Today is the birthday of poet Gary Snyder, born in San Francisco in 1930

Today is the birthday of poet Gary Snyder, born in San Francisco in 1930. He's associated with the Beat Generation; he certainly knew them, and liked them well enough, especially Jack Kerouac, who modeled Dharma Bums' Japhy Ryder on Snyder. Most of the Beats were city kids, and they found Snyder fascinating because he grew up in the woods of Washington and Oregon, was interested in nature, and had worked as a logger, a seaman, and a fire lookout. He earned his Beat label based on geography and timing, mostly, and not on common purpose or underground lifestyle. He was a student of anthropology and Asian culture, a dedicated Zen Buddhist, and an ecological poet. Lawrence Ferlinghetti called him "The Thoreau of the Beat Generation."

When an instructor at the American Academy of Asian studies taught him about landscape painting as a meditative practice, Snyder thought he might try to translate the concept to poetry. He began his epic myth-poem, Mountains and Rivers Without End, in 1956, attempting the literary equivalent of a Chinese or Japanese scroll painting. He expected it to take a couple of years to complete. It took 40. He told the Paris Review: "It all got more complicated than I had predicted, and the poems were evasive. So I relaxed, and thought, however long it takes. I kept my eye on it, walking, reflecting, and researching, but didn't make any big demands on the mountain-goddess muse. So it worked out to about one section a year for forty years." It spans Buddhism, geology, and pre-history, and it also traces the poet's evolving views on environmentalism.