Review of David Hinton’s The Wilds of Poetry: Adventure’s in Mind and Landscape

Weishaus, Joel

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 16 | No. 2 Article 52-10-2018The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind andLandscape by David HintonJoel WeishausPacifica Graduate InstitutePart of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North AmericaCommons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeWeishaus, Joel. "The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape by David Hinton." The Goose, vol. 16 , no. 2 , article 5, 2018,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/5.Tracking Mind through the Wilds of 20th Century Poetry  The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape by DAVID HINTON Shambhala, 2017 $22.95USD  Reviewed by JOEL WEISHAUS  Traced through one of its roots in Greek, an anthology is an anthologia: a bouquet of flowers. An anthologist, then, is a reaper of colors that enter the eyes, and perhaps the nose. What is most interesting about an anthology is, of course, who is in it, and who’s been left out. In this sense, an anthology reveals more about the anthologist’s vision than the writers anthologized.   One of the most successful anthologists of modern poetry is Donald M. Allen. His The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, first published 57 years ago by Grove Press in New York, has been kept in print by The University of California Press. After 16 years as an editor for Grove Press, Allen migrated to California. Settling in Bolinas, a few miles north of San Francisco, he founded Grey Fox Press and the Four Seasons Foundation, which, during the early 1970s, helped attract poets from around the country to move to, or visit, that small, discrete town. The reason The New American Poetry is still held in almost mythic esteem is that the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s was a time when the New York Beat poets and San Francisco Renaissance poets, “a strong third generation,” Allen calls them, after Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, et al., joined in a movement that has since assumed an aura in the annals of Literary History.  The Wilds of Poetry may be less ambitious than Allen’s anthology, but only from a different, although complimentary, perspective. Noted for his translations of ancient Chinese Poetry, it seems to me that David Hinton began his move toward the present anthology in the introduction to his 2005 book, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China, in which he wrote:   the Chinese wilderness is nothing less than a dynamic cosmology in which humans participate in the most fundamental way.  The poetry of this wilderness cosmology feels utterly contemporary, and in an age of global ecological disruption and mass extinction, this engagement with wilderness makes it more urgently and universally important by the day. (xiii)  Also sensing the cant toward the superficial in our time, Hinton begins a trek toward a more interior poetry with Henry David Thoreau’s “grueling two-week journey to the summit of Mt. Ktaadn (Katahdin) in Maine” (1), made in midst of Thoreau’s famous two-year residency by a placid Walden Pond.       Although, because of inclement weather, Thoreau couldn’t reach the mountain’s summit, it was on his descent that “Thoreau’s experience of existential contact occurred” (1). Faced with a raw, unforgiving nature, Thoreau came up against the fundamental questions that “distill the central issue in nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual history: What is the self? What is the Cosmos?” (3). On this slippery slope, Hinton slides back 2,500 years, to when China “underwent a cultural 1Weishaus: The Wilds of Poetry by David HintonPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2018transformation very similar to that of the modern West,” which “entailed a rediscovery of consciousness in its original nature as woven into the tissue of existence” (6). Hinton makes an important point. Neuroscientists are presently engaged in an effort to pin down, as if a butterfly, just what consciousness is, mainly by examining images of the brain made by fMRI machines under various prone circumstances, teasing out functions that, in reality, do not work in isolation. The human brain may be one of the most complex organisms in the universe. So, there is an attraction toward complexities that arise from unknown causes, driving scientists to parse chunks of the universe into digestible bytes of information, and mystics to dive head first into unfathomable mysteries.  What Hinton points out, and this is one of the main theses of his book, is that what’s missing from the curriculum of a modern poet’s education, and American educational institutions in general, is  a way of doing philosophy—not mere juggling of abstractions, but as lived and felt experience […] a lived form of deep ecology, the ‘rewilding’ of consciousness […] outside of received Western assumptions. (12)  Each chapter of The Wilds of Poetry is titled with a form of “Wilds,” beginning with Walt Whitman: “Procreant Wilds,” in which, “A few years after Thoreau posed his existential questions, Whitman began making poetry from the immediacy of contact, and in doing so he pushed the revelations of post-Christian science, Deism, and Romantic pantheism to new depths” (15). Hinton uses various forms of contact, along with Taoism, Ch’an Buddhism, and “techniques of discontinuous fragmentation or collage that open the logical narrative of thought to non-logical insight and silence” (311), as some of the glues that hold the poets in this book together. In Whitman’s case, his masterpiece, “Song of Myself,” is his   attempt to say the unsayable, the reality of consciousness and Cosmos in all the immediacy of contact, where who we are is essentially the procreant Cosmos of where we are. (17)  In next chapter, titled “China Wilds,” Ezra Pound’s reworking of ancient Chinese poems is coupled with Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” in which Fenollosa  brings language and thought close to things themselves, thereby returning us to a more primal and profound form of experience, to that contact Thoreau describes, where we might discover who and where we are. (29)  Born in Massachusetts, in 1853, Fenollosa was an excellent art historian, although he had no background in poetics, nor was he a linguist or Sinologist. I doubt that anyone would propose that modern Chinese is pictographic, as Fenollosa argued for its ancient characters, but Pound was excited about “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” whose manuscript was given to him by Fenollosa’s widow and edited by Pound, because Fenollosa’s theory elaborated Pound’s imagist interests. After Pound comes the “Local Wilds” of William Carlos Williams, the 2The Goose, Vol. 16, No. 2 [2018], Art. 5https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/5physician/poet from New Jersey famous for, “Say it. No ideas but in things,” and whom Hinton proposes “brought mind as close as possible to Ch’an’s ‘immediate contact with the world’” (40). Hinton then moves to the opposite coast, to Robinson Jeffers, who   inhabits time at vast scales of elemental transformation, scales at which linear time is replaced by a unity of time and space moving like Lao Tzu’s outgoing generative moment. (59)  Indeed, Jeffers was a man of the elements, his cup filled to the brim with the Pacific Ocean’s raucous saline waters, and whose philosophy of inhumanism struggles   against the entire Western tradition, in which the human is assumed to be qualitatively separate from and superior to everything else in the material universe. (60)  I see this as one of the essential steps toward what we now call the “posthuman.”          Kenneth Rexroth, father of the San Francisco Renaissance Poets, is “Mountain Wilds.” Then, Hinton returns to the East Coast, where Charles Olson suggests  that we cultivate a life with the mind open simultaneously to all of the complexities of experience, which means a wild mind in contact, open to all its potential and beauty and depth. (92)  There are nine other poets in this anthology, including John Cage, known for scoring his music by leaving it to the chances and changes of the I Ching, more than for his free-wheeling, or constricted, poems, and Jerome Rothenberg’s working of the oral poems of primal peoples. Rothenberg’s “translations” have always sounded to me drained of their original magic, which lives in their rituals, in their cultures, and in the shaman’s “secret language” that cannot be performed on a page, or even in a recording.  In Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Mircea Eliade writes, “Very often this secret language is actually the ‘animal language or originates in animal cries” (86). Thus, in “Mammal Wilds” Hinton gives samples from Michael McClure’s “Ghost Tantras,” such as: “HRAHH ! grahhr ! WRAH ! GROOOOOOOOOOO !” (1). While such an anthology must include Gary Snyder, the only actual scholar/practitioner of Zen Buddhism Hinton has chosen, Larry Eigner, is still an inspired choice. Although Eigner, who because of bungled delivery at birth, spent his life in a wheelchair, and so couldn’t walk through wilderness, he made poems   reduced to (their) least possible materials, stripped down to a clarity only possible by abandoning those structures of meaning and explanation, the resources of a who shaping a where. (243)  Also included is the lesser-known Gustaf Sobin, an American who spent most of his life in Italy. Like Rothenberg, Sobin’s work is  a return to the primitive. Often emphasizing the oral, he reaches for a language that operates as it did in the Paleolithic, before it became the medium of a spirit-center, a mimetic inside looking out on the empirical outside. (286) 3Weishaus: The Wilds of Poetry by David HintonPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2018Rounding out the contents of The Wilds of Poetry are the canonical W.S. Merwin, A.R. Ammons, and Ronald Johnson, who uses  collage techniques to construct poems free of the traditional organizing self, poems that open consciousness in a radical way to the possibility of contact. (263)  Hinton is generous with his samples of each poet’s work, and for this reason alone the book is worthwhile owning. In addition, for those readers interested in the intersections of Taoism, Zen Buddhism, Environmentalist, and Poetry, it may exude a certain moral fragrance. Most important, however, is that at a time when the standards of poetry have fallen to where there is usually a creative goal no more enduring than prizes, grants, and tenure, Hinton delivers a message of depth and delight that young poets, their audience, and their teachers, would do well to take into account.  Works Cited Allen, Donald, ed. The New American  Poetry, 1945-1960. University of  California UP, 1999. Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic  Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton UP,  2004. Hinton, David, editor. Mountain Home: The  Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China.  New Directions Publishing, 2005.  JOEL WEISHAUS was Visiting Faculty at Portland State University Department of English (2003-2007), and a Visiting Scholar and Research Fellow at The University of California, Santa Barbara (2011-2012). In 2014, his Collected Poems, Feels Like Home Again, was published by Lavender Books, New Orleans. He is presently Artist-in-Residence and Lecturer at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, CA. 4The Goose, Vol. 16, No. 2 [2018], Art. 5https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/5

The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape by David Hinton

Scholars Commons

The Goose
Volume 16 | No. 2 Article 5
2-10-2018
The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and
Landscape by David Hinton
Joel Weishaus
Pacifica Graduate Institute
Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America
Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment Commons
Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose
This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an
authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante
de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez
scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée
Weishaus, Joel. "The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape by David Hinton." The Goose, vol. 16 , no. 2 , article 5, 2018,
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/5.
Tracking Mind through the Wilds of 20th 
Century Poetry 
 
The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind 
and Landscape by DAVID HINTON 
Shambhala, 2017 $22.95USD 
 
Reviewed by JOEL WEISHAUS 
 
Traced through one of its roots in Greek, an 
anthology is an anthologia: a bouquet of 
flowers. An anthologist, then, is a reaper of 
colors that enter the eyes, and perhaps the 
nose. What is most interesting about an 
anthology is, of course, who is in it, and 
who’s been left out. In this sense, an 
anthology reveals more about the 
anthologist’s vision than the writers 
anthologized.   
One of the most successful 
anthologists of modern poetry is Donald M. 
Allen. His The New American Poetry: 1945-
1960, first published 57 years ago by Grove 
Press in New York, has been kept in print by 
The University of California Press. After 16 
years as an editor for Grove Press, Allen 
migrated to California. Settling in Bolinas, a 
few miles north of San Francisco, he 
founded Grey Fox Press and the Four 
Seasons Foundation, which, during the early 
1970s, helped attract poets from around 
the country to move to, or visit, that small, 
discrete town. 
The reason The New American 
Poetry is still held in almost mythic esteem 
is that the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s was 
a time when the New York Beat poets and 
San Francisco Renaissance poets, “a strong 
third generation,” Allen calls them, after 
Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, Marianne 
Moore, Wallace Stevens, et al., joined in a 
movement that has since assumed an aura 
in the annals of Literary History.  
The Wilds of Poetry may be less 
ambitious than Allen’s anthology, but only 
from a different, although complimentary, 
perspective. Noted for his translations of 
ancient Chinese Poetry, it seems to me that 
David Hinton began his move toward the 
present anthology in the introduction to his 
2005 book, Mountain Home: The 
Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China, in 
which he wrote:  
 
the Chinese wilderness is nothing 
less than a dynamic cosmology in 
which humans participate in the 
most fundamental way. 
 The poetry of this wilderness 
cosmology feels utterly 
contemporary, and in an age of 
global ecological disruption and 
mass extinction, this engagement 
with wilderness makes it more 
urgently and universally important 
by the day. (xiii) 
 
Also sensing the cant toward the 
superficial in our time, Hinton begins a trek 
toward a more interior poetry with Henry 
David Thoreau’s “grueling two-week 
journey to the summit of Mt. Ktaadn 
(Katahdin) in Maine” (1), made in midst of 
Thoreau’s famous two-year residency by a 
placid Walden Pond. 
      Although, because of inclement 
weather, Thoreau couldn’t reach the 
mountain’s summit, it was on his descent 
that “Thoreau’s experience of existential 
contact occurred” (1). Faced with a raw, 
unforgiving nature, Thoreau came up 
against the fundamental questions that 
“distill the central issue in nineteenth- and 
twentieth-century intellectual history: What 
is the self? What is the Cosmos?” (3). On 
this slippery slope, Hinton slides back 2,500 
years, to when China “underwent a cultural 
1
Weishaus: The Wilds of Poetry by David Hinton
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2018
transformation very similar to that of the 
modern West,” which “entailed a 
rediscovery of consciousness in its original 
nature as woven into the tissue of 
existence” (6). 
Hinton makes an important point. 
Neuroscientists are presently engaged in an 
effort to pin down, as if a butterfly, just 
what consciousness is, mainly by examining 
images of the brain made by fMRI machines 
under various prone circumstances, teasing 
out functions that, in reality, do not work in 
isolation. The human brain may be one of 
the most complex organisms in the 
universe. So, there is an attraction toward 
complexities that arise from unknown 
causes, driving scientists to parse chunks of 
the universe into digestible bytes of 
information, and mystics to dive head first 
into unfathomable mysteries.  
What Hinton points out, and this is 
one of the main theses of his book, is that 
what’s missing from the curriculum of a 
modern poet’s education, and American 
educational institutions in general, is 
 
a way of doing philosophy—not 
mere juggling of abstractions, but as 
lived and felt experience […] a lived 
form of deep ecology, the ‘rewilding’ 
of consciousness […] outside of 
received Western assumptions. (12) 
 
Each chapter of The Wilds of Poetry 
is titled with a form of “Wilds,” beginning 
with Walt Whitman: “Procreant Wilds,” in 
which, “A few years after Thoreau posed his 
existential questions, Whitman began 
making poetry from the immediacy of 
contact, and in doing so he pushed the 
revelations of post-Christian science, Deism, 
and Romantic pantheism to new depths” 
(15). Hinton uses various forms of contact, 
along with Taoism, Ch’an Buddhism, and 
“techniques of discontinuous fragmentation 
or collage that open the logical narrative of 
thought to non-logical insight and silence” 
(311), as some of the glues that hold the 
poets in this book together. In Whitman’s 
case, his masterpiece, “Song of Myself,” is 
his  
 
attempt to say the unsayable, the 
reality of consciousness and Cosmos 
in all the immediacy of contact, 
where who we are is essentially the 
procreant Cosmos of where we are. 
(17) 
 
In next chapter, titled “China Wilds,” 
Ezra Pound’s reworking of ancient Chinese 
poems is coupled with Ernest Fenollosa’s 
“The Chinese Written Character as a 
Medium for Poetry,” in which Fenollosa 
 
brings language and thought close 
to things themselves, thereby 
returning us to a more primal and 
profound form of experience, to 
that contact Thoreau describes, 
where we might discover who and 
where we are. (29) 
 
Born in Massachusetts, in 1853, Fenollosa 
was an excellent art historian, although he 
had no background in poetics, nor was he a 
linguist or Sinologist. I doubt that anyone 
would propose that modern Chinese is 
pictographic, as Fenollosa argued for its 
ancient characters, but Pound was excited 
about “The Chinese Written Character as a 
Medium for Poetry,” whose manuscript was 
given to him by Fenollosa’s widow and 
edited by Pound, because Fenollosa’s 
theory elaborated Pound’s imagist 
interests. 
After Pound comes the “Local Wilds” 
of William Carlos Williams, the 
2
The Goose, Vol. 16, No. 2 [2018], Art. 5
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/5
physician/poet from New Jersey famous for, 
“Say it. No ideas but in things,” and whom 
Hinton proposes “brought mind as close as 
possible to Ch’an’s ‘immediate contact with 
the world’” (40). Hinton then moves to the 
opposite coast, to Robinson Jeffers, who  
 
inhabits time at vast scales of 
elemental transformation, scales at 
which linear time is replaced by a 
unity of time and space moving like 
Lao Tzu’s outgoing generative 
moment. (59) 
 
Indeed, Jeffers was a man of the elements, 
his cup filled to the brim with the Pacific 
Ocean’s raucous saline waters, and whose 
philosophy of inhumanism struggles  
 
against the entire Western tradition, 
in which the human is assumed to 
be qualitatively separate from and 
superior to everything else in the 
material universe. (60) 
 
I see this as one of the essential steps 
toward what we now call the “posthuman.”    
      Kenneth Rexroth, father of the San 
Francisco Renaissance Poets, is “Mountain 
Wilds.” Then, Hinton returns to the East 
Coast, where Charles Olson suggests 
 
that we cultivate a life with the mind 
open simultaneously to all of the 
complexities of experience, which 
means a wild mind in contact, open 
to all its potential and beauty and 
depth. (92) 
 
There are nine other poets in this 
anthology, including John Cage, known for 
scoring his music by leaving it to the 
chances and changes of the I Ching, more 
than for his free-wheeling, or constricted, 
poems, and Jerome Rothenberg’s working 
of the oral poems of primal peoples. 
Rothenberg’s “translations” have always 
sounded to me drained of their original 
magic, which lives in their rituals, in their 
cultures, and in the shaman’s “secret 
language” that cannot be performed on a 
page, or even in a recording. 
 In Shamanism: Archaic Techniques 
of Ecstasy, Mircea Eliade writes, “Very often 
this secret language is actually the ‘animal 
language or originates in animal cries” (86). 
Thus, in “Mammal Wilds” Hinton gives 
samples from Michael McClure’s “Ghost 
Tantras,” such as: “HRAHH ! grahhr ! WRAH 
! GROOOOOOOOOOO !” (1). 
While such an anthology must 
include Gary Snyder, the only actual 
scholar/practitioner of Zen Buddhism 
Hinton has chosen, Larry Eigner, is still an 
inspired choice. Although Eigner, who 
because of bungled delivery at birth, spent 
his life in a wheelchair, and so couldn’t walk 
through wilderness, he made poems  
 
reduced to (their) least possible 
materials, stripped down to a clarity 
only possible by abandoning those 
structures of meaning and 
explanation, the resources of a who 
shaping a where. (243) 
 
Also included is the lesser-known 
Gustaf Sobin, an American who spent most 
of his life in Italy. Like Rothenberg, Sobin’s 
work is 
 
a return to the primitive. Often 
emphasizing the oral, he reaches for 
a language that operates as it did in 
the Paleolithic, before it became the 
medium of a spirit-center, a mimetic 
inside looking out on the empirical 
outside. (286) 
3
Weishaus: The Wilds of Poetry by David Hinton
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2018
Rounding out the contents of The 
Wilds of Poetry are the canonical W.S. 
Merwin, A.R. Ammons, and Ronald Johnson, 
who uses 
 
collage techniques to construct 
poems free of the traditional 
organizing self, poems that open 
consciousness in a radical way to the 
possibility of contact. (263) 
 
Hinton is generous with his samples 
of each poet’s work, and for this reason 
alone the book is worthwhile owning. In 
addition, for those readers interested in the 
intersections of Taoism, Zen Buddhism, 
Environmentalist, and Poetry, it may exude 
a certain moral fragrance. 
Most important, however, is that at 
a time when the standards of poetry have 
fallen to where there is usually a creative 
goal no more enduring than prizes, grants, 
and tenure, Hinton delivers a message of 
depth and delight that young poets, their 
audience, and their teachers, would do well 
to take into account. 
 
Works Cited 
Allen, Donald, ed. The New American 
 Poetry, 1945-1960. University of 
 California UP, 1999. 
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic 
 Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton UP, 
 2004. 
Hinton, David, editor. Mountain Home: The 
 Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. 
 New Directions Publishing, 2005. 
 
JOEL WEISHAUS was Visiting Faculty at 
Portland State University Department of 
English (2003-2007), and a Visiting Scholar 
and Research Fellow at The University of 
California, Santa Barbara (2011-2012). In 
2014, his Collected Poems, Feels Like Home 
Again, was published by Lavender Books, 
New Orleans. He is presently Artist-in-
Residence and Lecturer at Pacifica Graduate 
Institute, Carpinteria, CA. 
4
The Goose, Vol. 16, No. 2 [2018], Art. 5
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/5


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The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape by David Hinton

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