Mary Sands
Ancient Order of the Fire GigglersReview of "Forest Beatniks" and "Urban Thoreaus":
Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure
by Rod Phillips
Peter Lang Publishing, 2000. ISBN: 0-8204-4159-7.
(Series: Modern American Literature; NY, NY; v. 22)There is an environmental conscientiousness practiced by those whose vision is placated when pretty
gardens landscape the wayside to fit aesthetic sensibilities, and then there is a deep ecology that suffuses art and spirituality in a manner that drives off the path, then walks, into pure wilderness. "Forest Beatniks" and "Urban Thoreaus," by Rod Phillips, shows how the latter mindset is fundamental in Beat-era and San Francisco Renaissance writings, most particularly those of Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure.
Forest Beatniks clarifies the biological imperatives of those who came after such authors as John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Robinson Jeffers and points to Kenneth Rexroth's "distinct reverence for he natural world" and William Carlos Williams' Paterson, "an effort at knowing one's specific locale with minute intimacy: its people, its history, its land, and its rivers," as examples of the ecological deep-mindedness that influenced and became permanent with the Beats.
The Beats are often thought of as city writers, since Kerouac's On the Road and Ginsberg's "Howl" popularly reflected urban panoramas, and not enough credit (until now) has been given to their visionary nature writing. We have decades of their ecological writing and essays, but it was many moons ago at the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco that Michael McClure read "Point Lobos: Animism," which was intent on a concept that all beings have a sacred visceral "undersoul". McClure also read "For the Death of 100 Whales," a piece that provided a visually potent image of the massacre of whales—one that arose decades before the popular press came out with "Save the Whales" campaigns. Also, Gary Snyder read "A Berry Feast," which as Phillips says, "juxtaposes the deforestation of China during the Shang dynasty (1766-1122 B.C.) with the mechanized clatter of modern high-technology logging in the American Northwest." Though Jack Kerouac did not read at the Six Gallery, he was there that night and later described in Dharma Bums his first impressions of Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder): an honest lumberjack poet, unlike some of the other fashionable intellectuals.
In the chapter "Gary Snyder's Erotic Universe," Phillips shows how "Japhy Ryder" was not afraid to be naked. His poetry has fused eroticism with the innocence of a bathing bear cub. His line "Fuck you! sang Coyote, and ran away!" from "A Berry Feast" came out as neat as pie, according to Kerouac, who said "...it was so pure, fuck being a dirty word that comes out clean" (Dharma Bums).
Phillips talks about the erotic nature of Snyder's poetry, and suggests that maybe though critics have hinted at it, the connection has gone for the most part unexplored. Phillips explores it. He looks at "No Nature" (or "Know Nature"), which immediately begs the question: What is intimate?
What's intimate? The feet and hands, one's confection of thoughts, knowledges and memories; the kitchen and the bedding. And there is one's language... ("No Nature").
The exposure found in Snyder's poetry might be raw, is sometimes sexual, but is always part of the natural world—a world that doesn't just look at things outside civilization, but at things and people within the wilderness of their own civilization. Bathing with his family years ago ("The Bath") or in recent years with older friends ("The Sweat"), Snyder gives nudity an ecology of permission. Phillips says "Freed from the urgent and ever-present sexuality evidenced in 'The Bath' and other early works, 'The Sweat' achieves a level of comfort with the human body which is unparalleled among Snyder's poems."
Nature as the body personified is another one of Snyder's characteristics in poetry. In "The Wilderness," he wrote about land being raped, similar to a woman's body, bulldozed into—and about cancer spreading throughout a breast (the land). In "Song of the Tangle" he described a background scene that he could see while making love to his wife during a yabyum ritual in Japan: "two thigh hills" and "cicada singing, swirling in the tangle... the tangle of the thigh... the brush through which we push."
Phillips points out Snyder's relationship with the environment as a "a relationship involving respect, affection, and an almost instinctive desire to protect the object of one's love and affection from harm." Snyder's poetry manifests this respect and love for all things in nature, whether it be an old-growth fir or a beautiful woman. Snyder has been called an eco-warrior, an eco-poet, and a modern-day Thoreau, and he has made many contributions to ecological literature (poetry, essays, teachings, and cultural studies). His Mountains and Rivers Without End epic-poem is a decades-long project of studying ecological systems, cultural manifestations in the environment, languages, spirituality, and inter-relations among these ever-evolving parties.
