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

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primitive 10 social structures for West Coast Hippies during the 1960s, and theorized a
Buddhist sense of ecology for a spiritual vision of environmentalism during the 1970s.
Bert Almon argues that rather than the sumi style of metonymy, the late post-war
poetry of Regarding Wave images a ―world placed under a microscope,‖ analogous to the
colorful tanka (thangka) art of Tibet (81). Thematically, the poet turns from spiritual
searching and traveling to family and home. He does not refute the validity of his earlier
work; he completes a circle, beginning with a search for transcendence and ending with a
concept of good work in the life and death world of samsara. 11 Regarding Wave performs
the good work of the ―myth-handler-healer‖ Snyder defined in talks at Oberlin College
and Brown University during the fall of 1978 as the ―heal[er] that makes whole‖ by
reconciling tensions between inner and outer states (The Real Work 172). The book of
poems attempts to heal contemporary U.S. culture‘s ―symbol base‖ (170) by opening up
the possibility of human attachment and responsibility across ocean currents, attempting
to reconcile tensions between human society and the natural world. He aligns the themes
of marriage, sexual intimacy, and family with the maritime place of Suwanose Island to
ask his readers to ―learn a logic of place‖ in an archipelago (Robbins 95); no easy feat for
an industrial world that has treated the oceans as inter-zones of emptiness.
10 Primitive, in this context, means non-modern, and in no way should connote
undeveloped or a-historical.
11 The eighteenth century poem, ―The Buddha‘s Law among the Birds‖ by an unknown
Tibetan lama of the Kahgyutpa sect, offers an intriguing interpretation of the life and
death world of samsara. According to the poem, the ―holy Lord Avalokita‖ assumed the
form of a Cuckoo bird to teach the ―feathered folk‖ the Dharma, which he does by sitting
immobile in a large sandalwood tree for ―many years day and night‖ (Conze 86-87).
Eventually a parrot approaches the holy lord asking the meaning of his trance to which he
replies: ―Listen then, O parrot skilled in speech! / I have surveyed this ocean of Samsara,
/ And I have found nothing substantial in it . . . I dwell in solitude and silence, / In trance
I meditate, from all distractions far removed.‖