Poetry Reading 1956 Snyder 1956 (Gary Snyder '51; "Myths and Texts"; Beat Poetry; Anna Mann Cottage; Allen Ginsberg?--not speaking on tape), part 1 of 1

Notes from FileMaker 'Lecturer/Performer' field: Snyder, Gary 1956 (Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder '51)

Notes from FileMaker 'Cross-Reference Titles' field: Copy Windows Media Player-format copy Copy of Reel #1 (assumed) Reel to Reel original is lost. See extra cassette copies: Cat. #1948 & #1959 See CD copy: cat. #447CD (MP3 format)

This copy made from a cassette copy of the lost reel to reel master, by Steven R. Halpern '85 during his student days at Reed College. He brought his cassette to Reed to be copied on 2/13/2008.

Gary Snyder Reading at Reed College (w.Allen Ginsberg) / February 14, 1956 Prepared by John Suiter / February 20, 2008

Snyder's Introductory Remarks to Myths & Texts

"Virtually all the poetry I've been reading is stuff I wrote since I left Reed College. I wrote a lot while I was here, but it no longer amuses me to the extent that I like to bother reading it out loud. Now what I'm going to start off with is a long poem that I'm working on, or a long series of interrelated poems, that will run about 35 to 50 pages, perhaps longer-and I just have selections from that here. The title of it is Myths & Texts-borrowed from the traditional anthropological name for collections of literature from primitive cultures-"myths" being the traditional, symbolic literature that has been handed down and received and isn't changed much, and texts being the literature that they get somebody to just talk-like they get some drunk old Indian to sit down and tell about what it was like when he was a kid-they call that a text. So, considering these as different styles and different types of poetry I've worked the two together some of them being symbolic-literary in sort of a fancy sense-and some of them being in a more direct sense just personal.

"The poem is in three sections-'Groves,' 'Beasts,' and 'Changes' -which is a progression from trees and plants through sentient animal life and the highly variable, changeable, transformable life of human beings finally with an underlying metaphysic of Mahayana Buddhism-so that the final idea of 'Changes' is the final big imaginative apolcalyptic snap of the mind which makes one into a Buddha, an enlightened being. The actual literary references running through this poem, or poems, come from a wide variety of sources, most of them Japanese, Chinese, or American Indian, and a few Occidental things. I haven't done this trying consciously to be fancy, it just happens that these are the literary sources my head has been filled with for the last six or seven years, and when I write this stuff down, it comes out that way.

"'The Groves' is an allusion in a way to the Old Testament notion of the groves of the pagan fertility worship; the groves Ishtar, Atthis, Cybele, Adonis; the groves that Frazer talks about in The Golden Bough, the groves which are the scene [seed?] of all of the ancient Near Eastern religions which the Old Testament is constantly inveighing against. I don't like the Judeo-Christian tradition-one bit. For the reason that it is, I think, totally separated, finally, from Nature-the patriarchal, masculine, rational influence being totally overweighed, or over-valued as against the sort of enlightenment-fertility concern of the pre-Christian-and also the subterranean, occult, and witchcraft traditions that survived in the Western civilization after the establishment of these big fancy, complicated religions that became official and ultimately so square. So, as sort of an epigraph to this poem I'm reading now a quote from the dendrologist George B. Sudworth on the lodgepole pine tree…"

Logging 3

Logging 1 Logging 4

Logging 11

Logging 7

Logging 8

Logging 14

Logging 15

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Introductory Remarks to Section 2: "Beasts"

[12:36] "And that is the end of the 'Groves' section as it was […The second part, about animals, derives a lot from the notion of almost all primitive people-and it's a pretty good notion, really-that animals and people are very interchangeable and can marry and exchange roles with great facility and also that there's great subterranean levels of magic operating in these relationships…"

Hunting 1 / "First Shaman Song"

Hunting 3

Hunting 4

Hunting 6

Hunting 8

"Tiger's Song" / Removed from mss before publication. Originally published in Janus (May 51), the third of "Three Mantic Poems." Later published in Left Out in the Rain.

Hunting 5 / the making of the horn spoon.

Mouse Cat wouldn't finish that mouse Woke us with squeaking Death by water or fire Coals almost dead in the fireplace Newspapers won't make enough heat He spun on his tail, dangled So water it was Across the street and into the rain ditch, full How he wriggled, even half-dead Still in the afternoon, Stranded on a twig right in back of the mailbox Only a trained eye would see it. This poem edited out of published version.

