By Jessica Workman
copyright 2008, all rights reserved
This is our body. Drawn up crosslegged by the flames
drinking icy water
hugging babies, kissing bellies,
Laughing on the Great Earth
Come out from the bath.
-- Gary Snyder, "The Bath"
A Brief Biography of Gary Snyder
Understanding Gary Snyder’s life is essential to understanding his poetry. Patrick Murphy offers a comprehensive look at Gary Snyder’s life in the first chapter of his book, A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and Prose of Gary Snyder, which is the source of the information that follows.
Gary Snyder was born May 8th, 1930 to Lois Wilkie and Harold Snyder in San Francisco, California. Eighteen months later, the family moved to Lake City, Washington. Lake City is significant to the development of Snyder’s “psychological and environmental-ethical development,” according to Murphy, because the town was essentially a giant clearcut (1).
Because he was born during the Great Depression, Snyder grew up with a good work ethic and was exposed to literature at an early age by his mother, who always aspired to be a writer. At the age of 12, Snyder’s family moved to Portland, Oregon due to war-related job growth. His parents separated soon after. This separation, however, did not affect his education because his mother arranged for him to attend Lincoln High School because of its superior academic reputation. But, even city living did not diminish Snyder’s love of the mountains and forests. Because of this, he began studying Native American ways of life and spent summers at camp at the foot of Mount St. Helens (2).
In 1947, Snyder received a scholarship to Reed College and majored in anthropology and literature. According to Murphy, “Midway through his undergraduate years Snyder learned a lasting lesson about mountains and wilderness that came not from physical immersion in the land but from a poetic perspective on a very different land of mountains and rivers, forests and plains” (3). He of course, found Chinese poetry in English translation, which left a deep impact on him and can be seen in his later poetry. It was his fascination with the Orient that led to his association with Mahayana Buddhism (he realized that Native American culture just wasn’t accessible to a white person).
Life soon became complicated for Snyder because he found out that he was:
…branded a subversive by two different governmental agencies. One was the U.S. Coast Guard, which did so because he had gotten his seamen’s card back in 1948 through the assistance of a communist-affiliated maritime union. The other was the F.B.I., which considered some of Snyder’s teacher and friends at Reed College to be either members or supporters of the Communist Party. (6)
It was not until Snyder sent a series of letters and negotiations, including loyalty statements, to the government that he was able to clear his record and apply for a passport.
1955 was pivotal for Snyder, Murphy believes, because it was the year he read “A Berry Feast” at the October 13th Six Gallery reading, which established him as a star of the San Francisco Renaissance. Soon after, Snyder left for Japan and studied at a Buddhist temple and did not permanently return to the United States until 1968. During that long span though, Gary returned to the United States, met and married his 2nd wife, Joanne, and then returned to Japan again. He and Joanne divorced after four years. It was not until 1967 did he marry his wife, Masa. After the birth of their son, Kai, they returned to the United States permanently (8-9).
Once back in the states Snyder was interested in actively participating in the ecology movement, anti-war movement, and the Native American movement. He also wrote prolifically over the course of the rest of his life. A list of his major works can be found at the bottom of the page.
Visions of Home in "The Bath"
Gary Snyder’s poetry elicits visions of home and the erotic in his 1975 Pulitzer Prize winning work, Turtle Island in order to cement his place as nature poet and environmental activist in the eyes of the literary community. The term “home,” however, is loosely defined in Snyder’s poetry, being found anywhere from poetry about his family, to poetry about nature. It would seem as if Snyder sees visions of “home” in his family, nature, pastoral images, and protecting the earth, the home in which our home sits on. The erotic also shines through in many of Snyder’s poems as a way of protesting the Puritanical censorship that has gripped the United States.
Clean, and rinsed, and sweating more, we stretch
out on the hardwood benches hearts all beating
Quiet to the simmer of the stove,
the scent of cedar
And then turn over,
murmuring gossip of the grasses,
talking firewood,
Wondering how Gen's napping, how to bring him in
soon wash him too --
These boys who love their mother
who loves men, who passes on
her sons to other women;
The cloud across the sky. The windy pines.
the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow
this is our body. (Snyder 13-14)
Family Images
Images of the family appear in Turtle Island, but especially in this passage from “The Bath.” For instance, Snyder’s poem focuses mainly on familial images in order to show a communal living setting in which there is no shame. All family members bathe together, thus creating a sense of community, a sense of family, and a familial cycle.
