A POETRY READING OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

       Gary Snyder    

Wednesday, June 13, 2001

5:00 PM to 6:00 PM

Resources Building Auditorium

1416 Ninth Street

Sacramento, California

 

 

GARY SNYDER writes poetry using great themes of nature and love. He has published eighteen books, translated into more than twenty languages. Snyder brings “together the physical life and the inward life of the spirit to write poetry as solid and yet as constantly changing as the mountains and rivers of his American--and universal--landscape."

A leading spokesperson for "rein habitation"--both in public and through his legendary work--his writing and thought have done much to introduce such concepts as "stewardship," "rein habitation," "bioregion," and "watershed" in both poetic discourse and public policy clearly bonding literary form, social responsibility, ethical conduct and cultural inclusiveness. He has been highly recognized for balancing his literary writing and his public policy environmental efforts with the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the John Hay Award for Nature Writing.

As a spokesperson for "those without voice--the trees, rocks, rivers, and bears--in the political process," Gary Snyder has come to occupy international standing as a representative for the rights and lives of the unvoiced in our societies. As a leading poet/environmentalist of our time, he has been introduced as "a major literary figure of the twentieth century. A major poet and ethical voice in the best-honored traditions of the American Thoreau and the Japanese haiku-master Dogen. His work makes us far more alive and attentive; it reaches into our deepest and best resources, heartens us to the challenges and promises of restoration to a natural place from which many of us now feel ourselves estranged."

Snyder was appointed to the California Arts Council in 1974, and served for six years as an active member of that arts/cultural organization. Snyder was born in San Francisco, and raised in the Pacific Northwest, and his earliest experiences there in the natural and wild worlds imprint his work and thought to this day.

Publications

  • Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (San Francisco: Four Seasons, 1969).
  • Myths and Texts (New York: New Directions, 1960,1978).
  • The Back Country (New York: New Directions, 1968).
  • Earth Household (New York: New Directions, 1969). [Prose]
  • Regarding Wave (New York: New Directions, 1970).
  • Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974). [Pulitzer Prize]
  • The Old Ways (San Francisco: City Lights, 1977). [Prose]
  • Axe Handles (San Francisco: North Point, 1983).
  • He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village ("the Dimensions of a Haida Myth") (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1979). [Prose]
  • Passage Through India (San Francisco: Gray Fox, 1984).
  • Left Out in the Rain (San Francisco: North Point, 1988).
  • The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point, 1990). [Prose]
  • No Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1992)
  • A Place in Space (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995). [Prose]
  • Mountains and Rivers Without End (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996). [Bollingen Prize]
  • The Gary Snyder Reader (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999).