Gary Snyder

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[Inaudible.]..alone in the 8th century, and studied at an enormous Buddhist, Mahayana university called NAllenda, for fifteen years, and then walked back to China, with a fraying pack full of books, which he translated for the next twenty years after he got back to China. He brought the school of Buddhism, which is called the school of Mind Only, and the school of Emptiness. That's one aspect of this next poem. Another aspect is a little petroglyph, American Indian petroglyph figure, called the hump-backed flute player, a little stick figure playing the flute, with a pack on his back, walking. He was found pecked on the rocks from Sonora, Mexico up into the Great Basin, and about which almost nothing is known. The Ghost Dance, which was a Messianic Indian religion, started by a Paiute named Wovoka, which asserted that perhaps by magic the white man could be swept away from North America and the game would return. And finally, the oldest living beings are the bristle-coned pine, who live in the White Mountains, at an elevation of nine thousand feet in eastern California, the oldest of which is something like four thousand five hundred years old. So this poem is called "The Humpbacked Flute Player."

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00:01:59.48

Reads "The Humpbacked Flute Player"

Gary Snyder

00:08:36.16

I'm going to finish with one more poem called "Down." These poems are not in the order that they're going to be, but they're in a convenient order for the moment.

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00:09:05.09

Reads "Down."

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00:11:48.46

Loud applause concludes reading.

Introducer

00:12:18.68

I can't thank you for that. I don't know any way. Charles Simic will be reading on November 19th. Thank you. [Applause]

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00:12:45.00

AUDIO RECORDING ENDS.