Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975, this
volume of poetry brought expanded national attention to gary snyder. While in his previous
two collections of poetry, The Back Country (1968)
and Regarding Wave (1970), he tended to delineate
himself as an international traveler and transient
counterculture practitioner, he defined himself
unmistakably as an inhabitant of North America,
a person who was settling in for a long process of
cultural transformation through the promotion of
reinhabitation. For the first time since Myths &
Texts (1960), Snyder published a collection that
consists of poems that were written entirely in the
United States from the point of his permanent return from Japan with his wife Masa and their son
Kai through 1974. This sense of reinhabitation is
reinforced by some of the prose pieces that make
up the final section of the volume.
The title of the book alludes to Native American depictions of the North American continent as
a giant turtle, and its symbolic function as a counter to the concepts of the United States, Canada,
and Mexico are made explicit in Snyder’s “Introductory Note”: “the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people
who have been living here for millennia. . . . The
‘U.S.A.’ and its states and counties are arbitrary
and inaccurate impositions on what is really here.”
He also clarifies the purpose of that title and his
orientation in the book toward reinhabitation as a
political and environmental strategy: “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. . . . Hark again to those
roots, to see our ancient solidarity, and then to the
work of being together on Turtle Island.”
Turtle Island contains nearly 60 poems and is
divided into three sections: “Manzanita,” “Magpie’s
Song,” and “For the Children.” The prose section is
titled “Plain Talk.” Snyder mixes together a variety
of poetic styles in these pages, including the two
very distinct kinds of poems that are displayed first
in Riprap and Myths & Texts but also other types of
poems, such as songs (for example, “Without” and
“Magpie’s Song”), prayers (for example, “Prayer
for the Great Family”), and histories (for example,
“What Happened Here Before”) as well as diatribes
(“Front Lines” and “LMFBR” and narratives (for
example, “Two Immortals” and “The Call of the
Wild”). Readers will also find here the majority of
the Snyder poems that are most often quoted and
reprinted in anthologies, such as “I Went Into the
Maverick Bar,” “Front Lines,” “For the Children,”
and “Tomorrow’s Song.”
The “Manzanita” section was originally published as a separate chapbook and has a clearly
Western focus. The first two poems look back to
the history of the Anasazi in the American Southwest and then link Native American history with
the circumpolar bear cult, emphasizing the global
linkages of primitive cultures, which nevertheless
remained highly place specific. He also has a pair
of poems that contrast the use of road kills as an
act of conservation and ecological responsibility in
opposition to the wasteful and cruel treatment of
animals by modern agribusiness and sport hunting.
The fifth poem of this section, “I Went into The
Maverick Bar,” is a bit unusual for Snyder in the
way that it emphasizes the “I” of the poem from
the outset. In this poem, Snyder both describes his
differences as a long-haired, earring-wearing freak
from the heartland cowboys in the bar, but he also
emphasizes his kinship with them and their shared
heritage. They are not the enemy, on the one
hand, but his invocation of Lenin’s revolutionary
politics in the closing quote of the poem, “What
is to be done,” on the other hand emphasizes his
sense of the need to transform the contemporary
culture that he believes they blindly uphold. Snyder also reiterates the importance of harmonious
family life in “The Bath” and extends that sense
of family to encompass other creatures in “Prayer
for the Great Family.” In the middle of the “Manzanita” section, Snyder reprints “Spell Against
Demons” from The Fudo Trilogy, a chapbook that
was originally published in a limited edition in
1973. Both humorous and serious in intent, it is a
Buddhist-based poem that is meant to exorcize the
demons that are plaguing this continent, reminding readers that Snyder intends to integrate his
practice of Buddhism with the native spiritual beliefs that he has upheld in the earlier poems. But
let there be no doubt: Snyder has not eschewed direct action, as evident in the poem “Front Lines,”
which opposes destructive urban development and
concludes: “And here we must draw / Our line.”
But Snyder is careful not to suggest that militancy
guarantees victory, as evidenced by the concern reflected in “The Call of the Wild.” In this poem he
worries about the destruction that is already being
accomplished by contemporary consumer culture’s
“war against earth.” The last three poems of this
section, “Source,” “Manzanita,” and “Charms,”
taken together, suggest that salvation, victory, and
true knowledge will come from close attention to
the nonhuman world that people must reinhabit
in order to transform the United States into Turtle
Island.
