Sangha of Poets
Dear Friends, As we are reading Nhat Hanh’s poems for our June session, I thought I’d share a few poems by other Zen poets in the weeks ahead. Here is one by Han-Shan, who lived…
Tag: Gary Snyder
Quit Complaining!
Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-shanTranslated and with an Introduction by Burton Watson I first learned of Han-shan 30 years ago when reading Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums, which starred Japhy…
Poets/1
Viva Tang Ten thousand and two texts A thousand and three tweets 644 Facebook status updates 87 cell phone messages save or delete Enough already! Take a deep breath Leave behind the technology And go…
Fiddling with the Archetypes
Gary Snyder, The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979 I first learned of Gary Snyder in fictionalized form as the hero Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. Therein, as in real life, the…
“Nobody’s Going To Do It for You”
Anne Waldman and Laura Wright, editors, Beats at Naropa: An Anthology Coffee House Press, 2009 I read Beats at Naropa exactly nine years ago, 2009. In my notes on the dialogues, essays, and interviews are…
Occasional Moments of Peace, Gratitude, and Delight
I first learned of Gary Snyder through Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums, where he was fictionalized as “Japhy Ryder,” who, according to Alvah Goldbook [aka Allen Ginsberg], was “a great new hero of American…
Living Beats
I received an email from New Directions today and found a link to this The Washington Post profile of Ferlinghetti, McClure, di Prima, Gold, and Snyder. Enjoy!
Forty Years of Letters
Bill Morgan, I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg —1955-1997 I read a lot of Ferlinghetti in the 1980s, and loads of Ginsberg…
On Susan Sontag, Trip to Hanoi
Journal, July 2005 Susan Sontag spent two weeks in North Vietnam in 1968, and wrote 90 pages about her experiences. (Perhaps I will cull from those notebooks I kept in Gaza and the West Bank…
He Would Have Never Gotten Tenure
The thing is to get under the students’ skin and arouse enough enthusiasm that they get under their own skin. This means allowing yourself to be yourself in class. My own best teachers were WC…