In Phillips' chapter "Kerouac's Dharma Bums," it's clear that Snyder's appeal and broad-minded sense of life and all its connectedness made a big impact on Jack Kerouac during the mid-1950's, when they met, became friends, exchanged big thoughts and dreams, and went mountain climbing together up the Matterhorn. It was during this period of time that Kerouac seems to have been at his most serene. He'd transitioned from an urban writer (having pondered America's cities and towns, as well as his upbringing in Lowell) whose hero was mad-at-the-wheel Dean Moriarty, to a man drawn to nature and the Buddhist teachings that his new hero, laid-back homegrown poet Gary Snyder, had turned him onto. The enlightened stage found in Dharma Bums, as Phillips says, was written about later, in 1957, after Kerouac's drinking became heavier and he had found celebrity status via On the Road. At that time, Kerouac was still able to recapture moments like "As he heads back over the border to his camp, Smith reflects on the newfound sense of freedom and security in nature which he has learned about from Japhy—the freedom to 'cast off the evils of the world and the city,' he writes, 'just as long as I had a decent pack on my back" (Dharma Bums).
Envisioning a world of rucksack wanderers was part of Kerouac's ecological awareness, and one that coincided with his wakening thoughts on Buddhism, while he still held close the Christianity he was raised with. Tensions remained during Kerouac's peak, but when he wrote Desolation Angels nearly a decade later, his bitterness and alienation were evident:
As far as I can see and as I am concerned, this so-called Forest Service is nothing but a front, on the one hand a vague Totalitarian government effort to restrict the use of the forest to people, telling them they cant [sic] camp here or piss there, it's illegal to do this and you're allowed to do that, in the Immemorial Wilderness of Tao and the Golden Age and the Milleniums of Man—secondly, it's a front for the lumber interests, the net result of the whole thing being, what with Scott Paper Tissue and such companies logging out these woods year after year..." (Desolation Angels).
A sense of bitterness is only one part of the quotient that the forest beatniks felt. Lew Welch also flitted back and forth from urban area to wilderness. Phillips writes, "Indeed, much of Welch's work can be seen as a reflection of a life-long discomfort with modern, urban America, and a yearning to find his place as what he referred to as a Native of the World" (in Ring of Bone). The other part of the quotient seems to be, as with the other beat authors, a respect and genuine embrace of the natural world.
In Phillips' chapter "Nature and Poetry of Lew Welch," he gives some background information about Welch, who was born in Arizona and moved often throughout his childhood, with his one constant being books by folks like Ernest Thompson Seton, a naturalist and an author, and Robert Service, who wrote about the Alaskan wilderness. Welch began his writing career early, in high school, and wrote poetry, plays, books, songs, and even ad copy throughout his life.
Fluctuating between city and country, Welch eventually lived for a while in Chicago, where he wrote "Chicago Poem." The poem is dismal and gray, as Phillips says, and shows Welch's frustrations with city life and his "total resignation from the 'monstrosity' of urban, industrial America":
I'm just / going to walk away from it." ("Chicago Poem")
Back in San Francisco, now with his wife Mary, he took a job as an advertising writer, but later was fired. Then his marriage dissolved. As with Kerouac's temporary metamorphoses, Welch also began to flee societal constructs—like his career—lived at a commune, began studying zazen, and grew more biocentric, which is reflected in his poem "Wobbly Rock," of which Phillips gives an illustrative analysis.
Eventually, Welch found a job as a fisherman, and Phillips says, "Welch's writings from his days in San Francisco's salmon fleet indicate that what he most valued in the work was not the paycheck (although the money was good at times), but instead the closeness to natural forces" (the real work).
It is this connection with the land, the sea, and nature as a whole that drove Welch's writing. It also pushed him further into maybe the same rock that Kerouac described in Dharma Bums—the rock that the chipmunk crawled into before flying out as a butterfly. Somewhere in this rock, Welch wrote a small collection titled Hermit Poems as well as a sequel titled "The Way Back."
