Online Zoom Forum: Gary Snyder: The Spiritual, Ecological and Social Vision in His Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 9 December 2026.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 15 minutes, followed by discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Prof Bashabi Fraser.
Bio: Bashabi Fraser CBE is an Indian-born Scottish academic, editor, translator, and writer. She is Professor Emerita of English Literature and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University and and an Honorary Fellow of the Association of Literary Studies (ALS), Scotland, and a Royal Literary Fund Associate Fellow. She has authored and edited over 30 books, published several articles and chapters, both academic and creative and been widely anthologised as a poet.
She is co-founder and director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs). Fraser specialises in postcolonial literature and theory. Her profile on the ScoTs website states that "Her research and writing reflect her interest in diasporic themes: the intermeshings of culture and identity, of dislocation and relocation, of belonging and otherness, of memory and nostalgia, of third space and hybridity and of conflicts and freedoms." She also specialises in Tagore Studies.
She is chief editor of 'Gitanjali and Beyond', an academic and creative peer-reviewed online journal brought out by ScoTs, and is on the editorial board of WritersMosaic, a platform for writers of colour which is an initiative of the Royal Literary Fund.
Fraser has been described as "chief ideator" of the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library, an organisation made up of various creative individuals and formed in 2017 housed at Indian Council for Cultural Relations in Kolkata.
Fraser was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to education, culture and cultural integration in Scotland, in particular her projects linking Scotland and India. The Saltire Society named her an Outstanding Woman of Scotland in 2015.
Speakers:
Dr Jason M. Wirth:
Title: Listen to the Wind: Snyder's Zen Ecology.
Description: Listen to the Wind is a translation of Chofu, Gary Snyder's Dharma name from his ten years of practice and study of Zen in Kyoto. I explore the meaning of this name as a clue to the coherence and interconnection of Snyder's poetry, spirituality, deep ecology, and social vision.
Bio: Dr Jason M. Wirth is professor and chair of philosophy at Seattle University and works and teaches in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Aesthetics (especially film, painting, poetry, and the novel), and Environmental Philosophy. His recent books include Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana 2019), Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dogen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY 2017), a monograph on Milan Kundera (Commiserating with Devastated Things, Fordham 2015), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (SUNY 2015), and the co-edited volume (with Bret Davis and Brian Schroeder), Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana 2011). He is also a co-editor and co-translator of Schelling’s On the Deities of Samothrace (Indiana 2025) as well as Wolfram Hogrebe’s Predication and Genesis (Edinburgh 2024). He is the associate editor and book review editor of the journal, Comparative and Continental Philosophy. He is currently completing a manuscript on the cinema of Terrence Malick as well as a work of ecological philosophy called Turtle Island Anarchy. He is a founder and editor of Watershed Press. He is also an ordained Soto Zen priest.
Dr Monika Kocot:
Title: “Nets of Beads, Webs of Cells”: Indra’s Net in Gary Snyder’s Ecopoetics.
Description: The metaphor of Indra’s net constitutes a recurrent and significant trope in Gary Snyder’s work. Rooted in Buddhist philosophy — a tradition central to both Snyder’s Zen practice and his poetics — the net of Indra functions as a symbol of the radical interconnectedness of all reality. This talk examines Snyder’s essays and poetry in which he deploys the metaphor to articulate a way beyond what he identifies as the Western construction of a separate self. It further investigates the ways in which Snyder has “ecologized” (Barnhill) the metaphor of Indra’s net and the related Buddhist concept of interpenetration.
Bio: Monika Kocot, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Lodz, Poland. She is the author of Playing Games of Sense in Edwin Morgan’s Writing (2016) and co-editor of Moving Between Modes. Papers in Intersemiotic Translation. In Memoriam Professor Alina Kwiatkowska (2020). She has published widely on contemporary Scottish poetry and prose and on Indigenous American literatures. Her current research explores the intersections of philosophy, spirituality, and literature, with a particular focus on the geopoetic writings of Kenneth White and Gary Snyder. She is a member of the Association for Cultural Studies, the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, and the Polish Cognitive Linguistics Association.
Andrew Schelling:
Title: Treasures Among the Frags: Thoughts on Snyder’s Uncollected Poems.
Description: Some Treasures Among the Frags: Snyder’s last gathering of poetry, “Uncollected Poems, Drafts, Fragments, & Translations” holds items that did not make it into his earlier books. Some are wild and far-out, squinting off the page with hidden insights. He calls a few of them “frags,” and there are poems dropped from his epic Mountains and Rivers Without End. I’ll look at and fill in details on a few of these poems from the underside of Snyder’s visions.
