: a poetry that did not require a lobotomy, a poetry fully engaged with the thinking and philosophical writing of its time.
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Rachel’s big book – the Selected – can be seen as the testimony of one who is a lifelong defender of and advocate for poetry’s value, importance, and crucialness to being fully human.
What may be most amazing of all about Rachel’s Selected Poems is the proliferation of new, varied work after Drafts, particularly the collage poems/pages.
The Notes themselves present a wealth of insightful material – references that are at once crucial to Rachel’s poems themselves (and are a further indication of that seamless relationship between poem and commentary, or poem and poetics), as in the beginning of the Note to Draft 48:
“Draft 48: Being Astonished. The various she’s, her’s, you’s, he’s and we’s are to be imagined as specific composites and splitting of positions, arguments, and possibilities explored by a variety of people in this fecund period of women’s experimental poetry.”
Or the brilliant extended Note for Draft 52: Midrash with its detailed consideration of Adorno’s claim that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, or the provocative beginning to the Note for Draft 54:
“Draft 54: Tilde. A tilde is the ~ over an N. In ancient Egyptian writing, the sound N is indicated alphabetically by a wavy sign; the object depicted by that hieroglyph is water.”
By comparison, Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land are dull and perfunctory. Rachel’s Notes are midrashim extending the range of awareness embodied in the poem itself. Her Notes too might be read as poems.
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I cite one example (from perhaps my favorite poem of Drafts, Draft 52: Midrash) that illustrates Rachel’s distinctive fusion of poem and examination and questioning of the nature of the poem:
Poem: symbol of normal culture. Culture:
has become barbaric. Therefore, the poem: and so on.
The syllogism rests.
Or another. Words fail at the exact point of this.
Poetry is made of words.
Therefore, write no poem.
Alt.: write a poem in which words fail.
. . .
Does poetry ignore crisis
trump up event
say policy does not matter to it
accept the normal
prettify hegemony?
should it therefore be forbidden?
And by whom, exactly? And how best?
Is there an enforcement mechanism
you’d like to suggest?
Brilliant section 16 of Draft 52 gives a fresh twist to Adorno’s famous remark and Adorno’s own relationship to the writing of poetry:
It is an act of mourning
to cut off
what is most important to him –
poetry –
as if to sacrifice Isaac
to walk the choked road
to bind one’s closest bond,
who that, once realized,
will blubber, snotty and noisy
screaming with fear – the knife goes up
to strike the poem, held down by
the driven father, in transfixed
obedience to higher command
whilst the angel (who looks just like
doomed son “poetry” but isn’t blubbering;
in fact is lucid, pretty, and removed
without an ounce of human empathy)
tells the dazed,
shattered Abraham
to desist.
For indeed, as the 21st-century extends and refines the horrors, violence, and insanity of the 20th-century, how & why can we write poetry? Toward what end, without, in despair, turning against the activity itself? These three big books, though no cure for the human abuses of the past century, may give us reasons to listen to the angel and to desist.
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Elsewhere in Drafts, her articulation of a feminist poetics, in addition to her critical trilogy, finds a movingly smart summary:
Through all this, women.
Women thinking of, in, through
and by themselves. Women loving
poetry and making it, and making scenes,
and doing books and little magazines
who are a literary caste or cast oft
unrecorded, wasted, trashed, or
hyper scrutinized, or worse.
Women astonished, always, inside
writing: how their possibilities
get undercut at times; at times even denied.
Still those loud bright notes and scintillant
scryings, arise, are here, are now and newly mint!
with a concluding riff on Rilke’s opening lines of the Duino Elegies:
If I were to cry out
the questions why or how or
who would hear us –
I’d say the only ones to hear this
are ourselves.
Therefore it is scrupulous to listen.
Especially to shadows.
Her book, and Kamenetz’s and Snyder’s, compel and reward our hearing.
Rachel, echoing the beginning of section 27 of Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous,” understands as well as anyone writing today what is at stake in choosing to write poetry:
“It’s hard for me to talk about poetry. Of its particularity. My sense, against consumable reason, that it matters. So much is at stake. So many abandoned worksites. The yes and the no simultaneous. The struggle to repair, even simply to state what is, how it is, and why it is so overwhelming, with permanent and never answered questions.”
This entire Draft 85: Hard Copy is a consideration, reply, and elaboration on Oppen’s great long poem “Of Being Numerous” (a poem which, by the way, includes and quotes questions from the young poet Rachel!)
