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Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947–1985 by Gary Snyder

1987; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1987.0106

1948-7142

Bert Almon,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

216 Western American Literature King of the Beatniks. By Arthur W. Knight. (Sudbury, Massachusetts: Water Row Press, 1986. 58 pages, $6.95 paper.) Arthur Knight’s play, based on Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Gregory Corso, details the last months of the “King of the Beatniks.” As Knight explains in his introduction, the play is not biographical so much as “about men who are baffled by the meaning of existence.” One uses alcohol to stave off a reality he no longer understands; the other uses sex and drugs. Unfor­ tunately, they spend one entire act statically explaining their guilt, their fathers, their friends’ suicides, and their “mess.” Knight uses masturbation as a central metaphor for his characters’ selfindulgence and sexual egocentrism. His introduction says that he seeks “the poetry of the obscene.” If so, he would do well to drop “coming . . . as a . . . mystical experience . . . [with] the face of a saint” in favor of studying the master Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre’s critical exegesis of the theme. Granted, Kerouac’s milieu itself may be at fault, substituting the putative grandeur of the obscene for mere adolescent nastiness. The play does contain some fine moments, notably John’s (Kerouac’s) memories of Mazatlan, his realistically uncomfortable reunion with a nearly forgotten daughter, and Logan’s (Corso’s) outbursts in the last act. The play touches on but unfortunately does not explore a fascinating dynamic: how much of Jesse (Cassady) did John create? For all its highights and lowlights, the play feels as if we have picked up where Long Day’s Journey Into Night left off—but without O’Neill’s monu­ mental characterization, cosmic struggle and terrifying collapse. Knight’s play does end, however, with a senseless stabbing, the perfect objective correlative for the undirected, uncommitted, and unconnected quality of Kerouac’s last days and, by extrapolation, of his entire generation. ADEN ROSS Utah State University Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947-1985. By Gary Snyder. (San Fran­ cisco: North Point Press, 1986. 209 pages, $15.95.) Ben Jonson named one of his collections The Forest; another was called Under-wood. Snyder might well have called this wide-ranging selection of uncollected work Underbrush. Some of it isquite negligible, but it all makes a contribution to his ecology. The arrangement is generally chronological, so we learn something about the strong continuity of his work: the first poem, Reviews 217 “Elk Trails,” is mature in matter if not in manner. It provides us with a text (the intricate patterns of nature revealed by following elk trails) and a myth, the “thin-flanked God” who laughs at mere human trails. And the second poem, “Out of the soil and rock,” written in New York City, contemplates cycles of nature from which cities emerge and into which they will vanish. A fruitful quarrel with civilization recurs in Snyder’s work. While he knows that the city has much to offer, he also believes that the city represents a wrong turning in human development: the city states of Sumeria gave us buildings (temples) and autocracy (kings). In a later poem, “The Other Side of Each Coin,” he sums up this pattern: “The head of a man of the ruling elite/And a very large building. One on each side of the coin.” There are some fine things in Snyder’s underbrush. Each of the eight sections has fine poems. The animal poems are among the delights: bear, bison and bobcat are celebrated. Snyder’s long-term readers will be interested to read more about the Sappa Creek, that notorious cranky tanker, not to mention Genji, his cat. Bits of the Snyder legend are filled in. We learn more about his friends, his marriages, his life in Japan, his return to the USA, his routine at Kitkitdizze. I wish that more of the poems had dates and places given. Many of them have a spare, journal-entry quality, and we might as well have the apparatus of a journal. One really new thing we learn from the book is the persistence of the formal impulse—the impulse toward traditional forms—in Snyder’s work. He has long been interested, it is...