Tag Archives: Gary Snyder

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Remembering Merce in his element: the vast Northwest

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Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Nearly Ninety. Photo: Anna Finke/2009

Dance critic and historian Martha Ullman West has spent a lot of time thinking about Merce Cunningham, the great 20th century dancer and choreographer who rethought what dance means by  introducing chance as a primary element in the mix. Cunningham, who was born and raised 90 miles from Portland in the small town of Centralia, Wash., died July 26 at age 90. Martha considers, among other things, the effect that the Pacific Northwest had on Cunningham’s art.

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Merce Cunningham. Photo: Mark Seliger/2009 Merce Cunningham died the other day, in his sleep it is said, which means he was still hard at work at the age of 90. Artists do, you know, work in their sleep, as well as their waking hours. There is no rest for the psyche.

He died in New York on Sunday, July 26, at his home in Greenwich Village. In his obituary for the New York Times, Alastair Macaulay, who is working on a book on Cunningham, called him “always a creature of New York.”

That’s not untrue, at least from 1939 on, when Cunningham joined Martha Graham‘s company. But it’s only part of the story.

Merce, in fact, was one of ours. So was Robert Joffrey. So are Trisha Brown and Mark Morris, who, thank God, are still around. All are natives of the Pacific Northwest, specifically Washington State.

I believe that Merce’s use of space, his sense of infinite possibility, his connection to nature, his conviction that you can do anything that pleases you on stage as long as it works aesthetically, came from the ethos of this part of the world. You see those elements in the poetry of Gary Snyder, who like Merce and composer John Cage, Merce’s long-term partner in life and art, was influenced by Zen thinking. You see them, certainly, in the work of Trisha Brown.

And, to bring it home to Portland, you see it in the choreography and technique of Mary Oslund, who studied with Cunningham and several members of his company, including the late Viola Farber. Oslund remembers being at dinner with Merce when White Bird presented the company (which, God love them, they did twice, in 2001 and 2004). Merce talked with her about Farber, Mary says, in his “diminutive and humble way.”

“He gave us a lot of permission,” Susan Banyas told dance maker Gregg Bielemeier when she heard the news of Merce’s death.

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Books, General, Poetry, Vernon Peterson

Live from Reed, it’s Gary Snyder 52 years ago

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Gary Snyder , Lincoln High and Reed College graduate, made a return appearance in Portland Friday. In the Oregonian Jeff Baker reports the discovery of a tape of Gary Snyder reading at Reed College on February 14, 1956. Rather, it is a cassette copy a Reed student made twenty-five years ago from the original reel-to-reel tape that is now missing. Recall back in February of this year Scatter commented on Reed’s release of the tape of Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl” that same night and the likelihood that a second tape had captured Snyder’s reading, too. The release of the Ginsberg tape inspired the Reed graduate, Portland photographer Steve Halpern, to offer up the cassette he had made while doing research in Reed’s library. Baker’s story includes Snyder’s reaction to the discovery. Baker also reports that Snyder’s reading from the seminal work “Myths & Texts” gives a glimpse of how the text published in 1960 evolved from the early version he read at Reed.

Jack Kerouac wrote a fictionalized account of Snyder and Ginsberg during this time in The Dharma Bums, still my sentimental favorite among Kerouac’s novels. You can listen to the tape at Reed’s website, which also has extensive notes discussing the variations between the read and published versions of the poems. The recording is remarkably clear. Snyder’s rich outdoor voice complements nicely the environmental themes of the poems. In addition to “Myths and Texts,” Snyder read versions of poems published in later books, including Riprap (1959), although he did not read the title poem in that collection. Too bad, really, for “Riprap” is Snyder’s call to arms, hands and feet as a poet, as well as to the voice, mind and heart that grows through his work from beginning to end.
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Books, Poetry

Listening for Allen Ginsberg

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“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,/angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night… “

Man. Once you start quoting “Howl” it’s hard to break it off. You could read it every night for weeks, perfecting the flow of breath needed (inhale/exhale) to keep its phrases flying skyward, to the “starry dynamo.”

Ginsberg HowlSo, what are we to make of the news today that a tape has surfaced from 1956, a tape of Ginsberg reading Part One of “Howl” to a small gathering at Reed College, where his reading mate that night, Gary Snyder, had gone to school? My first reaction: Not much. We know Snyder and his connection with the Beats and Ginsberg. We know “Howl.” The priority of this reading over the one that was taped a few weeks later in Berkeley doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

But I haven’t heard the tape, either. And as I sit here scanning that first page (“who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall..”), I want to hear Ginsberg reading it. Young Ginsberg, hot on the trail, with Snyder, who’d been with him during its composition in San Francisco the previous year. Ginsberg digging into it at Reed, surrounded by 20… what? Students? Faculty? Early Portland Beats? I don’t know, but I want to hear them breathing in the background and try to imagine what they made of it all, huddled together against the Ice Age of mid-’50s Oregon.

Proximity matters. And some part of Portland still draws from the Beat past, maybe, the part that rejects the coercion that regulates us — whether it originates in the government or the economic system or our own minds. I want to listen to the freedom in “Howl” and the sorrow, too, and see if I can smell us in there somehow. Reed is going to deliver: We can listen to the tape on Friday at the Reed website.

Meantime, here’s Jeff Baker’s interview with Snyder from Oregonlive about the night of Feb. 13, 1956.