Hunting 11 / "Two dance songs for a four-crowned dancing hat"

Burning 4

Gull came down slantwise over the deck Hit me full in the head -a privelege To be shat by such a white, clean Handsome bird Gone in the fog. This was formerly subsection "d" of the Bird poem. Moved here in reading, cut from final version of the poem.

Hunting 12

"Up the Dosewallips" / Removed from Myths & Texts manuscript before publication. Seems that it was not published finally until being included in the "Atthis" section of Left Out in the Rain. This version is considerably different from the published poem.

Hunting 15

Hunting 16

…………………………………………………………………………………………………… Introduction to Section 3: "Changes" "Now I haven't finished up, I haven't done too much with this last section yet. I've got a lot of poems elsewhere, not here, that go in there, but I haven't stuck it all together yet, so this is really short. The Second Shaman Song…Incidentally, part of the structure of this is based on the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, which is available now in a Bollingen Series translation, and is a very fascinating system of seeing the operations of transformation of nature in terms of sort of poetic images-probably the root, actually, of the aesthetic of haiku-one side of the aesthetic of haiku-the other side would be the Zen tradition and the landscape painting tradition, which places its entire importance on the sudden, intuitive jump of the mind, cutting through all rational or logical folderol to a sort of keen knife-edge cut-through into reality…This is a horse I beat all the time. It's not dead yet, so I guess it's all right. Second Shaman Song-I wrote these shaman songs high on peyote, I don't know what they mean."

Burning 1/ Second Shaman Song

After second shaman song, GS reads the following:

Moonlight in the pasture Radio in the bunkhouse Rising at dawn to piss Horses grazing in the misty field "Can space be destroyed by time?" "You could wait and see," she said. "But not in one place."

This morning, 31 July Crater Mountain 1952 ('That was a lookout I was on') Floating face down in the water bucket a drowned mouse

"Hidden Lake to Sourdough" ('two different lookout stations') -"This is Sourdough" ('a Skagit boy') -"Go ahead Hidden Lake." -"Whatcha doing over there?" (Sourdough back to Hidden Lake) -"Readin some old magazines they have over here." -"Sourdough clear."

"Fording the Flooded Goldie River" / Poem later published in Left Out in the Rain.

Burning 14

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

GS Introductory Remarks to Other Poems

"I'm going to read a few from a series of poems that I just started last spring [1955] and I've had a lot of fun with them, just writing a very simple direct rocky sort of style that I got out of the notion from reading a lot of Chinese poetry, and also I got out of gradually becoming less ashamed of writing about my own experience and what I thought about things and also seeing a lot of Chinese poets were able to combine the personal poem with a type of really sort of classical structure. So I did a series of these, and I'll read a few of them."

The Late Snow and Lumber Strike of the Summer of Fifty-four / Publ. Riprap. Poem for a Stone Girl at Sanchi / Publ. The Back Country

Milton by Firelight / (publ. Riprap)

A Dry Day Just Before the Rainy Season / Published in The Back Country

For a Far-out Friend / (publ. Riprap)

You've Gone Cold / Published in Left Out in the Rain.

Lines on a Carp (for an Apocalypse) / Published in Left Out in the Rain

The Lookouts / Publ. Left Out in the Rain

A Villanelle / "Barely retained, some image of that pain" / Never published ?

Epistemological Fancies / Publ. Left Out in the Rain

Poem Left in Sourdough Mountain Lookout / Publ. Left Out in the Rain

Under the Skin of It / Publ. Left Out in the Rain

To Hell with Your Fertility Cult / Publ. The Back Country

Praise for Sick Women / Published in Riprap

Mid-August at Sourdough Lookout / Published in Riprap

Numerous Broken Eggs / Published in Left Out in the Rain

A Walk / Published in The Back Country

Piute Creek / Published in Riprap

[See Also: Previous day's poetry reading w/Allen Ginsberg: CD copy, Cat. #373CD; Contains one of the earliest existing recordings of Ginsberg reading "Howl" (Winter/Spring, 1956, as per: John Suiter (Photographer & Snyder scholar; "Poets on the Peaks") Quest calendar for Feb. 13, 1956 lists: "Monday Poetry Reading, Anna Mann 8:00"; presume this is the reading in question, when Ginsberg and Snyder were in Portland. [Alice T. Moss, '51 was in attendance that night at Anna Mann, when Ginsberg read Howl--as per conversation with Alice Moss to Mark Kuestner, 8/16/2007; Also, Ruth Leeds Love '58 was in attendance as per her email to Mark Kuestner, 2/13/2008]]