Though quite different from the Jewishness of Kamenetz’s poetry, Rachel’s poetry too is Jewish in a profoundly traditional sense. Her own capacity to grant equal being to text & commentary, to poem and its self-questioning, is very much like the place of Torah exegesis in relation to the “primary” text itself (as discussed by Handelman):
“What is extraordinary here [with the scribes including their discussions of Torah] is their expansion of the written Torah (revelation) to embrace their very attempts to understand it … Commentary and exegesis of the Torah attain the same status as Torah; they are considered to be latent within revealed Scripture, needing only to be drawn forth by the ongoing generation of scholars. Exegesis and interpretation of Scripture now themselves become Scripture, and emanate, claim the Rabbis, from the same divine source as the written Torah.”
While Rachel might not be willing to claim a divine source for her exegetical writing (in poems and in critical essays and books), it is clear to me that in a similar manner she has taken down any walls between text and commentary. As someone who has followed in that path, writing extensively as a poet and a critic (and co-editing a poetics series that has published over 60 books), Rachel’s writing – all of it – has been tremendously inspirational, intelligent, and engaging.
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When I was writing my review of Rachel’s Tabula Rosa (1988), which became a lengthy meditation on her long poem “Writing,” my son Alan was born. There were complications, and he spent a week in neonatal intensive care. In between trips to the hospital to be with my newborn son, I would return home to continue my engagement with Rachel’s poem. That poem and my time spent with it somehow became a healing and balancing experience, and as the essay grew and grew, my son improved and all was well. I still cannot think about “Writing” – which I believe to be its own kind of birth for Rachel, a birth that opened the way for what would become Drafts – without also calling to mind my son’s birth.[1] What stays with me from “Writing” are the great generative questions asked in this poem: “What is realism/ made of?” and in the column nearby “Language as betrayal?// betrayal of ‘what?’// keep going” – and its ambitious aspiration: “A text to speak now, writing/ writing the sung-half song.”
The hope for the poem-that-will-be, the questions that lead up to it, articulating what needs to be, already occurs and is in being through the poem as a calling forth for what will be. If we convert this situation via a religious terminology, we might say that the Messiah begins to be present in our calling for the Messiah to arrive. Or in Buddhist terms, Maitreya begins to be here in our desire for her arrival.
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When I was just beginning my intensive reading of poetry, in the early and mid-1970s, a poet (I can’t remember whom, perhaps Gregory Orr?) told me that over the output of a poet’s writing life, a poet’s work eventually would revolve around a single question or image or story. That each poet, throughout a writing career, unconsciously returns to a central story. As I examine these three big books, I don’t really want to pursue that perspective. Convenient (for critics) as that perspective might be, it is essentially untrue. It runs the danger of performing a kind of strip-mining of the varied terrain of a poet’s work to find the alleged special (singular) mineral. I guess that my own version of that search is closer to seeking central questions or preoccupations in a poet’s work. It is an issue of thinking: what questions or perspectives does a poet return to in the course of a writing life? Even so, if I make such an assertion – poet A returns to question B – it must also be understood that so much remains outside that particular consideration. Poets, over time, try out many different ways of making (or dwelling within) the poem. Eccentricity provides electricity too. The ecosystem-poetries written over a lifetime have bio-poetic-diversity baked into the poetisphere.
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Snyder’s Collected Poems: I wonder, could (or would) many of these poems be written today? Wouldn’t there be the buzz-kill accusation of “appropriation” lurking nearby? Indigenous perspectives, Japanese and Chinese Zen and Daoist perspectives, an old-style masculinist (and now unacceptable?) adoration and objectification of a woman’s body. And his writing is among the most important and essential of American poetry of the past 75 years – a substantive opening beyond the initial blasts of Beat poetry into a range of Eastern poetry, texts, and spiritual practices (Zen meditation being at the heart of it all). Snyder’s writing anticipates and grounds the ecopoetics of the present in wholistic indigenous relationships to the planet.
And the poems themselves – perhaps no one other than Thoreau (in the two million words of his Journal) – has written as intensely precise an ongoing work of such careful observation, while very often avoiding resorting to an Emersonian allegorizing of natural observation. Precise vision adequate unto itself, as in “Looking for Nothing”:
Look in the eye of a hawk
The inmost ring of a log
And though I will mostly be quoting short passages often from shorter poems, Snyder is a master of long poem sequences, as most clearly seen in Mountains and Rivers Without End. Like Thoreau, who wrote (by hand!) two million words for his Journal, the physical labor of Snyder’s writing (and he is a poet of Work) is impressive if not astounding as one reads a thousand (crowded) pages.
