Knots  in  the  Grain

from  The Real Work  by  Gary Snyder   1973

John Jacoby of the English department at Southern Methodist University — interview with poet Gary Snyder

J — This morning you were talking about the Shinto shrines placed near natural objects that vibrated with dense energy or special strength. I wonder about your sense of what poetic structures invoke or contain that kind of energy?

S — That reminds me of the Japanese term for song — bushi or fushi — which means a whorl in the grain. It means in English what we call a knot, like a knot in a board. It’s a very interesting sense of song — like the grain flows along and then there’s a turbulence that whorls, and that’s what they call a song. It’s an intensification of the flow at a certain point that creates a turbulence of its own which then as now sends out an energy of its own, but then the flow continues again. That’s parallel to what Black Elk says in Black Elk Speaks talking of the Plains Indian view of physical nature: that trees, animals, mountains are in some sense individualized turbulence patterns, specific turbulence patterns of the energy flow that manifest themselves temporarily as discrete items, playing specific roles and then flowing back in again. I like to think of poetry as that; and as that, as the knot of the turbulence, whorl or a term that Pound was fond of from his friend Wyndham Lewis, vortex. Or Yeats’s term gyre too. In the flow of general on the same level — the poem or the song manifests itself as a special concentration of the capacities of the language and rises up into its own shape. Now the question that people ask inevitably is, does this shape then mean a formal form, is that the shape it takes? And the question of course about pre-modern traditional English poetic forms as against what has been taking place the last few decades of the so-called free verse or open poetry. And the question is, are these formless — to which the answer is of course they’re not formless.

Nothing is formless (laughter). Everything takes strict pattern including the flowing water in the stream which follows the physical laws of wave movement, or the physical laws by which clouds move, or gases move, or liquids move amongst each other, or liquids of different temperatures interchange. All these things are form, but there is more or less fluidity in the form, and there is also the possibility that the formal patterning is to be found in a longer range measuring periodicity than is provided by our traditional ways of patterning. Metrics and stanzas are matters of periodicity, establishing recurrences, and those established recurrences take place in very short lengths, like one line at a time: iambic pentameter, whatever it is. You can get longer reaches of periodicity, but in English prosody they’re fairly short range structurings.

I wouldn’t have thought of a language to talk about longer potential structurings if I hadn’t come on to the music of India and in the music of India the structure of raga, melodic mode, and tala, rhythmic mode, by which very lengthy compositions are established, and then within that, within certain structural terms improvised. These give me a model that I understand in my own work to be parallel, analogous in some senses to my own work, of a longer range sense of structuring with improvisatory possibilities taking place on a foundation of a certain steadiness that runs through it. So one poem has of itself the whole periodicity of one line, one structuring, and a number of poems to get a scene together will form a construct which is like one whole melodic thing. The model that underlies that also is the sense of the melodic phrase as dominating the poetic structure, a kind of sense of melodic phrase as forming the poem rather than some formal metric stanza pattern that belongs to the past.

J — That leads me to another question I wanted to ask about rhythm. I remember when Riprap came out I’d seen a prose statement that said that the rhythms of the poems came from the rhythms of the physical labor, or riprapping, and the other work described. Now that you’re not doing physical labor, do you have similar places to catch rhythms from?

S — Well, it’s a mistake to assume that I’m not doing physical labor.

J — If you built your own house, I guess it is.

S — I not only built my own house, I do everything else around it continually. I’m farming all the time: cutting six cords of firewood for the winter, planting fruit trees, putting in fencing, taking care of the chickens, maintenance on the car, and maintenance on the truck, doing maintenance on the road. There’s an enormous amount of physical work to be done.

That’s a kind of work rhythm to be sure — which is just good old rural life work rhythms. Though I think probably the rhythm I’m drawing on most now is the whole of the landscape of the Sierra Nevada, to feel it all moving underneath. There is the periodicity of ridge, gorge, ridge, gorge, ridge, gorge at the spur ridge and tributary gorges that makes an interlacing network of, oh, 115-million-year-old geological formation rhythms. I’m trying to feel through that more than anything else right now. All the way down to some Tertiary gravels which contain a lot of gold from the Pliocene. Geological rhythms. I don’t know how well you can do that in poetry. Well, like this for example. Have you ever tried singing a range of mountains?

J — No.

S — Do you know how you do it?

J — No.

S — Well, you sit down somewhere where you’re looking at a long mountain horizon. Then you sing it up and down all the way along like that. I tried it on the mountains up above Death Valley, the Panamint range, one time. I tried it many times until I got it right. You know, until I got to know that skyline so well that I knew when I was following the melody that the mountains were making. At first it  was hit or miss kind of. And then you get closer. Then you begin to feel it. Then you get so that it’s a kind of a source of form, right?

J — You talk about a poet needing to know the beings that inhabit his unconscious — know how to meet them. I wonder if you’d say something about that.

S — Well, I don’t want to say too much about it because that belongs to the oral transmission, mind to mind, poet to poet, transmission of how you deal with demons (laughs), but we have to learn to do that quite clearly. And for some reason having demons seems to be one of the occupational hazards of being creative — more for some people and less for others.

S — My political position is to be a spokesman for wild nature. I take that as a primary constituency. And for the people who live in dependence on that, the people for whom the loss of that would mean the loss of their livelihood, which is Paiute Indians, Maidu Indians, Eskimos, Bushmen, the aborigines of New Guinea, the tribesmen of Tibet, to some extent the Kurds, people all over the world for whom that’s their livelihood. That’s a kind of politics, right? In the service of the wilderness, in the service of the Great Goddess Artemis. That comes to me naturally, that position. It’s not an anti-human position. It’s a position simply of advocacy, taking the role of being the advocate for a realm for which few men will stand up. Someone must be a spokesman for that, and I think that poets are better prepared to be the spokesmen for that than most people are, particularly someone with the background of myself.

J — That puts you in a position of being a spokesman in the land of the enemy.

S — Yes. Which is all right. A spokesman in the society of the enemy, but the land is my friend. I have supporters all around me, trees, and birds, and so forth, and also a lot of people. You know, it’s also the land of the American Indian.

J — We’re just about at the end of the time you promised, and I wonder if as a kind of close you’d comment on the energy crisis and what that means to you as a poet.

S — It doesn’t mean anything to me personally as a poet because it won’t change my way of life. Everything is going to be energy politics. Everything is going to be redrawn. The realignments of the nations of the world according to their access to energy is now taking place. Everybody thought it was money that counted before. Now it turns out that the only real wealth is oil. That is real wealth. You can’t burn money — I mean you can’t get much heat out of it when you burn it. You can light a cigar with it, and that’s about all. So oil is now the real wealth, fossil fuels. The actual “real wealth” is knowing how to get along “without.” Now which of those is the real wealth? “Do more with less,” as the slogan goes. In other words, human mind-energy capacities, human intelligence capacities as against mechanical and fossil-fuel-fired capacities. This is a marvelous time in which the nations of the world may get a new balance and a perspective on themselves — if it doesn’t degenerate into hysteria and short range crisis thinking. If we rush into a crisis mentality — totalitarian and draconian measures to keep the cars running, and the houses heated to seventy-two degrees, and the GNP continually growing — then we will rip off nature.

We should try to allay anxiety and spread confidence in the natural beauty of the human mind and the natural dignity of life at its normal, natural, ancient, slower pace. I think that creative people, poets, religious people, if they wish to speak, have a message which is of great value now … although whether or not anyone will heed it is another question.

A new Directions Book

© Gary Snyder