TEACHER MEDITATES ON NATURE OF POETRY.

Byline: Carlos Alcala Scripps-McClatchy Western Service

Gary Snyder has been immersed in poetry since he was 25, wrestling with the works of his predecessors - in English, Chinese, Sanskrit - and firing off his own canon in response.

He has created a necklace of writing threaded with Eastern religions, American Indian animism and an abiding interest in the relationship of nature and human culture.

Two recent books - one of essays, one poetry - provide summations of his career.

One prize - the $50,000 Yale Bollingen Poetry Prize, awarded to him two weeks ago - provides evidence of the broad recognition that his career's sum is great.

Snyder, now 66, finds it amusing to look back and compare his own retrospection with that of the 68-year-old hay hauler in one of his early poems.

That man looked back at his career, saying: ``I thought, that day I started,/I sure would hate to do this all my life./And dammit, that's just what/I've gone and done.''

When Snyder started as a poet, by contrast, he contemplated an adventure. It would take him through many jobs to sustain one career as a writer.

``I was not thinking, `I sure would hate to do this all my life,' '' he said.

Poetry was a desired vocation, but it was also one that required ``the willingness to turn your hand to whatever comes along,'' he said. ``Even if you are a fairly brisk-selling poet, the numbers aren't great.''

It wasn't until he started teaching at UC Davis a decade ago that he came upon what he jokingly called ``honest'' work, defined as ``what your girlfriend's dad would want you to have.''

And it is only now that poetry, pure poetry, will quite literally put a roof over Snyder's head and that of his wife and family.

He has subsisted modestly on teaching and readings until now, living 3,000 feet up in the Sierra foothills north of Nevada City.

The Bollingen prize for his poetry will give Snyder the means to replace the roof of the tiny 900-square-foot home he built, and allow him to build a small addition.

Beams in the house he built with friends were infested by carpenter ants and repair costs had worried him since a worker had come to look at the job.

``He said, `This is going to be a big-ticket item. Do you have the money?' I said, `I don't know,' '' Snyder said and laughed. Now he knows.

The work also will include something more prosaic than the roof over his family's heads: a flush toilet.

The current facility is what he calls one of the world's only tile-roof outhouses.

Snyder lives simply, but he has not made a fetish of disparaging technology.

He seems at home with his laptop and e-mail and acts at least as happy to talk about his gadgets - photovoltaic power cells and propane-powered backup generator - as he is to talk about his poetry.

But the gadgets and amenities of Snyder's home are less significant than its setting, a 100-acre wood of pine and oak and manzanita.

It is sunny - above the valley fog - but winter's runoff makes the earth feel damp and spongy beneath the leaves that cover paths around his home.

Tree frogs chirp, spiders glide on the still surface of a small pond and black-tail deer graze longingly outside his high-fence garden.

The place is named ``Kitkitdizze,'' the Wintu Indian name for a low-lying plant that 19th century miners referred to as mountain misery.

To get to Kitkitdizze, one passes a moon-strange gravel barrens that is the product of enormous hydraulic mining operations that used enormous water cannons to blow gold out of ancient riverbeds.

The history of that ancient Yuba River is in Snyder's head and he shares it readily, along with much more natural lore.

After all, when he wrote ``What you should know to be a Poet,'' he started with ``all you can about animals as persons/the names of trees and flowers and weeds.''

Nature suffuses his poetry. He can find it in the most unnatural places.

The architectural canyons of New York City feel ``as thoroughly natural as any wilderness,'' he wrote in the late 1980s, explaining how he composed ``Walking the New York Bedrock.''

That poem describes the winds, animals, flora, waters and geology of America's quintessential urban environment.

He is not concerned solely with nature, but with how people live with nature and with the question of how where we live makes us who we are.

``How do we become Americans and not transplanted Europeans?'' he asks rhetorically. ``Especially since more and more Americans are not transplanted Europeans.''

Which is to say that many of the inhabitants are from Asian cultures or cultures where animist influences remain strong.

That is what interests Snyder. ``I'm not interested in the Judeo-Christian tradition. That's on the other side of the Atlantic.''

He has been more interested in what's on the other side of the Pacific - in particular, Buddhism, which he studied in Japan for 10 years, before settling Kitkitdizze about 25 years ago.

His knowledge of Zen and Eastern traditions has mixed with environmentalism and humor in his writings.

He even wrote a ``Smokey the Bear Sutra,'' melding the Buddha with the furry shovel-toting fire-safety symbol.

But that Zen study has been intimidating for many Westerners, including his admirers.

One of them wrote - on a Web page dedicated to Snyder - ``You have to be careful writing about Gary Snyder, because he's such a Zen guy, you get the feeling anything you write will be vastly inferior to silence.''

Snyder responds: ``That would be good, if we could all do a little more creative work with silence.''