The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia

by Gary Snyder

Overview

For the full course of his remarkable career, Gary Snyder has continued his study of Eastern culture and philosophies. From the Ainu to the Mongols, from Hokkaido to Kyoto, from the landscapes of China to the backcountry of contemporary Japan, from the temples of Daitokoji to the Yellow River Valley, it is now clear how this work has influenced his poetry, his stance as an environmental and political activist, and his long practice of Zen. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Asia became a vocation for Snyder. While most American writers looked to the capitals of Europe for their inspiration, Sndyer looked East. American letters is profoundly indebted to this geographical choice.



Long rumored to exist, The Great Clod collects more than a dozen chapters, several published in The Coevolution Quarterly almost forty years ago when Snyder briefly described this work as "The China Book," and several others, the majority, never before published in any form. "Summer in Hokkaido," "Wild in China," "Ink and Charcoal, " "Stories to Save the World," "Walking the Great Ridge," these essays turn from being memoirs of travel to prolonged considerations of art, culture, natural history and religion. Filled with Snyder's remarkable insights and briskly beautiful descriptions, this collection adds enormously to the major corpus of his work, certain to delight and instruct his readers now and forever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640093911
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	06/09/2020
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Gary Snyder is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry and prose. Since 1970 he has lived in the watershed of the South Yuba River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, Snyder has also been awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award. His 1992 collection, No Nature, was a National Book Award finalist, and in 2008 he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Snyder is a poet, environmentalist, educator and Zen Buddhist.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Summer in Hokkaido 3

All He Sees Is Blue 9

The Great Clod 19

"Wild" in China 43

Ink and Charcoal 63

Walls Within Walls 75

Beyond Cathay 111

Wolf-Hair Brush 119

Editorial Reviews

"His newest book of prose, The Great Clod is a series of essays on Asia's ecological history, combining culture and politics in a way that is, unsurprisingly, poetic and graceful. The Great Clod may be slim but its scope is immense."—The Japan Times

"Classical poetry, calligraphy, the best source of temple incense—all figure in the text, which has something of the feel of a valediction. Elegant and thoughtful, with much to read between the lines in commentary on a long life's work. Students and admirers of Snyder will be enchanted and intrigued." —Kirkus

"Each essay furnishes a graceful, very conversational (sentence fragments and all), but keenly well–informed enticement to pursue its subject further. This kind of friendly, even compassionate, mode of instruction comes, of course, from the American arguably most responsible for spreading appreciation of East Asia among North Americans. If this little book should prove Snyder's last word on East Asia, it is wonderfully enough." —Booklist

"Snyder is an elder statesman of the natural world and the tribal unions of poetry. He has a body of work as original as predecessors Williams Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens."—The Bloomsbury Review

"His greatest strength—a quiet and profound elegance, an ability to write a simple phrase that seems to have been echoing through human consciousness for three or four thousand years."—Lewis MacAdams, California Magazine

"This poet's great gift has always been perfect visual clarity...and, needless to say, derives from Snyder's vision in the larger sense."—Paul Berman, Village Voice

"What thoughtful beauty! How skillfully Gary Snyder interfuses the practical knowledge of an animal sense with story, language, and song. True teachers in American are now an endangered species. I learn so much from this good man's perception, humor, discipline, and love for this world."—James Hillman

From the Publisher

2016-03-01
The noted poet and essayist returns with a deceptively small book enfolding a lifetime's worth of study. Snyder (This Present Moment, 2015, etc.) was an environmentalist before that word was widely applied, "radicalized," he memorably writes, "by the ghosts of the original trees still hanging out by their stumps and telling me what had gone on" in the overlogged forests of the Puget Sound. He has also been a student of Asian religions for seven decades. Both interests inform this slender volume, which reads as a kind of personalized digest of scholarship and history blended with memoir and travelogue—a book, in short, not quite like any other but trademark Snyder, its learning lightly worn but profoundly stated. The author begins on a rueful note that will be repeated elsewhere: that he had imagined, in his exuberant youth, that by going to China and Japan he would be immersing himself in civilizations that treated the land better than the materialist West did. Not so, he writes with wisdom gained: "large, civilized societies inevitably have a harsh effect on the natural environment, regardless of philosophical or religious values." His reading of East Asian history is a kind of understated study of the Fall of Man, tinged with anarchist morals; in the place of "a free, untaxed, self-sustaining people" rises a bureaucratized, state-governed society amenable to such things as slavery and despoliation. Religious traditions such as Taoism rise in critique, offering other objects of striving than the material: says one Buddhist exhortation, "the Perfect Way is without difficulty: strive hard!" Classical poetry, calligraphy, the best source of temple incense—all figure in the text, which has something of the feel of a valediction. Elegant and thoughtful, with much to read between the lines in commentary on a long life's work. Students and admirers of Snyder will be enchanted and intrigued.

Kirkus Reviews