The passage above is the definitive example of how Snyder uses familial images as a way of showing the communal togetherness his family accomplishes in their everyday lives. Bath time is no different than any other family time. They share this moment like they would any other moment, which can be illustrated by the lines “These boys who love their mother / who loves men, who passes on / her sons to other women;” Masa, the wife of Gary Snyder, shares her body with her children in preparation for their eventual passing on to other women. She, as a mother, will share her children someday as they begin their new lives with their future spouses. It would seem as if Snyder uses these lines to prove to his readers that in sharing simple moments like the bath together, his family is preparing for the future, a future where their children will grow, learn to become better men, and bring their spouses back into the communal setting (or, "home") to start another familial cycle.
The familial cycle can also be seen in the line, “this is our body.” It is used in such a way that brings the family together as one entity, one being. The mother and the father create children, thus creating an extension of their own bodies. Their family creates a cycle of togetherness that ultimately brings them closer to the land (also their "home"). “If family is the practice hall … then his vision of a new, more harmonious, ecologically balanced culture for North America must include a functional family” (Murphy 107). So, by alluding to the idea that his family shares one body, Snyder is reaffirming his ties to the land and showing that the communal living environment is not as detrimental to the family as many people living in mainstream communities may think. As Julia Martin states, “to give this attention to bathing indicates a deliberate making of community, and a definition of family-as-energy-network that is radically different from the familiar nuclear structure” (qtd. in Murphy 107). This idea also ties into ideas about how Puritanism shapes the thoughts of mainstream society, which will be talked about in the section, The Role of the Erotic, below.
The role of the family in this poem ultimately shows that Snyder is in support of a familial cycle that involves healthy communal living, which can be attributed to his vision of “home” as it relates to his family and their environment. The role of the immediate environment as “home” can be seen as pastoral imagery and is discussed in the next section.
Pastoral Images
According to Timothy Gray’s article, “Semiotic Shepherds: Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, and the Embodiment of an Urban Pastoral,” the pastoral is defined as “a site of refuge, disguise, play, and rearrangement” and that the pastoral wants to “nurture rather than (re)place” (524). If that is the case, then images from “The Bath” can be used to identify the pastoral and show that a family bath is a site of refuge and play in which the family is nurtured and encouraged, making it a vision of "home" to Snyder.
Sweating and panting in the stove-steam hot-stone
cedar-planking wooden bucket water-splashing
kerosene lantern-flicker wind-in-the-pines-out
sierra forest ridges night--
Masa comes in, letting fresh cool air
sweep down from the door
a deep sweet breath
And she tips him over gripping neatly, one knee down
her hair falling hiding one whole side of shoulder, breast, and belly,
Washes deftly Kai's head-hair
as he gets mad and yells-- (Snyder 12)
Here, images of the bath itself emerge as pastoral images because it shows a place of nurturing and a place of refuge from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. “…stove-steam hot-stone / cedar- planking wooden bucket water-splashing / kerosene lantern-flicker wind-in-the-pines-out / sierra forest ridges night—” shows the natural images commonly associated with the pastoral. But, his use of hyphenation gives the lines a hurried feel when read aloud, possibly to gloss over the image of the bath itself, no matter how pastoral, and allowing the focus to slow down as the family is reintroduced in the next line. What could this possibly mean? It would seem as if it shows that while the pastoral gives us a concrete visual of what “home” is to Snyder, it is the familial imagery that shows us what he embodies as “home.”
However, we can also consider the entire poem to be a pastoral poem if we adhere to Gray’s definition of pastoral. We have already come to the conclusion that Snyder uses “The Bath” to support his idea of “home” by using familial imagery. Pastoral imagery can also be applied to this same vision because we know from his biography that Snyder is vested in the environment and making nature a part of his existence. Knowing this and then reading the above stanza from “The Bath” ultimately proves that the use of the pastoral is used as a method of conveying the idea of home to his audience simply because he is describing the place of nurturing in a concrete way.
