Poet Receives UC Davis' Highest Honor
April 15, 2009. Poet Gary Snyder, whose poetry defied convention and defined an era, was awarded the UC Davis Medal, the highest tribute bestowed by the university.
Snyder, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis, received the honor Tuesday evening in a ceremony in the ballroom of the campus Activities and Recreation Center.
"Gary Snyder, arguably UC Davis’ most famous person,” said Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef. “Yet he has remained devoted to classroom teaching throughout his career, thrilling hundreds upon hundreds of students and elevating the campus by his presence. We are so fortunate, and so grateful, to have him as a member of our UC Davis family.”
The award recognizes individuals of rare accomplishment. Past recipients have included Michelle Bachelet, president of the Republic of Chile; Cruz Reynoso, the first Hispanic to serve on the California Supreme Court and a professor emeritus of law at UC Davis; and President Bill Clinton.
Remarkable parallels run through the lives of the latest UC Davis Medal recipients. Snyder was a farmers' son whose early years were shaped by the Depression. Gary emerged amid avant-garde art movements of the 1950s and '60s -- Snyder shaping the Beat/Zen Poetry Movement. Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930 and raised in the Pacific Northwest, where he worked as a youth on the family farm and seasonally in the woods. After earning an undergraduate degree in anthropology and literature from Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 1951, he pursued graduate work in linguistics at Indiana University and in East Asian languages at UC Berkeley. While in the Bay Area, he associated with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other poets and writers interested in altering consciousness and overturning writing conventions. From 1956 to 1969, Snyder lived in Japan and studied Zen Buddhism and East Asian culture. He joined UC Davis in 1986.
Snyder's more than 20 books of poetry and prose have swept literature's top prizes. "Turtle Island" won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975, and "No Nature" was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992. His many other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bollingen Prize, Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize, and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003.
"What came to fruition and influence in the Beat waves of the Fifties and Sixties has stood the test of the cynical decades that followed," British literary critic Ian Hamilton writes of Snyder's body of work in "The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English."
The reference book characterizes the thematic range of Snyder's body of work as "love and respect for the primitive tribe, honour accorded the Earth, the escape from city and industry into both the past and the possible, contemplation, the communal, peace, and the ascetic."
A resident of the northern Sierra Nevada since 1970, Snyder now devotes his time to environmental and cultural issues with a focus on the Sierra ecosystem. Although he officially retired from UC Davis in 2002, he continues to teach on campus with a focus on creative writing, ethnopoetics and bioregional praxis.
Snyder, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis, received the honor Tuesday evening in a ceremony in the ballroom of the campus Activities and Recreation Center.
"Gary Snyder, arguably UC Davis’ most famous person,” said Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef. “Yet he has remained devoted to classroom teaching throughout his career, thrilling hundreds upon hundreds of students and elevating the campus by his presence. We are so fortunate, and so grateful, to have him as a member of our UC Davis family.”
The award recognizes individuals of rare accomplishment. Past recipients have included Michelle Bachelet, president of the Republic of Chile; Cruz Reynoso, the first Hispanic to serve on the California Supreme Court and a professor emeritus of law at UC Davis; and President Bill Clinton.
Remarkable parallels run through the lives of the latest UC Davis Medal recipients. Snyder was a farmers' son whose early years were shaped by the Depression. Gary emerged amid avant-garde art movements of the 1950s and '60s -- Snyder shaping the Beat/Zen Poetry Movement. Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930 and raised in the Pacific Northwest, where he worked as a youth on the family farm and seasonally in the woods. After earning an undergraduate degree in anthropology and literature from Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 1951, he pursued graduate work in linguistics at Indiana University and in East Asian languages at UC Berkeley. While in the Bay Area, he associated with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other poets and writers interested in altering consciousness and overturning writing conventions. From 1956 to 1969, Snyder lived in Japan and studied Zen Buddhism and East Asian culture. He joined UC Davis in 1986.
Snyder's more than 20 books of poetry and prose have swept literature's top prizes. "Turtle Island" won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975, and "No Nature" was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992. His many other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bollingen Prize, Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize, and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003.
"What came to fruition and influence in the Beat waves of the Fifties and Sixties has stood the test of the cynical decades that followed," British literary critic Ian Hamilton writes of Snyder's body of work in "The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English."
The reference book characterizes the thematic range of Snyder's body of work as "love and respect for the primitive tribe, honour accorded the Earth, the escape from city and industry into both the past and the possible, contemplation, the communal, peace, and the ascetic."
A resident of the northern Sierra Nevada since 1970, Snyder now devotes his time to environmental and cultural issues with a focus on the Sierra ecosystem. Although he officially retired from UC Davis in 2002, he continues to teach on campus with a focus on creative writing, ethnopoetics and bioregional praxis.
posted by Wonji Dharma at
April 17, 2009
2 Comments:
He's one of the most important influences on my life. I'll be at his reading in Seattle next month.
How wonderful. I've already read some of "Turtle Island" out line to my (very) young son.
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