51 Facts About Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese.

For many years, Gary Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis and for a time served as a member of the California Arts Council.

Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco, California, to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder.

At the age of seven, Gary Snyder was laid up for four months by an accident.

In 1942, following his parents' divorce, Gary Snyder moved to Portland, Oregon, with his mother and his younger sister, Anthea.

Gary Snyder married Alison Gass in 1950; they separated after seven months, and divorced in 1952.

Gary Snyder graduated with a dual degree in anthropology and literature in 1951.

Gary Snyder spent the following few summers working as a timber scaler at Warm Springs, developing relationships with its people that were rooted less in academia.

Gary Snyder encountered the basic ideas of Buddhism and, through its arts, some East Asian traditional attitudes toward nature.

Gary Snyder went to Indiana University with a graduate fellowship to study anthropology.

Gary Snyder worked for two summers in the North Cascades in Washington as a fire lookout, on Crater Mountain in 1952 and Sourdough Mountain in 1953.

Gary Snyder found himself barred from working for the government due to his association with the Marine Cooks and Stewards.

Back in San Francisco, Gary Snyder lived with Whalen, who shared his growing interest in Zen.

Gary Snyder studied ink and wash painting under Chiura Obata and Tang dynasty poetry under Ch'en Shih-hsiang.

Gary Snyder continued to spend summers working in the forests, including one summer as a trail-builder in Yosemite.

Gary Snyder spent some months in 1955 and 1956 living in a cabin outside Mill Valley, California with Jack Kerouac.

Gary Snyder met Allen Ginsberg when the latter sought Gary Snyder out on the recommendation of Kenneth Rexroth.

Gary Snyder read his poem "A Berry Feast" at the poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco that heard the first reading of Ginsberg's poem "Howl" and marked the emergence into mainstream publicity of the Beats.

Independently, some of the Beats, including Whalen, had become interested in Zen, but Gary Snyder was one of the more serious scholars of the subject among them, preparing in every way he could think of for eventual study in Japan.

Gary Snyder developed a friendship with Philip Yampolsky an eminent translator and scholar of Zen Buddhism, who took him around Kyoto.

Gary Snyder turned one room into a zendo, with about six regular participants.

Gary Snyder became the first foreign disciple of Rinzai Roshi Oda Sesso, the new abbot of Daitoku-ji.

Gary Snyder married Kyger on February 28,1960, immediately after her arrival in Japan, which Fuller Sasaki insisted they do, if they were to live together and be associated with the Nichibei Daiichi Zen Kyokai,.

Gary Snyder received the Zen precepts and his dharma name of Chofu, and lived occasionally as a de facto monk, but never registered to become a priest, planning eventually to return to the United States to "turn the wheel of the dharma".

Much of Gary Snyder's poetry expresses experiences, environments, and insights involved with the work he has done for a living: logger, fire-lookout, steam-freighter crew, translator, carpenter, and itinerant poet, among other things.

Gary Snyder was the inspiration for the Japhy Ryder character in Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums.

In 1966, Gary Snyder joined Allen Ginsberg, Richard Baker, future Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center, and Kriyananda aka Donald J Walters, to buy 100 acres in the San Juan Ridge area of the Sierra-Nevada foothills, north of Nevada City, Northern California.

Gary Snyder devoted a section at the end of the book to his translations of eighteen poems by Kenji Miyazawa.

Gary Snyder continued to publish poetry throughout the 1970s, much of it reflecting his re-immersion in life on the American continent and his involvement in the back-to-the-land movement in the Sierra foothills.

Gary Snyder wrote numerous essays setting forth his views on poetry, culture, social experimentation, and the environment.

In 1979, Gary Snyder published He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth, based on his Reed thesis.

In 1986, Gary Snyder became a professor in the writing program at the University of California, Davis.

Gary Snyder was married to Uehara for twenty-two years; the couple divorced in 1989.

Gary Snyder married Carole Lynn Koda, who would write Homegrown: Thirteen brothers and sisters, a century in America, in 1991, and remained married to her until her death of cancer.

Gary Snyder had been born in the third generation of a successful Japanese-American farming family, noted for its excellent rice.

Gary Snyder shared Buddhism, extensive travels, and work with Snyder, and performed independent work as a naturalist.

In 2004 Gary Snyder published Danger on Peaks, his first collection of new poems in twenty years.

Gary Snyder was awarded the Levinson Prize from the journal Poetry, the American Poetry Society Shelley Memorial Award, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and won the 1997 Bollingen Prize for Poetry and, that same year, the John Hay Award for Nature Writing.

Gary Snyder has the distinction of being the first American to receive the Buddhism Transmission Award from the Japan-based Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation.

Gary Snyder uses mainly common speech-patterns as the basis for his lines, though his style has been noted for its "flexibility" and the variety of different forms his poems have taken.

Gary Snyder typically uses neither conventional meters nor intentional rhyme.

Gary Snyder has always maintained that his personal sensibility arose from his interest in Native Americans and their involvement with nature and knowledge of it; indeed, their ways seemed to resonate with his own.

William Carlos Williams was another influence, especially on Gary Snyder's earliest published work.

Gary Snyder commented in interviews, "I have some concerns that I'm continually investigating that tie together biology, mysticism, prehistory, general systems theory".

Gary Snyder argues that poets, and humans in general, need to adjust to very long timescales, especially when judging the consequences of their actions.

Gary Snyder is among those writers who have sought to dis-entrench conventional thinking about primitive peoples that has viewed them as simple-minded, ignorantly superstitious, brutish, and prone to violent emotionalism.

The "re-tribalization" of the modern, mass-society world envisioned by Marshall McLuhan, with all of the ominous, dystopian possibilities that McLuhan warned of, subsequently accepted by many modern intellectuals, is not the future that Gary Snyder expects or works toward.

Gary Snyder's is a positive interpretation of the tribe and of the possible future.

Gary Snyder rejects the perspective which portrays nature and humanity in direct opposition to one another.

Gary Snyder is widely regarded as a member of the Beat Generation circle of writers: he was one of the poets that read at the famous Six Gallery event, and was written about in one of Kerouac's most popular novels, The Dharma Bums.

Gary Snyder himself has some reservations about the label "Beat", but does not appear to have any strong objection to being included in the group.