APOCALYPSE HERE
Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Counter Culture Community.
Timothy Gray.
University of Iowa
Press, 2006, 352 pages

Timothy Gray’s Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Counter Culture Community envisions history as a “physical place community desires to take” (21), or “history take two” (23), history intersecting the history history. History is in the sky, after all; am I my job, family, neighborhood? No, a little, but also an idea, and Gray paints a Pacific Northwest Asian Pacific Rim-ward. It’s just that that’s the psychic space, the sense of psychic, semiotic space part of the story. That’s why the Vietnam war is a Blakean mental war. Chronologically there’s the San Francisco counter culture’s history “take one” (22-31): forties open forms of Duncan Rexroth Spicer Everson Miles Pacifica Radio Rexroth’s haiku translations, Alan Watts and then other California Zen variations of which, in a way, the Beats are one and then Hippies sort of another and then seventies cultural phenomena like Nixon going to China, Buddhist Governor Jerry Brown and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceand The Tao of Physics mainstream this Californian version of Asian/Native American/environmental/eighties New Age-ward spirituality. “California’s westward tilt toward the Asia-Pacific region was doubtless confirmed when its young governor, clad in a suede jacket, walked silently up to the stage during one of Snyder’s poetry readings and proceeded to sit in the lotus position” (31). Take Two history (31-37) considers the other end of the telescope, how “poems and poets tend to shape the natural world, instead of the other way around” (32). . . no place without culture. Something exciting is happening, the President is being reigned in, reality needs a nudge to be real and poems and poets are the unacknowledged nudgers of the world. That’s why this essay is a poem, because every true statement interfaces, is more than just true, takes part in poems. What happens in San Francisco flows through San Francisco, says Gray. “The local history of the San Francisco Renaissance will mean much more if it is viewed as part of a spatial narrative, one that includes a diverse array of global citizens” (32), the west a window on Asia. Snyder goes through the window into a California counter culture horizon. He “migrates” (chap. 1) to and in this status. As a teen he sees the Puget Sound and Portland, Washington and Oregon, the Great Northwest, as shifting semiotic spaces, places he moves through, makes, and is, an ongoing project. Snyder sees Chinese landscape as the Northwest’s Cascades, Asia and the Great Northwest united, inner spaces. Early logging poems emblematize simple things cut and floating, migrating. Gray notes “hundreds of displaced butterflies.” At a press conference to announce Iraq’s improved security situation a rocket hits the building. “There’s nothing wrong,” says the Iraqi President. Thousands of dis- placed American rifles filter in. At this point, Snyder’s early Loggingpoems take in the vibra- tions and flow of their accord. Millions of escape routes meet up on the other side of the mirror. Birds fly over Snyder’s poems as they coalesce into little floating magnets and the electromagnetic island landmarks that guide them into chapter two— cancer again for Elizabeth Edwards—Snyder’s second book of poems hinges on “translating.” Bush, says my 10-year-old son Noah, won’t let his people tell the truth but he won’t let it out in the open either, but Gary Snyder interviews Han-shan across time and space. Snyder’s elastic stone sheets of verse enjamb their ways downstream, the straight dope! He has made our company proud. Translating flows from rock to throw to chap three, becoming something other, “embodying” it, Snyder in the Pacific rim. Something vaguely, oddly real happens. Love. We’ve been fooling around. I’ll tell the truth. “we’ll lean on the wall/against each other.” We’re environmental “stew simmering on the fire” and camp now on the chapter called “Communing” where we heat the sun.

—STEPHEN PAUL MILLER