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As a young, beginning poet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I treasured Snyder’s poetry: Regarding Wave; Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems; his presentation of Han Shan. (I actually traveled to China in the early 1990s and visited Han Shan’s primary temple and another temple important to Han Shan’s wanderings.) Snyder offered a poetry of immediacy, of a valued sacred everydayness, and a way of revering life on this planet. Along with a host of others of that particular moment in time in Northern California – I grew up in San Jose, spent a summer in Berkeley, and went to college in Palo Alto – Snyder’s example enticed me and many others into a study and experience of Zen practice. At the prompting of writers such as R. H. Blyth, Paul Reps, Philip Kapleau, D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and others, Zen practice seemingly became a necessary part of living in the Bay Area in the 1960sand 1970s. In addition, Snyder made the fusion of family life, spiritual practice, nature as home, myth, a turn to Eastern texts, a respect for indigenous cultures, and the study of poetry all seem part of an integrated holistic learning to live an ethical, spiritually engaged life. For me, that planting of the Zen-seed took root thirty years later when I began a daily practice and eventually took the noble precepts and received my Buddhist name (myo shin dai kei) in the jukai (lay ordination) ceremony. I think that Snyder showed me a way that led me to a deep reading of Thoreau’s Journal and, eventually, an ongoing dive into a range of Chinese and Japanese Zen writers, from Dōgen to Lao Tzu to Bodhidharma. Snyder had the aura of a kind of wisdom that presented a broad pathway for future reading, writing, and living. Thank you, Gary!
His Collected Poems reads like a deeply extended investigation into how to live. Poetry was not something done on the side; poetry was the record of a deliberate thoughtful practice in daily living.
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Snyder’s poems are built out of words-as-things, an approach articulated fully as early as “Riprap,” which 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:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things.
A distinctive quality of Snyder’s word-things manifests itself in a musicality and rhythm of heavily stressed phrases and lines (as in Section 6 of the Burning chapter of Myths & Texts):
My clutch and your clutch
batter the same bough
Elliptical, bird-light
stink of spilled wine.
. . .
March wind
blows the bright dawn
apricot blossoms down.
Note the way that the insistent double-stressed line endings (your clutch, same bough, bird-light, spilled wine, March wind, bright dawn) give way to a beautifully soft last line: apricot blossoms down.
It is a music (to my ears) much like a determined, well-balanced walk along a trail. (I also hear echoes of the heavily end-stressed lines of Pound’s Cantos and of many translations of classical Chinese and Japanese poetry.)
Often, those heavily stressed lines are an intimate part of Snyder’s precise observations, as in the beginning of “Old Pond” (from Axe Handles):
Blue mountain white snow gleam
Through pine bulk and slender needle-sprays,
little hemlock half in shade.
ragged rocky skyline,
single clear flat nuthatch call:
down from the treetrunks
up through time.
The close-together heavily stressed syllables feel like they arise from a solid grounding by the poet in place and time.
*
Snyder projects a kind of romantic adventuring, a heroism of one involved in a quest at once spiritual and physical. Many poems themselves articulate that experience – one which I and many others found deeply appealing as we began the adventures of our own early adult writing lives. It’s the kind of notation for the poem “It” that inspired many of us:
[Reading Blake in a cowshed during a typhoon
on an island in the East China Sea]
Going to graduate school (as many of us who loved poetry did in the 1970s) hardly felt like adventure enough to become a true poet or to know the way!
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If poetry is to be a path from which one learns how to live, Snyder learns and articulates a global perspective with roots in many different cultures, especially indigenous cultures. That perspective, perhaps best and initially put forward in Turtle Island (for which Snyder received the Pulitzer Prize in 1975) begins with an introductory note which now feels prescient and ever more urgent:
“Turtle Island – the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to “North America” in recent years. Also, an idea found world-wide, of the earth, or cosmos even, sustained by a great turtle or serpent-of-eternity.
A name: that we may see ourselves more accurately on this continent of watersheds and life-communities-plant zones, physiographic provinces, culture areas; following natural boundaries. The “U.S.A.” and its states and counties are arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here.
The poems speak of place, and energy-pathways that sustain life. Each living being is a swirl in the flow, a formal turbulence, a “song.” The land, the planet itself, is also a living being – at another pace.”
That perspective had been thought out and worked on by Snyder years earlier, as we see in “Plain Talk,” begun in 1969 and included as the concluding section of Turtle Island:
“Position: Man is but a part of the fabric of life – dependent on the whole fabric for his very existence. As the most highly developed tool-using animal, he must recognize that the unknown evolutionary destinies of other life forms are to be respected, and act as gentle steward of the earth’s community of being.
