{"id":10122,"date":"2025-02-24T14:49:16","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T18:49:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/poet-gary-snyder-on-craftsmanship-vs-creative-force-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-02-24T14:49:16","modified_gmt":"2025-02-24T18:49:16","slug":"poet-gary-snyder-on-craftsmanship-vs-creative-force-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/poet-gary-snyder-on-craftsmanship-vs-creative-force-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Poet Gary Snyder on Craftsmanship vs. Creative Force \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"Meeting<\/a><\/p>\n

It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all artists regularly do, to blame the block on a fickle muse and rue ourselves abandoned by the gods of inspiration. The truth is somewhere in the middle: We are a channel and it does get blocked \u2014 it is not an accident that the psychological hallmark of creativity is the \u201cflow state\u201d<\/a> \u2014 but while it matters how wide and long the channel is, how much friction its material offers and how much corrosion it can withstand, what flows through it \u2014 its source, its strength, the rhythm of its ebb and flow \u2014 is a mystery. That is why Virginia Woolf termed creativity a \u201cwave in the mind\u201d<\/a> \u2014 the mind matters, but the wave just comes unbidden and unbiddable. <\/p>\n

Many writers have contemplated the mystery of creativity \u2014 take, for instance, David Bowie<\/a>, Octavia Butler<\/a>, John Lennon<\/a>, May Sarton<\/a>, Lewis Hyde<\/a>, and Nick Cave<\/a> \u2014 but none more articulately than the poet, anthropologist, and environmental activist Gary Snyder<\/strong> (b. May 8, 1930), who in his long life published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, influenced two generations of writers and activists, and inspired the main character in the most famous novel by Jack Kerouac (with whom he roomed for a while).<\/p>\n

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Gary Snyder in Allen Ginsberg\u2019s kitchen, 1991. (Photograph: Allen Ginsberg.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a passage from Earth House Hold<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the 1969 collection of journal entries and poem fragments from his twenties and thirties \u2014 Snyder writes:<\/p>\n

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Poems<\/em> that spring out fully armed; and those that are the result of artisan care. The contrived poem, workmanship; a sense of achievement and pride of craft; but the pure inspiration flow leaves one with a sense of gratitude and wonder, and no sense of \u201cI did it\u201d \u2014 only the Muse. That<\/em> level of mind \u2014 the cool water \u2014 not intellect and not \u2014 (as romantics and after have confusingly thought) fantasy-dream world or unconscious. This is just the clear spring \u2014 it reflects all things and feeds all things but is of itself transparent. Hitting on it, one could try to trace it to the source; but that writes no poems and is in a sense ingratitude. Or one can see where it goes: to all things and in all things. The hidden water underground. Anyhow \u2014 one shouts for the moon in always insisting on it; and safer-minded poets settle for any muddy flow and refine it as best they can.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In another entry, he considers the fork in the channel an artist must face \u2014 to go toward tradition or toward the unexampled, toward order or toward chaos:<\/p>\n

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Comes a time when the poet must choose: either to step deep in the stream of his people, history, tradition, folding and folding himself in wealth of persons and pasts; philosophy, humanity, to become richly foundationed and great and sane and ordered. Or, to step beyond the bound onto the way out, into horrors and angels, possible madness or silly Faustian doom, possible utter transcendence, possible enlightened return, possible ignominious wormish perishing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Art by Rockwell Kent<\/a>, 1919. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But as he traveled to Japan to study Zen Buddhism and spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities, Snyder came to question many of the Western assumptions about creativity. In an interview he gave in his late forties, he admonishes against mistaking the passionate path for a path of madness, against buying into the tortured genius archetype handed down to us by the Romantics, most of whom never lived past their thirties:<\/p>\n

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The model of a romantic, self-destructive, crazy genius that they and others provide us is understandable as part of the alienation of people from the cancerous and explosive growth of Western nations during the last one hundred and fifty years. Zen and Chinese poetry demonstrate that a truly creative person is more truly sane; that this romantic view of crazy genius is just another reflection of the craziness of our times\u2026 I aspire to and admire a sanity from which, as in a climax ecosystem, one has spare energy to go on to even more challenging \u2014 which is to say more spiritual and more deeply physical \u2014 things.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In his sixties, with hundreds of poems written and millions lost to the mystery, he at last distilled his experience of creativity in a spare, stunning poem partway between Zen koan and prayer, found in his 1992 collection No Nature<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>):<\/p>\n

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HOW POETRY COMES TO ME<\/strong><\/p>\n

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Elena Ferrante on the myth of inspiration<\/a> and Rilke on the combinatorial nature of creativity<\/a>, then revisit Gary Snyder on how to unbreak the world<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}