Cold Mountain

Pulled Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems by Gary Snyder off the book shelf. Snyder's work continue to resonate. He just won a prestigious award for his work. He might be described as a nature poet, but Snyder goes much deeper. The judges who gave him an award called him a contemporary devotional poet.

His translations of the Cold Mountain poems of Han Shan, still resonate as well.
Here is #11



Spring water in the green creek is clear

Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white

Silent knowledge - the spirit is enlightened of itself

Contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness.



Snyder reaches back more than 1200 years to find a poet who speaks to him about living in the natural world, a poet who wrote his lines on rocks and trees on the side of a wild mountain. As he learns about Han Shan, he is also basing his own poems on his experience in the wild, as a lookout in the North Cascades and on a trail crew in Yosemite.

'Riprap' by Gary Snyder

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,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.


Why does Snyder still resonate? Will his poems speak to some future reader the way Han Shan spoke to Snyder, and to modern readers?

Richard Gray, writing about Snyder in American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, quotes him:
'I hold the most archaic values on earth', Snyder insists, 'They go back to the Paleolithic'; 'I try to hold history and the wilderness in mind', he has added, 'that my poems may approach the true nature of things, and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times'."

Snyder moves slow, and his poetry reaches far back in time. Snyder's poems move through us like the slow grinding of the earth's plates.