Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco, California, and is associated with the Pacific Northwest, the setting for much of his poetry. In 1956 he began an extended sojourn in Japan and India, where he studied Zen Buddhism in a monastery and visited sacred sites. His thoroughgoing interest in Asian philosophies and his concern for wild nature, meditative states, and alternative ways of living made him one of the most popular of American poets of the 1960s.
More By This Poet
Riprap
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:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
...
Piute Creek
One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers,...