This attitude is further developed through
many of the poems of the next section, “Magpie’s
Song.” Here the magpie has a function similar
to that of the coyote as a trickster who speaks to
and interacts with the human world. As with the
first section, this one contains an eclectic mixture
of different types of poems. The second and third
poems of this section are “The Real Work” and
“Pine Tree Tops.” The first poems emphasizes the
idea that all life is engaged in survival and is just
getting by, whether they are seagulls or humans,
riding the waves and looking for food. The second
poem ends with the ambiguous line, “what do we
know.” If read in complementary fashion, the two
likely meanings of these words combine. The first
functions as a summary of the descriptions in the
poem of the speaker who is out at night, paying
close attention to the life in the woods and learning the details of Turtle Island. The second can
be understood as a question through which the
speaker admits that regardless of how much we
learn we will remain students of the wild, always
ignorant of the mysteries that surround us. This
admission of ignorance, then, becomes one of the
things that “we” must know if people are to reinhabit the land. “Night Herons” continues this type
of theme. The speaker is visiting San Francisco and
while he and his friends go for a walk at night, he
notices all of the animals living amid the machinery of modern society. As the poet celebrates the
coincidence of his return to the city alongside the
return of the night herons, he feels an optimistic
sense of self-renewal as a result of the possibility for
ecological renewal.
The poems mentioned in the previous paragraph all reflect a meditative mood on the part of
the poet. With “The Uses of Light” he shifts into
a more playful, rhyming poetry. Heavily indebted
to Buddhism—particularly Vairocana, the sun
Buddha—the poem also reflects the recognition
that the sun remains the primary source of energy
and, therefore, food and links virtually all life on
the surface of the planet in one interconnected
web. But the poem does not stop there. In the final
stanza, it invokes a Chinese saying about climbing up one level of a tower to expand dramatically
one’s perspective on the surrounding world. This
stanza, then, comments not only on the rest of the
poem and its point about recognizing the interdependence of human life on other life-forms but it
also reiterates the point in “Pine Tree Tops” and
other poems in this section regarding the new to
break out of the perceptual habits promoted by
contemporary culture and to look at life in fresh
ways, such as being thinking of the sun in terms of
the reactions of the “stones,” “trees,” “moths” and
“deer” of the poem. Part of this new perception is
reflected in “It Pleases,” where the poet dismisses
the apparent power of Washington, D.C., because
it does not hold jurisdiction over the material
world that “does what it pleases.”
“Mother Earth: Her Whales,” the most far
reaching of the political poems in Turtle Island,
however, does not take such a sanguine view of the
power of wild nature in the face of governments
and bureaucracies. As Hwa Yol and Petee Jung
note, “It began with a terse foreword in which he
said that everyone came to Stockholm not to give
but rather to take, not to save the planet but to
argue how to divide it up. . . . The poem meant to
defend all the creatures of the earth.” It does so by
pitting the lives in nature against the destruction
of various civilizations, both historic and contemporary, east and west as well as north and south. It
is important to note that Snyder closes with attention to the survival of animals, while nation states
are represented by a dead knight whose eyes vultures are homing in to eat.
The third section of Turtle Island, “For The
Children,” contains just nine poems. Here Snyder
wishes to pass on something to the next generation
and so focuses not on condemnation, concern, or
doubt but on reassurance and practical wisdom.
The opening poem, “O Waters,” functions as a
prayer that invokes rituals of purification and concludes by declaring that all planetary life shares a
mutual fellowship. “Tomorrow’s Song” then turns
to the future. It begins by declaring that the United
States has lost its alleged “mandate” as a governing
body because it refused to include the nonhuman
in its deliberations and laws. The future, therefore,
must rectify this omission and also move beyond a
fossil-fuel-based excessive-consumption culture.
The new future in which the children “will grow
strong on less” will require hard work that is based
on a wilderness-centered philosophy of life. The
next poem, “What Happened Here Before,” provides some historical background for how human
beings came to live the way they do in the part of
California that Snyder, his family, and his community are seeking to reinhabit. The “white man” is
specifically criticized for his exploitation of nature
and the destruction of native cultures. The poem
ends with a challenge: “WE SHALL SEE / WHO
KNOWS / HOW TO BE.”
