An official selection of the San Francisco International Film Festival (founded in 1957), The Practice of the Wild is a little gem of a documentary, from Zipline Entertainment and San Simeon Films, that takes you on a journey through the life of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder. Through his dialogue with novelist Jim Harrison, Gary laughs about his ‘role’ as one of the founders of the Beats—his camping trip in the Sierras with Jack Kerouac inspired The Dharma Bums—tells the story of his time as a Zen Buddhist in Japan, and rhapsodizes his beliefs in ‘deep ecology’ through readings and deliberations of his poetry.

It’s been four years or so since I last picked up a volume of poetry (a stack of books from the Boston Public Library, actually, by Franz Wright), but this affecting film is a reminder of the necessity of verse in our daily lives. Just a few weeks ago, in fact, I passed a friend who was transfixed with building a small stone wall around a large bush. He looked at me, smiled and said, “It’s either stones or poetry—order out of chaos!”

As you can tell from his meditative voice and his reflections, Snyder has lived his life from the inside looking out. “Nature,” and art he says, “always happens in a place. So why not look around and see where you are?” “Riprap” had me at the first two lines when I read it for a workshop as an undergrad—the simplicity of Snyder’s mind ‘noticing’ the world and the nature around him, an invitation to transcend the space between thoughts and things:

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

placed solid, by hands

In choice of place, set

Before the body of the mind

in space and time

Snyder is eighty years old now, still chopping wood, still kindling fires, and still building stone paths leading “these poems, people / lost ponies with / Dragging saddles” deeper into the world. As Harrison remarks, “Everything isn’t in Google.” The DVD will be enclosed in the book The Etiquette of Freedom, Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison and The Practice of the Wild. A new edition of Snyder's collection of essays Practice of the Wild, with a new forward by the author, is already in stores, but does not include the DVD. nth

- Ryan O'Connor

Labels: Beats, Dharma Bums, DVD, Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, nature, poet, poetry, Practice of the Wild, Zen Buddhism