Situation: There are now too many human beings, and the problem is growing rapidly worse. It is potentially disastrous not only for the human race but for most other life forms.”
*
Wisdom poets are sometimes prone to lose their sense of humor. Not Snyder, as in passages from one of my favorite late poems, “Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh,”
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers,
Because it leaps forward and backward, is an endless sniffer and searcher,
Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,
And it winks when it goes out
And puts word-heaps into hoards for me, dozens of pockets of gold under boulders
in streambeds, identical seedpods strong on a vine, or it stores bins and bolts;
And I lose them and find them again,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at “delete,”
so it teaches of impermanence and pain.
*
Perhaps Snyder’s legacy is best stated in a key page from his 2015 book This Present Moment:
This present moment
that lives on
to become
long ago
*
Before giving a reading at the University of Virginia, Gary Snyder visited the old tenant farmer’s house (and many thousand acres of trails and walking rights) where I lived in 1972 or 1973. A small group of us walked and talked, and Gary said the Virginia mountains outside of Charlottesville reminded him of Japan. A number of years later (in the early 1980s?), I had dinner with Snyder and a group of others in a pre-reading meal in downtown San Jose prior to Gary’s reading at San Jose State. I was staying in San Jose with my grandmother Fanya (who lived on her own into her early nineties), and when I was getting ready to go to the dinner gathering, Fanya looked at me and said, “Vut [what] Hankie, you’re going out to dinner looking like that?” I explained to her that I was comfortable wearing nice clothes, even a coat and tie, but that this poet was coming down from the mountains (Sierra Nevada mountains), and that it would be inappropriate to wear something too dressy, so I had on jeans and a comfortable shirt. I even told her that I had brought khaki pants and an ironed white dress shirt, but that I knew what was appropriate for the dinner. When I showed up, Snyder was wearing khaki pants and a nicely ironed white dress shirt. The reading was great!
*
Rodger’s work, and Rachel’s, and Gary’s – they teach us (and themselves) how to read.
They are each, also, a working out of one’s inheritance – Rodger as noted in his essay at the back of the book (and discussed elsewhere in my essay); Rachel – through theory, Oppen, a non-flat-footed feminism (developed within the great community of women poets involved with the amazing journal HOW(ever), published from May 1983 to January 1992); Snyder of Han Shan, “the East,” Zen, and the Beat community, and Thoreau and Muir.
And if it has not yet become clear, on a personal level, that is what each of these poets have taught me, lessons and perspectives which I hope have nourished my own fifty-five years of writing poetry. From Rodger, I continue to learn direct and indirect (perhaps intrinsic) ways to be a Jewish poet. From Rachel, the importance of philosophical thinking and reading as a key nutrient for a long writing life. From Gary, Zen Buddhist practice and a finely tuned clarity of observation – two essentials for a healthy, sustainable writing life.
*
These books are a serious self-reckoning. They strike me as three very fine responses to what Dōgen (in the 13thcentury) wrote in his essay “Fukanzazengi”: “You have gained the pivotal opportunity of human form. Do not use your time in vain.” Dōgen urges us “to apply yourselves to the way that points directly at reality,” for if you do so, “your treasure-store will open of itself, and you will use it at will.” (My quotations make use of both Kazuaki Tanahashi’s translation and Carl Bielefeld’s translation.) These three poets each show us wonderful ways to honor this pivotal (and brief and impermanent) opportunity of being in human form.
*
Perhaps as poets such as Kamenetz, DuPlessis, and Snyder continue to write poems, to evolve, to change, to question, all “new” poems become midrashim, a commentary (implicitly or explicitly) and addition to the conversation begun by prior poems. This conversation is one that we as readers and poets join. I give thanks for the exemplary teaching, wisdom, and persistence of these three poets as they have each, in different ways, shown us complicated and lovely ways of living in, with, and by poetry.
*
Before I offer a concluding perspective or two, I feel compelled to return to Rodger’s The Missing Jew, as the title continues to provoke a response. The missing Jews makes himself present – and no longer missing – by way of the poems and the presence they create. Being Jewish – being anything and anyone? – involves choosing: which stories, which prayers, which ways of writing. Judaism may be characterized by the collision between an affirmed monotheism and the unnameable (and unrepresentable). Something will always be missing. From a historical perspective, in light of the darkness of the 20th-century, there are too many reasons why many Jews remain missing.
