Buddhist, “deep ecologist,” and Pulitzer Prize‒winning poet Gary Snyder is, as Eliot Weinberger wrote in the Paris Review, “a rarity in the United States: an immensely popular poet whose work is taken seriously by other poets.” The Santa Barbara Independent caught up with Snyder over the phone ahead of his Santa Barbara appearance An Evening of Poetry and Conversation, Wednesday, November 4, 8 p.m., at UCSB’s Campbell Hall.
In one of your earlier poems, “Axe Handles,” you quote a folk song in the Shih Jing, the Classic of Poetry: “‘In making the handle / Of an axe / By cutting wood with an axe / The model is indeed near at hand.’” The poems in your new collection, This Present Moment, vary considerably in form from poem to poem. Can you talk a little about how the form of a poem decides itself for you or is decided by some model “near at hand”? I have written several times over the years that my approach to poetic form is to, in part, allow the poem to find its own form. This is of course not entirely literally applied. Most of my poetry is what is sometimes called “open form” poetics, which can include an occasional sestina or rhymed iambic-pentameter couplets. But the truly open-form strategy is one of leaving the colloquial “spoken language” to find a voice which is compressed and lightly musical without calling too much attention to itself and has an energy that carries the narrative devices straight on through. I like strong endings, too — endings which move the whole perspective out to a larger scale.
In “Fixing the System,” you write, “every valve / leaks a little / there is no / stopping the flow.” Do those lines have a larger significance for you? I should ask, “Do they have a larger significance for you?” I simply wrote the poem, but I need not show my hand. As an artist I am setting up little lures or traps and then want to see what gets caught.