Beat Zen cross-pollination

The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder (Counterpoint Press) edited by Ginsberg biographer Bill Morgan, is a record of the cross-pollination of Beat Generation ethics with Japanese Zen Buddhism, of which Gary Snyder was perhaps the first, and for sure the most ardent devotee among the Beat crowd.

Ginsberg and Snyder first met in Berkeley in 1955 just before the famous Six Gallery poetry reading at which Ginsberg gave the reading of his countercultural anthem “Howl” memorialized by Jack Kerouac in his Dharma Bums, in which Snyder gets the name “Japhy Ryder,” While Ginsberg moved to Paris with William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and others, Gary Snyder entered a Japanese Zen monastery, embarking on a course of study that lasted until his return to the United States in 1969. For many years, Snyder was a faculty member at the University of California, Davis, and served on the California Arts Council. The two men maintained correspondence throughout their lives.

Allen Ginsberg died in 1997 after co-founding the “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Boulder’s Naropa Institute, now Naropa University.