All in the family: Gary Snyder's poetics of reinhabitation

Gary Snyder's uses of Chinese poetic traditions invites readers to consider Axe Handles as a series of poetic conversations with contemporaries and historical figures and to view his poems as moments and events related to other works intertextually in various and reciprocal ways. His uses of Taoism and Buddhism suggest that we look for a direct presentation of natural entities and cycles combined with artistic techniques that may shift our conventional understanding of the world and reorient it so that we may see things as they present themselves. Snyder's use of Indra's Net alerts us to view the poems as a discrete experiences and events and to see that each poem's features correspond to other poems in ways that present the complex interrelationships which cycle through nature and culture. In other words, the structure, text and context of Axe Handles suggest a model of reading that displays the relationships and interconnectedness of things as they participate in the self- arising nature of the world, that accounts for the concrete, cyclical nature of existence and experience, and that presents human experience as a multivocal conversation among historically specific "peoples," human, natural and inanimate.; Axe Handles also offers a model of living ecologically, of what Snyder has called "Earth Householding," by carefully attending to the experience and consequences of living in place. As he chronicles his own reinhabitation of the San Juan Ridge, Snyder demonstrates and practices a biocentric ethic that models how people can identify and live compassionately with diverse communities of other beings. His poetry transforms our cultural representation of human nature and the nature of the world we inhabit.; This thesis joins that conversation as a series of critical discussions and the close reading of selected poems, particularly from Axe Handles . Critical discussions include Snyder's uses of Taoism, Buddhism and Chinese poetic traditions; ecology, systems theory, the Gaia hypothesis and Deep Ecology; and the nature and importance of gift-exchange, ritual, and the ethical implications of the works of Eihei Dogen.