RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

North American homeland. I analyze his return to California through the poetry of Turtle
Island in chapter three.
Regarding Wave marks a turning point from Snyder‘s early poetry of the 1950s.
His early poems demonstrate the stylistic precision of modern poets like Ezra Pound and
the haiku compression of the Chinese Han-shan of Cold Mountain. 9 Robert Kern
describes Snyder during this period as the practitioner of an eco-poetics of metonymy,
not metaphor. He argues that his poetry ―privileges not speech but silence‖ and ―is more a
seeing . . . a near-mute presentation, without commentary, of the world‘s ongoing
processes‖ (109). Riprap (1959) and Myths & Texts (1960) utilize a ―silent‖ poetics of
metonymy rather than write towards an ultimate metaphor of reality. These early books
of Snyder‘s evoke states of awareness associated with sacred places and meaningful
actions by re-presenting the concrete particulars of those places and ways of being. The
poem ―Riprap‖ can be read as this style‘s ars poetica:
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time
…
In the thin loam, each rock a word
19
9 Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1965) translates the poetry of Han-shan or Kan-zan,
describing him as a wise ―mountain madman in an old Chinese line of ragged hermits‖ of
the T‘ang dynasty, who was a favorite of latter-day Zen painters (35). See ―Ellipsis and
Riprap‖ by Laszlo Gefin in Murphy‘s Critical Essays on Gary Snyder.