'The Practice of the Wild' review: On Gary Snyder

One of the earliest questions Snyder asked was about the possibility of an afterlife for animals. Although born in San Francisco, he spent much of his childhood on a small dairy farm in Washington state. When one of the family's cows died, the young boy asked his Sunday school teacher if he would meet his heifer in heaven. The man could have finessed an answer, Snyder says in the film, but, instead, simply said no: Cows don't go to heaven.

"Our moral engagement with the non-human hit me very hard" at that moment, Snyder says with a wry smile.

Directed with deceptive subtlety by John J. Healey, and co-produced by Healey and Will Hearst, "Wild," which will be broadcast at 1 p.m. Sunday on KQED, is only 52 minutes long, but like a good poem, is packed with information, heart and meaning beyond its surface. Much of the film consists of a running conversation between Snyder and Jim Harrison, himself a gifted poet and author of novels like "Dalva," and the novella trio "Legends of the Fall."

Archival footage, as well as interviews with contributors such as poet Michael McClure and one of Snyder's former wives, Joanne Kyger (she calls him only "Snyder"), are blended with the ongoing conversation between Harrison and Snyder as they traipse the hills of San Simeon, the Hearst ranch.

The film, which was screened in this year's San Francisco International Film Festival, includes Snyder reading from some of his work - the poems "Turtle Island" ("I pledge allegiance to the soil ...") and "The Practice of the Wild." These and other Snyder poems are considered sacred texts of the deep ecology movement, which recognizes the interdependent bonds among all living things, to oversimplify.

McClure recalls that famous October evening in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg stood in the smoke of San Francisco's Six Gallery and read the poem "Howl" for the first time to an audience. As significant as that was, something else happened a bit later: Snyder read "A Berry Feast," which McClure claims had an even bigger impact on his audience because it became "the first deep ecology poem."

Snyder has had many lives (and, for that matter, many wives, including Carole Koda, whose death from cancer four years ago still haunts him). He has been a teacher, a poet, an essayist, a Zen master and an indefatigable environmental activist. He spent a good part of the '60s in Japan, where he not only learned about Buddhism but also refined his poetic style, finding a love for monosyllabic words, which, he says, are "like rocks." He says writing a poem for him is like creating "a little rock trail."

Each to each, the words of a Gary Snyder poem are often deceptively simple. Arranged together, they sound like life - "the old mare nosing lunchpails, grasshoppers crackling in the weeds," he wrote in "Hay for the Horses." It's what Harrison calls "the essential near wilderness" of Snyder's work.

Trails and pathways, like the "little rock trail" of a Snyder poem, figure prominently in his speech. When considering the possibilities of an afterlife or reincarnation, he talks about "the ghost trail" or "the spirit trail."

Snyder recalls the camping trip in the Sierra he made with his friend Jack Kerouac, an event the latter would memorialize in the novel "Dharma Bums," with Snyder portrayed as Japhy Ryder. At night, sitting near the ring of light and warmth of a campfire, Snyder talks about becoming aware of animals rustling in the darkness just beyond. He started to walk away from the campsite, feeling his way. But he wasn't fearful: He understood that darkness can hold as much meaning as the light.

Through light and dark, the point of Snyder's life and art has been the trail. Destinations are merely way stations.

E-mail David Wiegand at dwiegand@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle