Breaking the Anthropocentric Circle? Gary Snyder’s Struggle with Language in This Present Moment
Abstract
Gary Snyder has a profound impact on various facets of the American ecological movement. His work bridges ecological consciousness with Eastern philosophies, challenging dominant human-centered worldviews through his ecopoetic vision. In This Present Moment, Snyder highlights the themes of interconnectedness, biocentrism, and agency for all sentient beings. His poetics foreground the idea that human beings are embedded within the fabric of the Earth along with all other sentient beings; nevertheless, while his language is inevitably grounded in human semiotics, his poems strive to strip themselves of anthropocentric expression. Snyder utilizes sparse, unembellished diction that resists symbols and abstraction; that is, he seeks to reflect the rhythms and flow of nature beyond the boundaries of human perception and meaning. His ways of overcoming linguistic constraints create a space for non-human presences to speak for themselves or to be present without being appropriated through an anthropocentric lens. By exploring these themes in This Present Moment, this article aims to demonstrate how Snyder reconfigures the web of relations between humans and the non-human world by generating a poetic practice that welcomes reciprocity and resists domination. The purpose of this study is to trace how Snyder’s late poetry employs a biocentric mode of perceiving ecological relations and challenging human exceptionalism.
Keywords
Gary Snyder, This Present Moment, non-anthropocentrism, sentient beings, language and representation.
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