Bio: Andrew Schelling is a poet, translator, essay writer, and editor of anthologies. He joined the Jack Kerouac School in 1990, and in 1994 began teaching Sanskrit language for the department of Buddhist Studies, and now for Yoga Studies. He works on land-use and ecological issues in Colorado and the American West, is an amateur naturalist and mountaineer, and for many years taught at Deer Park Institute in India. His most recent collection of poetry is Forests, Temples, Glacial Rivers, and a new collection of translations is just out, Old Time Love Song Magic, which presents the known poetry of Vidya, India’s earliest woman poet to write in Sanskrit. Tracks Along the Left Coast is an ideogram of linguistics, storytelling, wilderness lore, bohemian poets, and cattle rustling. The book has become an underground classic on the West—or Left—Coast.
Prof Julia Martin:
Title: What Images Return: Fragments from Snyder’s teaching that live with me.
Description: My reading of Gary Snyder’s work began as literary scholarship when I was a graduate student, but it soon became clear that he had become, more than anything else, a teacher. Forty-something years later, the way I experience the world continues daily to be informed by a bricolage of what I’ve learnt from him about practice and poetry and wildness and the living web of being. In this talk, I’ll reflect on some of the images and pieces of poems that return to me in this way.
Bio: Julia Martin is an emeritus professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of the Western Cape, and has published widely in the field of literature and ecology for both an academic audience and the general reader. Her publications include Writing Home (2002) a volume of narrative essays, A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (2008), a travel memoir about archaeological sites in the Northern Cape, The Blackridge House: A Memoir (2019), a story of her mother’s quest for home, and On the Sponge Islands: Loss and Restoration in the Aegean (2026), a nonfiction narrative about sponges and the impact of sponge diving in the Dodecanese. She has a particular interest in the work of Gary Snyder, and collaborated with him on Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places (2014), a collection of their conversations and letters over thirty years. Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects (2022) co-authored with Barry Lopez, is an extended conversation about the practice of writing in the face of the present environmental catastrophe.
Dr. Jonathan Stalling:
Title: Crossing Maple Bridge: Gary Snyder at Hanshan Temple and the Transmission of Emptiness Through Jueju.
Description: Gary Snyder’s engagement with classical Chinese poetry did not end with his celebrated translations of Hanshan. He also absorbed the compressed, relational logic of the jueju form into his own poetic practice. This talk examines Snyder’s rewriting of Zhang Ji’s famous Tang quatrain set at Hanshan Temple just outside Suzhou entitled “Night Mooring at Maple Bridge” ???? as a contemporary meditation on emptiness, traspacific dharma transmission, and poetic inheritance. Read alongside Snyder’s Hanshan translations, the "Maple Bridge" rewriting reveals how the jueju form, while hidden from view due to Snyder's modern lineation, becomes a vehicle of transmission capable of crossing languages and centuries. Stalling's talk will be presented in part on location at Maple Bridge, Suzhou.
Bio: Dr. Stalling is the Director of the David L. Boren School of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the Harold J. & Ruth Newman Chair of US-China Issues and Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Institute for US-China Issues, where he directs The Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, The Newman Prize for English Jueju, Chinese Literature and Thought Today, and the CLT book series (University of Oklahoma Press). He is also the founder and curator of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive. Dr. Stalling's interdisciplinary work sits at the cross-section of English-Chinese translation studies, poetics, linguistics, literature, and philosophy as well as Comparative US-China Culture more generally. He teaches courses on various aspects of US-China cultural, literary, and linguistic studies. He is the author or editor of eight books (with two forthcoming) including Poetics of Emptiness (Fordham, which explores Gary Snyder's work among others), Grotto Heaven (Chax), Yingelishi: Sinophonic Poetry and Poetics (Counterpath) and Lost Wax: Translation through the Void, and he is the co-editor of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (Fordham), By The River: Contemporary Chinese Novellas (Oklahoma) and Contemporary Taiwanese Women Writers (Cambria). He is the translator of Winter Sun: Poety of Shi Zhi (1966-2005), which was a finalist for the National Translation Award. Dr. Stalling’s Chinese-English interlanguage work is the subject of a new book published by Hong Kong University Art Museum Press (distributed by University of Chicago Press) entitled “Yinggelishi: the Interlanguage Art of Jonathan Stalling." Finally, Dr. Stalling is also the creator of the English Jueju, a novel system for teaching Classical Chinese poetic forms in English which can be found at www.juejupath.com.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
NB: There will be no refund if you cancel your booking.
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