“Toward Climax,” which logically follows
from the preceding poem, responds to this challenge through a set of contrasts between a historically destructive way of looking at the world and
an alternative life-affirming—all life, not just that
of humans—worldview. The penultimate and title
poem for the section, “For the Children,” presents
a lyrical utopian view of the future and contains an
often repeated closing refrain: “stay together / learn
the flowers / go light.” Some critics have scoffed at
the simplicity of this slogan, but it contains just the
kind of statement that is appropriate for its audience. The next generation must unite and remain
united through all kinds of political, economic,
and cultural adversity and setbacks; they must
learn where they live and what else lives there and
through that learn to respect that life; and they
must abandon the consumerism that is literally
choking Americans to death. “As For Poets” ends
this section and the poetry sections of Turtle Island
in much the way that “Riprap” ended Snyder’s first
volume. It makes a metapoetic statement about
the role of poems and their diversity through the
images of a variety of poets, who are not people
so much as they are whorls of energy in the larger
flow of matter that is seeking consciousness.
“Plain Talk,” the prose section that closes
Turtle Island, contains five short pieces, with the
longest one, “Four Changes,” also being the most
important. Snyder provides a brief introduction to
this essay, which was originally written and distributed in 1969 by means of some 50,000 broadsides
and pamphlets that were distributed freely across
the United States. Here Snyder reprints the original edition with bracketed comments that were
added in 1974. Through sections titled “Population,” “Pollution,” “Consumption,” and “Transportation,” he first describes the crisis in each category
as he sees it unfolding, and then he posits a guide
to action for each. Many of the statements in this
essay elaborate on or clarify themes that are explored in the Turtle Island poems.
“‘Energy Is Eternal Delight,’” although alluding
to William Blake, does not focus on romanticism or
poetry, but instead it addresses a general issue that
is already raised throughout the volume—the looming energy crisis and the danger of a turn to nuclear
power—as well as a specific action—the resistance
of Native Americans to uranium mining in the U.S.
Southwest. “The Wilderness” focuses on the issue
of figuring out how to represent the interests of the
nonhuman in governmental deliberations and turns
to the examples of so-called primitive cultures for
examples of proper practice. This essay in many ways
prefigures the slim prose collection The Old Ways,
which appeared in 1977, and is reprinted as a section
of A Place in Space. “What’s Meant By ‘Here’” makes
an excellent companion to the poem, “What Happeed Here Before” and serves as a demonstration of
bioregional history. “On ‘As For Poets’” provides a
gloss of the poem that ended the “For the Children”
section of the volume and functions, as well, as a
commentary on the volume as a whole. Snyder con
cludes, “The power within—the more you give, the
more you have to give—will still be our source when
coal and oil are long gone, and atoms are left to spin
in peace.” As Katsunori Yamazato so eloquently sums
it up, “‘how to be’ is the central question that Snyder
asks and tries to answer throughout Turtle Island,”
and clearly this closing sentence defines a certain
mode of being. Turtle Island is unquestionably the
most programmatic of all of Snyder’s collections of
poetry; nevertheless, it displays a wide variety of poetic styles and devices, as aesthetic as it is thematic.
Also, it is as humorous and visionary as it is serious
and focused on the moment.
Bibliography
Jung, Hwa Yol, and Petee Jung. “Gary Snyder’s Ecopiety.”
Environmental History Review 14.3 (1990): 75–87.
Murphy, Patrick D. A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and
Prose of Gary Snyder. Corvallis: University of Oregon Press, 2000.
Snyder, Gary. The Back Country. New York: New Directions, 1968.
———. The Fudo Trilogy. Berkeley, Calif.: Shaman
Drum, 1973.
———. Myths & Texts. 1960. New York: New Directions, 1978.
———. The Old Ways. San Francisco: City Lights Books,
1977.
———. A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995.
———. Regarding Wave. New York: New Directions,
1970.
———. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974.
Yamazato, Katsunori. “How to Be in This Crisis: Gary
Snyder’s Cross-Cultural Vision in Turtle Island.”
In Critical Essays on Gary Snyder, edited by Patrick D. Murphy, 230–247. Boston: G. K. Hall,
1990.
Patrick Murphy