The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [231]
Ginsberg and Snyder’s friendship began during the fall of 1955. Ginsberg was taken with Snyder’s calm, scholarly way. “He’s a head, peyotist, laconist,” Ginsberg wrote to a friend, “but warmhearted, nice-looking, with a little beard, thin, blond.”42 The poet Kenneth Rexroth, a polymath who had a regular arts-culture show on KPFA-FM, had booked them together for a reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. This art cooperative was run by young painters from the San Francisco Art Institute, who threw a poetry party that launched the beat movement on the West Coast. (From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. the gallery was an auto repair shop.) Ginsberg had arrived in the Bay Area bearing a letter of introduction from the poet William Carlos Williams, making the acquaintance of Kenneth Rexroth, and bragging about his French-Canadian friend Jack Kerouac from Lowell, Massachusetts, whose novel The Town and the City (1953) had marked him out as the new Thomas Wolfe. For the reading at the Six Gallery, Rexroth was asked to be the master of ceremonies, as a gesture of respect for his many years of mentoring poets in San Francisco. Four Bay Area poets were asked to read: Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip Lamantia. Snyder was excited to share the stage with Rexroth, whose poems, including “Another Spring” and “Toward an Organic Philosophy,” expressed his own wilderness ethos.
On October 7, 1955, the night of the famous reading at the Six Gallery, more than 150 people showed up, in a festive mood. Wine bottles were passed around. With the exception of Lamantia, who read poems by a deceased friend, the participants focused on the theme of humans reconnecting with nature. Philip Whalen contributed the comical “Plus Ça Change,” which kindly mocked Americans’ fear of touching each other, a reaction attributed to “alienation conditioning.” Kerouac, who was working on his novel On the Road—about his cross-country trips in the late 1940s and early 1950s, often with his delinquent friend Neal Cassady, sat Buddha-like on the concrete floor of the Six Gallery, hooting and hollering, slugging down wine, as the “forest poets” read their compositions.
If the United States faced a spiritual crisis in 1955, McClure believed, it was because many Americans insisted that animals didn’t have souls. To most Alaskans, for example, harpooning a whale, shooting a wolf on ranch property, and slaughtering polar bears for fun were economic propositions. McClure, whose poetry combined biology with mysticism, challenged the reckless treatment of wildlife in his long poem “Point Lobos: Animism.” Biologists and physicists admired his poems. Drawing on the scientific writings of Ernst Haeckel, who argued that all living entities were sacred, McClure hoped to teach Americans to treat ecosystems with reverent respect. Native Alaskans, for example, thought themselves equal to the polar bear, perhaps even inferior, but never better. “What I was interested in was the intersection of science and poetry,” McClure recalls. “There was too much distance between them, when in reality they have a lot in common.”43
The breakthrough poem at the Six Gallery was McClure’s “For the Death of 100 Whales.” McClure said that slaughtering whales was immoral. In April 1954, Time magazine had published an article about how the U.S. troops stationed at a NATO airbase in Iceland had gone on a rampage, slaughtering whales en masse with machine guns. They killed 100 whales, causing a wave of blood to ooze across the choppy waters. Making artistic use of this troubling story, McClure claimed that the cold-blooded killers were the troops, not the innocent whales, and protested against the carnage. The poem chastised the “mowers and reapers of sea kine”; the closing verse was:
OH GUN! OH BOW!
There are no churches in the waves,
No holiness,
No passages or crossings
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