Gary Snyder

Cross the Golden Gate and drive north into the fog, past the houseboats jumbled along the Sausalito waterfront, up into the canyons beneath Mount Tamalpais, and you come to somewhere quieter, more isolated, and for a time considerably stranger than the city across the bay.

Here were poets and mystics discovering Zen, artists and eccentrics building lives on houseboats, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac wandering around Mount Tam.

Alan Watts reimagining the spiritual life.

Philip K. Dick questioning reality.

who really linked the Beat Generation directly to the Grateful Dead.

I mean, he spent a lot of time hanging out, partying, and sharing his wisdom with the Grateful Dead.

Through poets like Lou Welch, another Beat figure who went to Reed College with Gary Snyder and Philip Whelan, and followed them to Marin County, and ended up in a relationship with a woman named Magda Craig, a talented artist in her own right, who had a son named Hugh Craig, who would later change his name to Huey Lewis.

So there were people who were actively connecting these generations.

He was trying to find a soul to this country that he couldn't find.

And he was using his own Catholicism, which wasn't quite enough, so he sort of transitioned into Buddhism, which is something Gary Snyder, who's another beat poet, got him into, and Kerouac wrote Dharma Bums.

What's it called? Dharma Bums.

Now, here we go.

I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it and is fed upon and is native and maker.

Wendell Berry was not a Buddhist practitioner, but he was a good friend to Gary Snyder, and there's a whole book about their letters to each other, of their Buddhist poet and Christian-ish farmer poet.

Wendell Berry knew a thing or two about Dharma.

And so did many others, you know, Bodhisattva Dolly Parton.

I'm not disparaging that.

But I'm saying, as the poet Gary Snyder says, you can make a home.

Just stay somewhere and figure out how to live in a particular place.

That's all.

Okay.

Gary Snyder, you know-

Yeah

... people like that.

I wind up here?

And there were people who genuinely, you know, it's close to the Sierras and Gary Snyder was still there.

And it was very much about your, your tales of wandering through the forest.

And so, you know, looking around for, someone who you know possibly understood me and there was another guy over there um whose name was steve and we got to talking and he also didn't write nature poetry and over the course of time he became friends um and but we were also sort of panicking because it's a two-year program.

And I think maybe that's what Marin was calling on me to do, put it all in one place so that other people could experience it and to solve the mystery and to find out that, in fact, yes, there was a divergent, distinctive awakening that took place in my hometown of Marin County.

Do you think that one reason there hasn't been this sort of regional explanation is that people who are, say, exploring the growth of nature writing and poetry in America in the mid-century are like, OK, it's like Gary Snyder and it's the Bolinas poets or, you know, people who are approaching, you know, kind of George Lucas and film are like they go down that route.

And what this what taking this regional approach allows you to do is to sort of draw all the connections that individual disciplines don't do.

Absolutely.

We got in, got great access, and had a wonderful time.

Just one of the smaller stories of the Renaissance there.

Why don't we go to where you begin the book? So, you know, if you tell someone Eastern philosophy, self-sufficiency, interest in indigenous, you know, they might be like flashing Gary Snyder.

But you have a bunch of other figures who were also crucial, even if they became, you know, not necessarily international or globally famous.

because he lived in and out of America, he translated texts, he wrote essays on Zen Buddhism that began to attract members of the American intelligentsia.

Particularly in the post-war period, post-Second World War period, you have the influence of Buddhism on everybody from John Cage to abstract expressionist painters, to perhaps most famously, members of the so-called Beat Generation, like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Diane de Prima, and so forth.

I'm working on a book on Buddhism and the Beats.

That's another thing.