[SinyugiN]

My 9 month old grand-daughter, Grace Carmel Price, had just gone off to sleep. This is always a blessing for my wife and I when we are doing our stint of baby-sitting. My wife was gearing-up for her Sunday football in Australia, when my eye caught ABC24’s Big Ideas: The Practice of the Wild.1

This 2010 doco was about the life of the American Beat poet, Gary Snyder. His first book, Riprap, drew on his experiences as a forest lookout and as one of the trail-crew in Yosemite. The book was published in 1959. I was 15 years old at the time and in love with baseball, hockey, football and Susan Gregory. I also joined the Baha’i Faith that same year. -Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC24, 1:00-2:00 p.m., 3 June 2012.

For a review of this doco on 8 November 2011, go to: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/re...-the-wild/5150

In 1959 you shipped for Japan
where you rented that cottage
outside Kyoto & studied Zen.

You married in February 1960,
four months after I joined the
Baha’i Faith. Your poetry was
about your experiences, ideas,
& environments involved with
the work you did for a living:
logger, fire-lookout, crewman
on a freighter, translator, poet,
carpenter, and serious student
of Japanese animism……………..

You’ve been at it for 50+ years,
Gary, and I hardly knew you;
but I got your story today, &
reading about the origins of
the Beat generation as far as
the start of my life in the mid-
‘40s, I realized how much a
part of my own work is yours.

Still, my work is very different.
I really did not get ‘into’ poetry
until I was nearing the end of my
working life: 1955 to 1999--with
all its ups-and-downs, its endless
meetings, wall-to-wall people, &
finally, the urge to write poems.

Some had that Beat influence which
had been on the periphery of my life
since my early childhood: ‘46 to ’50.
But my poetry had a myriad influences;
with nearly 70 booklets & 7000 poems
I’d say I’m more eclectic than Beat….I
enjoyed learning about you today, Gary.

Ron Price
3 and 4 June 2012