Under the Volcano: Gary Snyder’s Ecopoetics of reinhabitation

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine, through the work of the ecological Zen poet Gary Snyder, what the relatively recent field of ecocriticism can contribute to a discussion on processes of rebuilding, in the light of Snyder’s poetic response to the great May 2000 eruption of Mount St Helen. Snyder’s perspective on natural processes is much influenced by the many years he spent studying in a Zen Buddhist monastery in Japan. The blast is, primarily, a lesson in impermanence, while the human will to master the non-human environment is the problem rather than the solution. What then would be the point of reconstruction, if one accepts that the world is ruled by change? The question arises in the perspective from which Gary Snyder practices his ecopoetry. The ecopoem is a means of restoring a bond between man and the non-human environment, as part of a “reinhabitation” project whose agenda Snyder has expounded in various essays, echoing the thinking of his fellow bioregionalist poet and thinker: Wendell Berry. Now reinhabitation does not mean reconstruction, recreating what was destroyed. In contrast with reconstruction, it involves learning to inhabit the world again, but differently, and accepting impermanence, even if this means destruction. This paper looks into the forms taken by this approach as it is translated into poetic practice, or, more precisely, poetic intervention in Snyder’s works, including in the brief material life of the poem.