All winter long I make wood stews:
Poem to stove to woodpile to stove to
typewriter. woodpile stove.and can't stop peeking at it!
can't stop opening the door!
can't stop giggling at it"Shack Simple"
crazy as Han Shan as
Wittgenstein in his German hut, as
all the others ever were and areAncient Order of the Fire Gigglers
who walked away from it, finally,
kicked the habit, finally, of Self, of
man-hooked Man(which is not, at last, estrangement) (Ring of Bone)
His growing hermitage and desire to link up totally with the wilderness, defying all modern expectations and relying on natural ones, such as life cycles and food chains, lead to what appeared to be his death in 1971. A foreboding poem before his disappearance (and suicide note) in the Sierras outside of Nevada City, California, was titled "Song of the Turkey Buzzard," which spoke of "the very opposite of death, bird of rebirth, Buzzard... meat is rotten meat made sweet again...". He was 44, had suffered problems due to years of drinking, and was at the end of an important relationship. Phillips says "The death outlined in 'Song of the Turkey Buzzard'—if indeed the term 'death' can be used at all in this case—is emblematic of Lew Welch's lifetime struggle to achieve enlightenment by leaving behind 'the world that is man'." One can't help but see Welch's "death" as the final stage whereupon the chipmunk flies out of the rock as a butterfly.
Phillips says that "Beat writers of the 1950's and 60's took a variety of approaches in their attempts to reconnect with the natural world, among them Gary Snyder's emphasis on the physical body and its place in the world, Jack Kerouac's romantic rucksack quest for truth and solace in nature, and Lew Welch's anti-urban withdrawal into the wilderness." He describes Michael McClure's approach as relying on "the scientific disciplines of the present as a means of discussing environmental issues and forging his own reconnection with the natural world."
In the chapter "Michael McClure's Mammalian Poetics," Phillips talks about McClure's long-standing legacy in the Beat Generation, all the way back to the San Francisco Renaissance era and the Six Gallery reading. Firmly footed in not just the Beats, but in biological poetry, McClure wrote the essay "Scratching the Beat Surface" in 1982, in which he explained his visit to Point Lobos:
I wanted to tell of my feelings of hunger, of emptiness, and of epiphany. I hoped to state the sharpness of a demonic joy that I found in a place of incredible beauty on the coast of Northern California. I wanted to say how I was overwhelmed by the sense of animism—and how everything (breath, spot, rock, ripple in the tidepool, cloud, and stone) was alive and spirited.
In "Scratching the Beat Surface," McClure also discussed his peyote experiences. His earlier collection Meat Science Essays "provides an insight into the central importance which his drug experimentation played in shaping his view of nature." Phillips adds, "The adventure of consciousness which McClure entered into with his first taste of peyote, may well be at the root of the poet's mammalian vision." This gets back to McClure's take on a sacred visceral "undersoul" being present in all animals, and might be connected with by stripping away human fabrications, something that McClure did while taking heroin, cocaine, peyote, and psychedelic mushrooms.
Phillips describes McClure's mid-1960's style as focusing on drama (when he wrote the controversial play "The Beard") instead of poetry, but during this time he also wrote Poisoned Wheat, a chapbook that protested the country's involvement in the Vietnam War. As Phillips explains, "the book's title refers to the wartime practice of poisoning grain fields in Cambodia..." and the importance of the book "was not its small stab at the American war machine, but in its radical merging of biology and politics."
It was during the 1970s that McClure, influenced by bio-physicist Harold Morowitz and ecologist Ramon Margalef, turned to science to "clarify my unorganized perceptions of the fifties and sixties" ("Scratching the Beat Surface"). Phillips notes that McClure "began to view poetry as an 'extension of physiology' and further, to consider the possibility 'that a poem could even become a living bio-alchemical organism.'