The Role of the Erotic in "The Bath"
Snyder’s use of the erotic in this poem is particularly controversial because it uses nudity (including adult and child) and sexual images in order to encourage community as it relates to nature. Going back to what Martin said about community “to give this attention to bathing indicates a deliberate making of community, and a definition of family-as-energy-network that is radically different from the familiar nuclear structure” (qtd. in Murphy 107), we can see that this applies to the erotic imagery in the poem as well. Take, for instance, this selection from the first stanza:
…………………………
the soapy hand feeling
through and around the globes and curves of his body
up in the crotch,
And washing-tickling out the scrotum, little anus,
his penis curving up and getting hard
as I pull back skin and try to wash it
Laughing and jumping, flinging arms around,
I squat all naked too,
is this our body? (Snyder 12)
Snyder creates images of bathing his child that are borderline perverse and could conceivably be considered perverse by those who do not study the author or his poetry. Just as Snyder crosses the line into perversion, “his penis curving up and getting hard,” he pulls back and creates an image of a father bathing his son: “as I pull back the skin and try to wash it / Laughing and jumping, flinging arms around, / I squat all naked too.” Snyder uses these erotic and/or perverse images as a way to show the community that his family makes no matter how much it deviates from the standard family nuclear structure.
How important is deviation from society to Snyder? By this poem alone it seems very important. Snyder is essentially playing with fire and at risk of unbalancing the delicate structure that society bases their familial standards upon. By venturing forth into the erotic, Snyder challenges the very foundation our puritanical beliefs on sexuality are founded on. This, however, is not the only instance where Snyder uses erotic images in “The Bath.”
The hidden place of seed
The veins net flow across the ribs, that gathers
milk and peaks up in a nipple—fits
our mouth—
The sucking milk from this our body sends through
jolts of light; the son, the father,
sharing mother’s joy
That brings a softness to the flower of the awesome
Open curling lotus gate I cup and kiss
As Kai laughs at his mother’s breast he now is weaned
from, we
wash each other,
this our body (13)
This stanza relies heavily upon erotic images. Alluding to the idea that the son and the father take joy in sharing the breast of the mother is highly controversial in a society that bases their moral beliefs on a very conservative scale. Snyder uses this stanza as an anti-Puritanical message that shows his readers that his family shares everything, from the bath to the breast. And, in sharing everything, they create a community that is closer and more in-tune with nature than anyone with a standard nuclear family structure. Snyder creates a structure that allows readers to dive into erotic imagery and then allow themselves to scale back and see the bigger picture. In this stanza, for example, we are faced with the idea that father and son share the mother’s breast. But if we scale our focus back a little, we see that the theme of this stanza is sharing and the development of community within the family.
So, we have fallen upon why Snyder uses erotic imagery in “The Bath.” It ultimately shows that it builds community within his family, but it also sends out a message to his readers regarding puritanical living. Snyder is most definitely anti-Puritan and uses the erotic to show this and assert that the use of the erotic is not as controversial as it seems. He creates a balance that sends the reader head first into erotic images and then reels them back in for an explanation of why he uses it.
The Works of Gary Snyder
1959: Riprap
1960: Myths & Texts
1965: Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems
Six Sections of Mountains and Rivers Without End
1966: A Range of Poems
1967: The Back Country
1969: Earth House Hold
Regarding Wave
1970: Six Sections of Mountains and Rivers Without End Plus One
1973: The Fudo Trilogy
1974: Turtle Island
1977: The Old Ways: Six Essays
1979: He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth
1983: Axe Handles
Passage through India
1986: Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947-1985
1990: The Practice of the Wild: Essays by Gary Snyder
1992: No Nature: New and Selected Poems
1995: A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds
1996: Mountains and Rivers Without End\
1999: The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations
2002: The High Sierra of California
Look Out: A Selection of Writings
2004: Dangers on Peaks: Poems
2007: Back on the Fire: Essays
Works Cited
Gray, Timothy D. “Semiotic Shepherds: Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, and the Embodiment
of an Urban Pastoral.” Contemporary Literature 39.4 (1998): 523-59.
Murphy, Patrick D. “Membership in a Real World: An Introduction to the Writer and His Work.”
A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and Prose of Gary Snyder. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State UP, 2000. 1-19.
---. “Reinhabiting the Land: Turtle Island.” A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and Prose of
Gary Snyder. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State UP, 2000. 104-22.
Snyder, Gary. “The Bath.” Turtle Island. New York: New Directions Books, 1969. 12-14.
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