Week Four: Gary Snyder, Poetry

For week four we turned our artistic minds to nature poetry.  Armed with two anthologies from the poet laureate of deep ecology, Gary Snyder, we set off for a historic cabin at Wilder Ranch to find a dry place to write.  A contemporary of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Snyder excels at capturing moments and using his words to take readers on journeys through the Sierra Nevada foothills he calls home.  Before embarking on our own journeys through the present, we began by exercising our poetic minds with an observation and description game.  When we finished, we read a few of Snyder's poems for inspiration.  The rain was still holding off, so we chose individual sit spots outside each other's line of vision and wrote for 10 minutes.  One student wrote his poem using Snyder's anthology for a writer's table; I'm confident Snyder would have approved!