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What I’d hoped would be a great night listening to Gary Snyder turned into a real snoozefest. Host Garrison Keillor reminded me why I hated him so much as a kid when our parents forced my brother and I to listen to the Prairie Home Companion boxed set over and over again during car trips. Long pauses, stories about outhouses in Minnesota, Lutheran jokes — he bored me to tears then, and he did again last night.
To be fair, he wasn’t feeling well. He started off the evening telling how he’d taken a nasty fall at a dinner party the night before and hit his head on a planter box. That drew some hearty snorts and chuckles from the two women behind us; unfortunately, he wasn’t trying to be funny. That incongruity set the tone for the rest of the night, which was for the most part tedious.
I really wanted a little James Lipton style interviewing. Butter him up and ask some crowd-pleasers: What did you think after you first read Dharma Bums? Who was crazier, Kerouac or Burroughs? What was it like living in San Francisco in the 50’s? The last one he talked about a little, and it seemed was willing to share more war stories, but it never happened. Instead we got a contrived conversation where Garrison and Gary pretended like they were meeting for the first time. It was an interesting spin on the traditional Q&A, but the results weren’t good.
Oh well, it looked great on paper, but they never hit a groove. At least Kate and I got to hear Gary Snyder read a few poems. Here’s one of them:
Hay For The Horses
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
—-The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds—-
“I’m sixty-eight” he said,
“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
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.”
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