*
At the end of this essay-review, I first want to apologize: as I return and return to tinker with the essay, I am struck by how much I have left out. I wish I had gone more deeply into individual poems, but then perhaps the essay would become an unwieldy book? I return, then, to where I began, asking and thinking about how best to honor these books, how best to pay tribute to what they are and what they say and instruct. In some senses the answers are simple: continue to read their writing; let their writing continue to suggest ways for us to do our own writing and our own living in the world.
I am struck by how the writing of all three moves well past what might be called (mere) self-understanding. Too often, the writing of poetry (or the practice of meditation) is presented as a path toward self-understanding. I would like to present an alternative perspective (with apologies in advance to Rodger, for I will be quoting from Buddhist rather than Jewish sources due to what I have at hand and what feels most familiar and applicable).
Their writings are not simply an ongoing embellishment of initial accomplishments. And yet, as with almost any poet, perhaps all?, there are some essential concerns and stylistic elements that like a mineral deposit in a granite cliff create a visible streak. And yes, all three poets exhibit varying degrees of restlessness, experimentation, and change in their work. Within that overall amalgam, I’d rather pay attention to the knowledge and vision that is not so much directed at self-knowledge (though self-knowledge may be a precursor to and inseparable from that deeper, broader vision).
In Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, poem #7, what I am suggesting about these three poets get stated rather clearly, though the three translations I will quote all have a slightly different emphasis. David Hinton’s translation of the concluding two lines of the poem have a stark clarity:
If you aren’t free of yourself
how will you ever become yourself?
The self that one becomes by being free of oneself is a much larger, more fully integrated self than a primarily western psychological composite.
Thomas Meyer embeds Lao Tzu’s observation within other lines of the poem:
heaven and earth
have been around
a long time
because they take
no interest
in themselves
they last
a long time
this way the last
are first
whoever forgets themselves
are well-remembered
Ursula Le Guin’s translation too offers a slightly different perspective:
So wise souls
leaving self behind
move forward,
and setting self aside
stay centered.
Why let the self go?
To keep what the soul needs.
Shunryu Suzuki, in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, though not writing about the Tao Te Ching, addresses the peculiar nature of meditation practice and what happens over many years of that practice, observations that I find apt for what takes place over many years of writing poetry, where, often, a narrower version of self-understanding predominates:
We must make some effort, but we must forget ourselves in the effort we make.
You must be true to your own way until at last you actually come to the point where you see it is necessary to forget all about yourself.
One might reasonably ask, what then is of greater interest and import than knowing oneself? For poets, many years of practice may school one from seeking an idiosyncratic personal style and vision into a more humbling sense of one’s participation in a conversation – poetry – that has a breadth and depth and history so much greater than what me me me in this present moment wants to have heard.
I return to one of the most important directives found in George Oppen’s poetry, in “World, World –”
Soul searchings, these prescriptions,
Are a medical faddism, an attempt to escape,
To lose oneself in the mystical self.
The self is no mystery, the mystery is
That there is something for us to stand on.
We want to be here.
The act of being, the act of being
More than oneself.
Oppen writes (in the lines that precede the passage I have just quoted) that “’Thought leaps on us’ because we are here. That is the fact of the matter.” The poetry of Kamenetz, DuPlessis, and Snyder leaps on us and continues to do so, calling upon us to think more and to think anew. These three poets are, in different ways, each interested in turning our attention to the mystery of this world and to the complex paths of being more than oneself. That precious and deeply intriguing self exists as a part of a much larger world – of all that is or was in being. And yes, our treasured texts (a key part of Dōgen’s treasure-store) – Jewish, Buddhist, feminist, philosophical, ecological, scientific – are part of that larger world, as are the poems themselves that surpass a merely personal narration, acknowledging that our own substance is inseparable from and not superior to all that we exist within.
It is not an easy task (though often a very pleasant one) to think about three amazing instances of forty, fifty, sixty years of a writing life. What to make of it, what to say about it pales before what the writing itself is. I don’t think it is a stretch say that their writing is part of why “we want to be here.”
[1] See my “Travelling many direction’d crossings”: The Poetry of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, pp. 34-59, in Opposing Poetries, Volume 2: Readings, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022 by Rodger Kamenetz, published by Ben Yehuda Press on August 23, 2022, 46 pages, $19.95 paperback.
Selected Poems 1980-2020 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, published by Chax Press on September 1, 2022, 352 pages, $32.00 paperback.
Collected Poems by Gary Snyder, published by Library of America on June 21, 2022, 1,000 pages, $45.00 hardcover