Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the Cascades by John Suiter.
Counterpoint Press, 2002.
$40 — 304 pp.


When we think of the Beat generation and its literary icons, we think, mainly, of urban scenes: raucous poetry readings, sparsely-furnished lofts, cosmopolitan coffeehouses, smoky jazz joints and bars ... thus has the myth of this generation been sculpted, when, in fact, nature and the natural world played a major role in the formation of the lives and minds of many of this movement’s major poets. Nowhere has this nature-based perspective been magnified more telescopically than in Boston-based photographer and writer John Suiter’s book Poets on the Peaks.

Based on scores of previously unpublished letters and journals, plus recent interviews (necessitating a whopping 80 pages of 892 annotated entries and 9 pages of bibliography), Suiter has taken a mountain of research and created a smooth, free-flowing text that takes his readers inside the Beat boat on a river ride through the epiphanal years in the lives of his book’s principal players: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac. In a narrative landscape that is as illuminating as it is liquid, are also more than 30 Duotone black-and-white photos by the author and numerous historical photos that create nothing short of an homage to the northwest’s Cascade Range while complementing the solitary adventures of three of the young men that helped form poetic, spiritual, and environmental values for a generation.

Poets on the Peaks is, at once, detailed nature writing, engaging biography and knowledgeable literary criticism. Suiter takes us from 1952 and Snyder’s arrival at the Skagit River, Granite Creek Ranger Station, in the North Cascades (as “the little golden dharma hero with Aethereal Beard of Northwest Bull Durham woods” as Allen Ginsberg has written of him in those years in his journals, just prior to spending the summer in the fire lookout at 8,129 feet on Crater Mountain ... all the way to Kerouac’s death in 1969. With Suiter’s brilliant photo images as a constant backdrop, we follow our threesome through the paces of a lifelong, triumviral friendship, their burgeoning Buddhism, and the poetic epiphanies that would lay the groundwork for the environmental movement in the U.S. that would awake in the late 1960s following the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act. We have a front row seat for what has to be the most detailed account ever of the now-famous Six Gallery Reading in San Francisco in the fall of 1955, as well as the equally well-documented meeting of Ginsberg, Snyder and Kerouac at Kenneth Rexroth’s apartment prior to the Six Gallery event.

While these tales of beatnik glory are perhaps more interesting to young, enthusiastic fans of Beat legend and nostalgia, it is the landscape of the northwest coast as a mirror and catalyst for the spiritual and poetic development of Snyder, Whalen and Kerouac that steals the show in this book.

In this environment, Suiter takes us through the mind’s eye and into the fingertips of the creation of such seminal poetic texts as Snyder’s Rip Rap, Myths & Texts, Earth House Hold, Mountains & Rivers Without End; Whalen’s On Bear’s Head; and Kerouac’s The Scripture of the Golden Eternity and Desolation Blues. Perhaps even more interestingly, Suiter takes us into the interior of individual poems and passages that define the voices of these three writers and, at the same time, set the pace and the tone for a whole generation of poets, poetic prosestylers, nature writers and eco-activists that would follow.

“I don’t want to be a drunken hero of the generation suffering everywhere with everyone; I want to be a quiet saint living in a shack in solitary meditation of universal mind,” wrote Kerouac in January 1954, prior to his 40-day and 40-night stint in the fire lookout on Desolation Peak — a revelatory 64 days in seclusion that Suiter compares favorably with Thoreau’s Walden experience, Jesus in the wilderness and Buddha under the Bo Tree.

Meanwhile, and while Kerouac was discovering himself and the ideological essences of Zen Buddhism (while writing his “Buddhist blues” and transliterating a hip version of the Diamond Sutra) high atop Desolation Peak, Snyder was beginning his own Buddhist “Rucksack Revolution” in Marin County just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco — from which grew the grassroots beginnings of the Pacific Rim bioregional culture.

Snyder’s poem from this period, “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” not only mirrors his meditative summer spent in the Cascade and Sierra ranges, but provides us with a starting point for the familiar voice that would eventually lead to such identifying poems as “Rip Rap,” “Axe Handles” and “Prayer for the Great Family.” His translations of Han Shan; and his being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975:

Down valley a smoke haze

Three days heat, after five days rain

Pitch glows on the fir-cones

Across rocks and meadows

Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read

A few friends, but they are in cities.

Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup

Looking down for miles

Through high still air.

[Rip Rap, Four Seasons Foundation, 1958]

While Snyder was honing his wilderness, Buddhist and poetic skills in Japan, Philip Whalen had followed his lead into the Cascades and was writing a firebrand style of “fire lookout” poetry of his own:

“A single waking moment destroys us/And we cannot live without/Ourselves./You come to me for an answer? I/Invented it all, I/Am your tormentor, there is no/Escape, no redress/You are powerless against me: You/Must suffer agonies until you know/You are suffering;/Work on that.” [“Unfinished,” On Bear’s Head, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969]

Later, with “Jack Kerouac in smoky flame/Blazing bright at Buddha’s name,” as Snyder describes him in his poem “Ballad of Rolling Heads” during that brief bhikku period of Kerouac’s life, Whalen had hunkered down in the Bay Area and was beginning to become the Buddhist monk that would eventually emerge as the head of the San Francisco Zen Center. Snyder, meanwhile, and yet again, was sequestered in a monastery in Japan learning to sit zazen.

Thusly, the eco-drama is played out to the end in Poets on the Peaks in poems and personal conversation all the way up to the near present, when (as Kerouac predicted) pilgrims make cross-country treks to visit the former fire lookout shrines, looking for trinkets, as objets d’esprit, left behind by these three backcountry buddies during those halcyon days before the mantle of canonization fell into their postured laps.

For the rest of us, those of us not so young, idealistic or energetic to go looking for gods perched on high-mountain crags, but nevertheless interested in a progressive environmental ethic, we can find our own epiphanies in the pages of Suiter’s book, exemplified by lines such as the following that seem to sum up and scale the whole eco-poetic journey:

“The black snag glistens in the rain

& the last wisp of smoke floats up

Into the absolute cold

Into the spiral whorls of fire

The storms of the Milky Way.”

[ Myths & Texts, New Directions, 1978, pg.42]

In this sense, John Suiter’s Poets on the Peaks is our touchstone or talisman — a mythic saga — and is all the fetish we mere mortals need.

(Thomas Crowe is a writer who lives in the Tuckasegee area of Jackson County. He can be reached at newnativepress@hotmail.com)