Another scientist to influence McClure was Fancis Crick, who in turn was fascinated by McClure's work and said:
The worlds in which I myself live, the private world of personal reactions, the biological world (animals and plants and even bacteria chase each other through the poems), the world of the atom and molecule, the stars and the galaxies, are all there; and in between, above and below, stands man, the howling mammal, contrived out of "meat" by chance and necessity. If I were a poet I would write like Michael McClure—if only I had his talent.
Though he devotes chapters to Kerouac, Snyder, Welch, and McClure, Phillips also looks at other Beat writings that were intrinsically ecological, such as William Burroughs' Yage Letters, which "details his travels through the jungles and tribal villages of Central American in search of Indian shamans who hold the key to the powerful hallucinogenic plant Yage. The result is American literature's first psychedelic travel narrative."
Then there's Amiri Baraka's anti-urban poems with environmental themes, Joanne Kyger's nature poetry, and Robert Creely's "Desultory Days," which McClure termed "awareness of living environment, oneness of time, deepening of consciousness, and myriad-mindedness." Phillips doesn't ignore Allen Ginsberg and discusses at length "Wales Visitation," which is a work that Ginsberg described as mediating "between psychedelic inspiration and humane ecology." Phillips doesn't leave out Zen-poet Philip Whalen, either, who also read at the Six Gallery reading in 1955. From Whalen's "Further Notice":
I can't live in this world
And I refuse to kill myself
Or let you kill meThe dill plant lives, the airplane
My alarm clock, this ink
I won't go awayI shall be myself—
Free, a genius, an embarrassment
Like the Indian, the buffaloLike Yellowstone National Park. (On Boar's Head)
Phillips also looks at poet Kirby Doyle, who Lew Welch mentored. Doyle has not received too much recognition, but Phillips gives him room and talks about his poem "Pre American Ode," saying that it's "an attempt at rediscovering 'Pre,' the natural essence which Raymond Foye has described as 'the prime matter that existed prior to man—it is destiny—a genius inherent in nature, in the land—preexisting."
A small section at the end of Forest Beatniks is devoted to post-Beat poets, such as Richard Brautigan and Ed Sanders. What can't be emphasized enough, but which thankfully Phillips' book does do, is that many post-Beat nature writers cite Gary Snyder's poetry and essays, Jack Kerouac's rucksack vision from Dharma Bums, and Alan Watts' and other Beat works as definitive influences for their own poetry and writings. Arne Naess, Bill Devall, and George Sessions, progenitors of the Deep Ecology movement, see the Beats as important sources in environmental thought and inclinations.
Thanks to Rod Phillips, "Forest Beatniks" and "Urban Thoreaus" offers a much overdue study of the Beats and their ecological writings and involvements. The author spent much of the 90s working on a doctoral dissertation about the Beats and ecology, and then spent several more years polishing his manuscript into this book.
It is a book that will hopefully encourage further study of devotion to nature and open up new areas of nature writing and evolutionary thought necessary for understanding the perplexity and synergy needed first in mind, then in expression, then in hands-on practice for doing what we need to do to in an age when population, dominant human-centricism, and destruction of the natural world has increased exponentially year after year. Around the beginning of the Beat Generation, the population in the world was only half what it is now. Since then, thousands of species of wildlife have disappeared, hundreds of thousands of acres of forest have been clearcut without good-minded woodland management, and the planet seems tipped precariously against anyone's advantage—ours or any other species'.
Forest Beatniks also turns around the media myth that the Beat writers were primarily radicals with nothing better to do than tap their bongos and mumble incoherent poetry; it shows how their writings, to this day, are saturated in the natural world, helping it to come alive and happen for the weary reader—making it more a part of who we are than a howl contemplating the city midnight or a good dose of road wear for an awakened seeker.
Lew Welch just turned up one day,
live as you and me. "Damn, Lew" I said,
"you didn't shoot yourself after all."
"Yes I did" he said,
and even then I felt the tingling down my back.
"Yes you did, too" I said—"I can feel it now."
"Yeah" he said,
"There's a basic fear between your world and
mine. I don't know why.
What I came to say was,
Teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. All the other cycles.
That's what it's all about, and it's all forgot."
("For/From Lew", Axe Handles, Gary Snyder)
© by Mary Sands
