Turtle Island Gary Snyder

Turtle Island is a book of poems and essays written by Gary Snyder and published by New Directions in 1974. The writings express Snyder's vision for humans to live in harmony with the earth and all its creatures. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975.[1] "Turtle Island" is a name for the continent of North America used by many Native American tribes.

By the late 1950s, Snyder had established himself as one of the major American poets of his generation. He was associated with both the Beat Generation and the regional San Francisco Renaissance. He spent much of the 1960s traveling between California and Japan, where he studied Zen. In 1966, he met Masa Uehara while in Osaka. They married the following year and had their first child, Kai, in April 1968; by December, Snyder and his new family moved to California.[2] His return coincided with the highest crest of 1960s counterculture, as well as the nascent environmental movement. He was received as an elder statesman by both the hippies and the environmentalists, and he became a public intellectual who gave public lectures, making television appearances, and publishing new writing.[3]

Many of the poems and essays in the book had been previously published. The essay "Four Changes" first appeared in The Environmental Handbook, a collection published by David Brower and Friends of the Earth for the first Earth Day in 1970.[4] "Four Changes" was initially published anonymously with no copyright notice, and consequently it was widely reproduced.[5] One of the poems, "The Hudsonian Curlew", was first published in the November 1969 issue of Poetry magazine.[6] Some of the poems were published in 1972 as a limited-edition collection titled Manzanita.[7]

Many of the poems in Turtle Island are political in nature, like much of Snyder's poetry of the late 1960s, albeit with a different focus than that of his earlier writings. With American military involvement in the Vietnam War coming to a close, Snyder's attention had turned from matters of war and peace to environmental and ecological concerns. In 1973 several of Snyder's friends, interested in his new direction, gathered in Berkeley, California to hear him read his new work. At the reading, Snyder asked whether these political poems could "succeed as poetry"; his friends "reportedly refused to pass judgment" on the question.[8] Later, the poet's UC Davis colleague Jack Hicks related words from a female graduate student who took one of Snyder's classes in the late 1980s: "there are two kinds of political poetry: Suckers—rare—seduce you to the point. Whackers assault you with the message. ... I cited Turtle Island as a blatant whacker, and Gary defended it strongly. But first he listened."[9]

Turtle Island is split into four sections. The first three—Manzanita, Magpie's Song, and For the Children—include a total of almost 60 poems, while the fourth section, Plain Talk, includes five prose essays. The collection includes many of Snyder's most commonly quoted and anthologized poems. There is also an introduction, in which Snyder explains the significance of the book's title.[10]

In his review of Turtle Island in Poetry magazine, critic Richard Howard[11] commented that the book describes "where we are and where he wants us to be," although the difference between those two is "so vast that the largely good-humored resonance of the poems attests to Snyder's forbearance, his enforced detachment."[12] He praised the book's poems for their meditative quality and their lack of preachiness or invective.[13] He described the poems as "transitory, elliptical, extraterritorial" works, in which "the world becomes largely a matter of contours and traces to be guessed at, marveled over, left alone."[14]

In Library Journal, James McKenzie wrote:

In precise, disciplined, unromantic language and form (at its best resembling Pound's), Snyder's poems pare cleanly through the thick crust of late 20th-Century urban mass life, revealing its essentially incidental nature, connecting us with the creeks, mountains, birds, and bears of "North America" that were here long before it had that name and, nature prevailing, will be here after that name is lost, forgotten, destroyed.[15]

Writing for the Christian Science Monitor, Victor Howes praised the book's "gentle, uncomplicated love-lyrics to planet earth" and said it would be equally appealing to poetry readers and to conservationists.[16] Herbert Leibowitz, writing for the New York Times Book Review, was less enthusiastic. While Leibowitz found merit in a select few poems and praised Snyder's prose as "vigorous and persuasive", he found the collection "flat, humorless ... uneventful ... [and] oddly egotistical".[17] In his view, it was "a textbook example of the limits of Imagism."[17] Still, the critic said he was "reluctant to mention these doubts" because he found Snyder's fundamental environmentalist message to be so laudatory, even "on the side of the gods."[17]

The printing of the first American edition was limited to 2,000 copies.[18] As of 2005, the book had been reprinted roughly once a year in the United States, placing it among a handful of Snyder's books that have never gone out-of-print.[19] It has sold more than 100,000 copies.[20] The book has been translated into Swedish (by Reidar Ekner in 1974), French (by Brice Matthieussent in 1977), Japanese (by Nanao Sakaki in 1978), and German (by Ronald Steckel in 1980).[21]

Pulitzer Prize

Snyder received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Turtle Island in May 1975.[22] Because of Snyder's remoteness at Kitkitdizze, news of the award took some time to reach him.[7] It was the first time a Pulitzer had been given to a poet from the West Coast.[23] The prestigious award helped to legitimize Snyder's idiosyncratic worldview in the intellectual mainstream.[24]

Along with the award itself, Snyder received a check for $1,000 (equivalent to $5,662 in 2023). According to his friend Steve Sanfield, Snyder quietly donated the money to a local volunteer organization that was building a new school in the San Juan Ridge area.[25] Snyder maintained that the best perk of winning the Pulitzer Prize was that people no longer introduced him as "a Beat poet".[26]

1. ^ Theado 2003, p. 413.
2. ^ Hart 2004, p. 84.
3. ^ Almon 1979, p. 31; Hart 2004, p. 83.
4. ^ Sessions 1991, p. 367.
5. ^ Almon 1979, pp. 31–32.
6. ^ Snyder 1969, pp. 119–122.
7. ^ a b Almon 1979, p. 39.
8. ^ Gray 2006, p. 280.
9. ^ Hicks 1991, p. 284.
10. ^ Murphy 2007, p. 321.
11. ^ Howard 1975, p. 346.
12. ^ Howard 1975, p. 349.
13. ^ Howard 1975, pp. 349–350.
14. ^ Howard 1975, p. 350.
15. ^ McKenzie 1974, p. 2970; Theado 2003, pp. 418–419
16. ^ Howes 1974, p. 10; Theado 2003, pp. 419–420
17. ^ a b c Leibowitz 1975.
18. ^ Sherlock 2010, p. 9.
19. ^ Campbell 2005.
20. ^ Duane 1996; Goodyear 2008.
21. ^ Sherlock 2010, pp. 9–10.
22. ^ Kihss 1975.
23. ^ Hart 2004, p. 82.
24. ^ Boekhoven 2011, p. 200.
25. ^ Sanfield 1991, p. 119.
26. ^ Breit 2017, p. 169; Sanfield 1991, p. 119.

Bibliography

• Almon, Bert (1979). Gary Snyder. Western Writers Series. Boise State University. ISBN 0-88430-061-7 – via BSU Digital Collections, Special Collections and Archives.
• Boekhoven, Jeroen W. (2011). Genealogies of Shamanism: Struggles for Power, Charisma and Authority. Barkhuis. ISBN 978-90-77922-92-7.
• Breit, Luke (2017). "A Conversation with Gary Snyder". In Callone, David Stephen (ed.). Conversations with Gary Snyder. Literary conversations series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. pp. 169–176. ISBN 978-1-4968-1162-2.
• Gray, Timothy (2006). Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community. Contemporary North American Poetry Series. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt20krzvz. ISBN 0-87745-976-2.
• Hart, George (2004). "Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (1974)". In Hart, George; Slovic, Scott (eds.). Literature and the Environment. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. pp. 81–94. ISBN 0-313-32149-3.
• Hicks, Jack (1991). "The Poet in the University". In Halper, Jon (ed.). Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. pp. 275–284. ISBN 0-87156-636-2. (registration required)
• McNulty, Tim (1991). "The Wilderness Poetic of Gary Snyder". In Halper, Jon (ed.). Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. pp. 254–258. ISBN 0-87156-636-2 – via the Internet Archive. (registration required)
• Murphy, Patrick (2007). "Turtle Island". In Hemmer, Kurt (ed.). Encyclopedia of Beat Literature. New York: Facts on File. pp. 321–324. ISBN 978-0-8160-4297-5 – via the Internet Archive.
• Sanfield, Steve (1991). "As It Is". In Halper, Jon (ed.). Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. pp. 117–119. ISBN 0-87156-636-2. (registration required)
• Sessions, George (1991). "Gary Snyder: Post-Modern Man". In Halper, Jon (ed.). Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. pp. 365–370. ISBN 0-87156-636-2. (registration required)
• Sherlock, John (2010). Gary Snyder: A Bibliography of Works by and About Gary Snyder (PDF) (revised and expanded 2nd ed.). University of California, Davis Special Collections Department.
• Taylor, Bron (2005). "Snyder, Gary (1930–) and the Invention of Bioregional Spirituality and Politics" (PDF). In Taylor, Bron (ed.). Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 1562–1567. ISBN 978-1-84371-138-4 – via religionandnature.com.
• Theado, Matt, ed. (2003). The Beats: A Literary Reference. Carrol & Graff. ISBN 0-7867-1099-3.
• Wirth, Jason M. (2017). Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-6543-2.

Journal and web articles

• Campbell, James (July 15, 2005). "High peak haikus". The Guardian. Archived from the original on April 6, 2017.
• Campbell, James (January 9, 2009). "Howls". The New York Times Book Review.
• Duane, Daniel (October 6, 1996). "A Poem, 40 Years Long". The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 28, 2018. Retrieved June 3, 2019.
• Freeman, John (April 22, 2019). "Every Day is Earth Day: 365 Books to Start Your Climate Change Library Part One: The Classics – Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (1974)". Literary Hub.
• Goodyear, Dana (October 13, 2008). "Zen Master". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on June 14, 2018.
• Howard, Richard (September 1975). "Three Found Poets". Poetry. 126 (6): 346–351. Archived from the original on October 4, 2018 – via the Poetry Foundation.
• Howes, Victor (November 15, 1974). "Poet's Love Lyrics to Planet Earth". The Christian Science Monitor. p. 10.
• Kern, Robert (Spring 1977). "Recipes, Catalogues, Open Form Poetics: Gary Snyder's Archetypal Voice". Contemporary Literature. 18 (2). University of Wisconsin Press: 173–197. doi:10.2307/1208042. JSTOR 1208042. (subscription required)
• Kihss, James (May 6, 1975). "Pulitzer Prizes Awarded 2 Biographers and Albee". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 4, 2019. Retrieved June 3, 2019.
• Leibowitz, Herbert (March 23, 1975). "Ecologies of the finite and the infinite". The New York Times Book Review.
• McKenzie, James (December 30, 1974). "Review of Turtle Island". Library Journal: 2970.
• Snyder, Gary (November 1969). "The Hudsonian Curlew". Poetry. 115 (2): 119–122. Archived from the original on October 17, 2018 – via the Poetry Foundation.
• Snyder, Gary (January 12, 1972). "Energy Is Eternal Delight". The New York Times.
• Wilkinson, Loren (2016). "Critical Review: Wriglesworth, Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder". The Trumpeter. 32 (1). Athabasca University: 75–88.

• Turtle Island at the Internet Archive; a digital copy of the book can be borrowed for 14 days with registration
• Turtle Island in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Several poems from Turtle Island have been published online by the Poetry Foundation:

• "The Bath"
• "The Hudsonian Curlew"
• "I Went into the Maverick Bar"