Six Introductions

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2007 by Eshleman, Clayton

A Note on the Introductions

When I began to teach in the English Department at Eastern Michigan University, the fall of 1986, there was no visiting writer program. I decided to try to raise some money that would enable us to bring in a few writers each year, and began by going to the text book stores that sold books to our students. I suggested to the managers that since our students regularly bought books from them, that it would make sense for such stores to contnbute to honoranums for visiting poets and prose wnters. While the Shaman Drum Bookstore in Ann Arbor did not do business with our students in Ypsilanti, the owner Karl Pohrt liked the idea of more wnters coming into the area (some of whom he would go ahead to invite to do programs in his store), and he offered us $1000. I raised another $1000 from local stores and with my $2000 went back to EMU, saying, in effect, to the Department Head and other possible donors, if the bookstores are willing to contribute, don't you think the university should contnbute too? Colleagues Janet Kauffman and Lorry Smith contributed to this work as well, and we ended up with around $3000 for the first year. Ever since, the English Department has been sponsoring several readings per year. Our visiting authors have included Gary Snyder, Jerry Rothenberg, Amin Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Bei Dao, Eliot Weinberger, Ron Padgett, Nathaniel Mackey, Pierre Jons, Forest Gander, Carol Maso, Rickki Ducornet, C.D. Wright, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, Adrienne Rich, David Matlin, Amy Gerstler, Diane Wakoski, Sherman Alexie, Carol Maso, Diane Glancy, Mary Caponegro, Will Alexander, Michael Palmer, Michael Davidson, Christine Hume, Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, Michael Harper, Jeff Clark, and Andrew Joron.

Besides sharing the fundraising, Janet and Larry and I, in the late 19805 and throughout most of the 19905, shared the introductions as well. I used the preparation time for mine to read or reread several of the author's books and to go beyond the generic introduction that mainly lists books and awards. I sought to quickly identify what was special about a particular author's body of work.

Here are six introductions, for Gary Snyder (November 16,1996), Michael Palmer and Will Alexander (February 4, 2000), Christine Hume (February 4, 2002), and Jeff Clark and Andrew Joron who read together on October 12, 2005.

Gary Snyder

Since 1956, when he read his poems about the native American trickster Coyote at a reading in San Francisco during which Alien Ginsberg read Part One of Howl, Gary Snyder has been developing a selfless, sensual, landscape-attuned poetry on change and becoming that in the light of our current awareness of planetary potential and doom has become a clearing in American consciousness. It presents itself as ruggedly and thoroughly as monumental Chinese Sung Dynasty landscape painting in a context of interconnectedness involving lore, research, meditation, and a range of living and mythical companions. In the "cold companionable streams" of Snyder's poetry, there is a deep faith in the capacity of the earth to injure and restore.

Rivers and Mountains Without End is Snyder's sixteenth book, 138 pages of text, thirty-nine poems in four sections or movements.

This work was struck, some forty years ago, off a Sung Dynasty scroll painting. Snyder's opening poem, the key to the book, describes the painting as, scene by scene, it unfurls to the left. He comments: "At the end of the painting the scroll continues with seals and poems. It tells a further tale." Rivers and Mountains Without End, then, is the twentieth-century addition to the painting. In its own interlocking, unfolding segments, it draws upon ecological awareness and nature's architecture to such an extent that I want to coin a term for what is happening, to suggest that Rivers and Mountains Without End is an ecotecture, a habitatstructure. It redirects Whitman's "adhesive love" from solely human comradeship to a comradely display that includes Artemisi and white mountain sheep. Thus I feel that this work is not really an epic, as the dust jacket states, in the tradition of Pound and Williams. Snyder himself thinks of it as a sort of sutra. A string of kayaks comes to mind. Functionally speaking, this book is a rock with centrifugal eddies that can be set at the center of Snyder's life work.

What appears to be the leanness in the work is actually Snyder's precise observation, which obviates explanation. At its most intense, his observational power evokes prayer and praise.

Snyder adheres to the Buddhistic principle of emptiness; there is no self, everything we see and are is empty. Thus the absence of the sensitive or tormented psychological subject in this poetry.

In the spirit of Sung landscape painting, as well as in the later Cézanne, one thing is as important as another, each part is an important as the whole. Thus the nodes of illumination strung throughout the writing. Snyder's world is redolent with common wealth-his elixir of enlightenment is buttermilk.