For six decades or more, Gary Snyder has written a poetry of experience. And a poetry, almost always, of a brusque wisdom with the quality—somehow, for me—of the weather in the Pacific Northwest. That lush cold, that abundance in the fog. Here is “For the Children,” from his collection Turtle Island, published in 1974 by New Directions—sounding to me like it was written yesterday, for us and our awful moment:
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
Then the poem lets in the dream, the idealism, and you can’t tell, in the second stanza, if the voice wants to mock or affirm that idealism, that dream:
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
In the third and fourth stanzas—and this is the turn that leaves me blown open—the poet grounds us in the learnings of human experience, lays them down in the language, sturdy and not wasting a letter, as the poem ends: