Question

What does riprap symbolize in Gary Snyder’s poem, “Riprap”?

Answer 1

A.the barriers of friendship

B.the needless walls we build around ourselves

C.the journey and the workmanship of the trail of life

D.the things we bother ourselves with in life

I think the answer is C, but I'm really unsure. Please help!

Answer 2

For the American poet Gary Snyder the poem is a work-place. The idea of work, I shall argue throughout this paper, is central to Snyder's ecological poetics because it allows him to throw explicit attention on to the act of ‘writing the land'. This is clear from his well- known environmental concerns, and his work with various ecological projects in America since the sixties. Critics have thus tended to see his poetics as an assertion of the interconnectedness of all things that is both Buddhist and ecological. According to Helen Vendler Snyder is better known as an ‘ecological activist' than poet, but I shall argue that his poetics is an ecological poetics: it is the site for acts of reading that are ecological in their attempt to read land and poem as one. I want to suggest, however, that Snyder's ecological poetics discovers dualities -- land versus poem, human versus nature, self versus other -- even as it seeks to overwrite them in what Snyder terms the ‘real work' of integrating self, society and, most crucially, environment. Whilst this marks his challenge to the ideology of mainstream America, it also marks the extent to which his poetry is a product of deeply ingrained patterns of American culture. Snyder's poetic work ethic, this paper argues, is the ground upon which anxieties about the annihilation of personal and cultural identities, anxieties at the heart of American thought, are worked through. This is because the dualities which Snyder's work expose indicate a troubled relationship to the land, they discover faultlines that are deeply ingrained in American culture. Snyder's ecological poetics recognises that these can no longer be sublimated into romantic myths of the land, but must be seen as the traces of divisive self-division at the heart of the American psyche.