40 Years. One Man. One Vision. One Poem.

KITKITDIZZE, CA. —  The Japanese artist beat the green tea with a bamboo whisk, stirring up more than hot water. It was Buddha’s birthday, April 8, 1956, in Berkeley. With both hands he gave a steaming cup to Gary Snyder.

At 26, Snyder was already smitten with the East. As a graduate student he’d studied Chinese and Japanese brush techniques. Now over hot draughts of the bitter tea and talk of 14th century Japanese monk Sessho’s delicate scroll paintings, Snyder grew inspired: If only he could weave the spiritual power of his beloved West Coast wilderness and the inner realm of the mind into an epic poem.

Four decades and 147 pages later he is done. The just-published result: “Mountains and Rivers Without End” (Counterpoint). “I think it’s a marvelous, fascinating and complex piece of work, if I may say so myself,” he said. “But I don’t quite think I understand it yet.”

Others aren’t so hesitant. “A magnificent achievement,” raved Publisher’s Weekly, comparing the book to “Leaves of Grass.”

Sort of Ezra Pound-meets-John Muir in a Buddhist monastery, Snyder’s work and persona have captivated fans and fellow artists ever since the thrift store-clad tramp shared the stage with his friend Allen Ginsberg on the night the Beat generation burst onto the San Francisco scene in 1955 (Ginsberg wore a suit and tie, Snyder jeans). Jack Kerouac modeled Japhy Ryder, the handsome, Zen-spouting hobo after Snyder in “The Dharma Bums” (Viking Press, 1958). In 1975 Snyder’s poetry collection “Turtle Island” won the Pulitzer Prize.

“He’s one of the few people you can’t meet with and come away the same,” said David Brower, the environmental guru who formed the Friends of the Earth in 1969, with Snyder on its board, after breaking with the Sierra Club. “He reminds us of what the human spirit can do if left to itself.”

At the moment, the human spirit is burning toast in his outdoor kitchen. “I don’t even notice the insects,” Snyder said, as a visitor swatted away various buzzing and hovering things. Snyder at 66 has a well-seamed face that bespeaks a life lived in nature. His eyes sparkle, a thick thatch of slate-gray hair falls across his long face, which comes to a point with a gray-on-white beard and he exudes a boyish curiosity and energy.

He lives with his fourth wife, writer Carole Koda, and their 12-year-old daughter at the 3,000-foot level of the Sierra Nevada in a house he built from trees he felled on the spot. The 100-acre homestead--called Kitkitdizze, an Indian name for the bear clover shrub--is deep in the pines. Nevada City is the closest burg. UC Davis, where Snyder has taught for the last decade, is 108 miles away.

The house is small and rustic, with bamboo mats on the floor. For 15 years he had no electricity and a hand-pumped well; now solar panels and a generator power a computer and fax and draw ground water into the house.

Snyder was born in San Francisco and grew up on a dairy farm outside of Seattle. His mother read poems to him before bed (he remembers Poe in particular) and he began composing his own as soon as he learned to write. As a youth he began camping alone, surrounding himself in solitude and the glory of the Earth. “I was forever changed by that place of rock and sky,” he writes of the Cascades in his new book.

He spent summers working in national parks and took jobs as a logger and a deck hand on an oil tanker. After graduating from Reed College in Portland, he took graduate classes at UC Berkeley in East Asian languages.

A month after his fateful tea in 1956, Snyder caught a freighter to Japan where he moved into a temple in Kyoto to study Zen Buddhism. He stayed until 1969, translating ancient texts from Japanese and Chinese, teaching English, meditating up to 10 hours a day and traveling. All the while he wrote poetry, fusing natural history, Eastern religion and Native American myth into unrhymed verse that celebrates both the corporeal and the spiritual.

The Japan Poetry Review has called him “an anarchistic erotic shamanistic Zen-Kegon-Tantric Buddhist ecological activist poet working for the good of the biosphere.”

Some of that is evident in the new book, an impressionistic diary of the intervening 40 years. It begins with the poem “Endless Streams and Mountains,” the title of another ancient scroll:

Clearing the mind and sliding in

to that created space

A web of waters steaming over rocks,

air misty but not raining,

seeing this land from a boat on a lake

or a broad slow river,

coasting by.

*

Over the course of 39 poems, Snyder hitchhikes up and down the West Coast, eats Chinese food at 4 a.m. in San Francisco, gets a very short haircut before setting off for a long trek in the back country, chants sutras while hiking Mt. Tamalpais with Ginsberg, travels the world and shares blueberries with a bear.

Along the way he makes brief incursions into the world most of us know--such as in “Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin:”

Dragons of light in the dark

sweep going both ways

in the night city belly.

The passage of light end to end and rebound,

--ride drivers all heading somewhere--

etch in their traces to night’s eye-mind

calligraphy of cars.

*

But Snyder is only in his element in the elements and his book ends, as it began, in the wild.

Six years ago Snyder and his neighbors formed the Yuba Watershed Institute, which co-manages 1,800 acres of timberland with the Bureau of Land Management near Nevada City. The organization tries to plot a course between economic activity and wilderness preservation in Nevada County, whose population has jumped from 30,000 to 90,000 in the last quarter of a century.

Snyder also helped found the nature and culture program at UC Davis. Students at a senior class seminar just spent a week at his spread, swimming in the Yuba River and listening to the poet and others lecture on the history of Buddhist culture in the region, basket weaving and deep ecology.

(The synopsis says Snyder “would like to see ‘the humanities’ rethought to include the preliterate, the primitive, the prehistoric and perhaps even the nonhuman.”)

About five years ago he was walking through Manhattan and saw the commotion of the city in a clarifying light that moved him to bring his labors on his epic poem to a close. “OK, I’ve seen enough of the world,” he recalled. “I wasn’t trying to represent the whole world but I was trying to get a sketchy sense of the world. I figured I’d touched enough bases and I just needed to sort it out.”

He took a sabbatical. “I really shut down everything,” he said.

Over the decades he had collected masses of material, which he proceeded to whittle and winnow. Last April, on the 40th anniversary of his fateful tea, Snyder met a few old friends in San Francisco, drank a few cups of bitter brew and declared his poem finished--sort of.

To explain, he unfolds a 3-inch-wide (or about one-quarter-scale) replica of the scroll that inspired him. Moving right to left, revealing only a tiny section at a time, he demonstrates how the work should be viewed: as an animate object, savored over tea and discussion, not as a lifeless still life, tacked to a museum wall.

“Western landscapes are paintings of inert objects,” he said. “Eastern paintings are of living energy, the dynamic forces of the Earth. See, the rock is alive with energy; the water cycle, the flow of water into and out of the atmosphere is present in the whole thing,” he continued, scanning a vast panorama of earth and sea and cities and people. “You don’t need perspective, emptiness creates space; emptiness is space.”