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Walking on Walking: A Coded Ku in Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End

Since the publication of Mountains and Rivers Without End (hereafter MRWE) in its final form in 1996, an increasing number of critics have become fascinated with this modernist long poem that took Gary Snyder (1930–) forty years to complete. Trying to make sense of the thematic structure of endlessness or the spatiotemporality embedded within the text, some critics have pointed to the key phrase or focal image of “walking on walking,” which plays a vital role in projecting a motif of traveling or moving, that is, that all travelers, including the narrator-poet, people, animals, mountains, and waters, are walking endlessly on a journey (Hunt, “Singing the Dyads” 20; Murphy 187; Kern 126–27; Paparazzo 109; Martin 179). Yet “[c]onstituting a sort of motto or leitmotif for the book” (Kern 126), the phrase “walking on walking” still leaves space for an analysis of its function as a ku, the definition and poetic role of which are explained very briefly in an interview between Snyder and Ekbert Faas in the late 1970s (Faas 135–36). This article aims to decode “walking on walking” as a core ku of the long poem MRWE on the levels of visual, ecological, and scientific interpretation. Like a strange attractor, this core ku attracts all beings to walk on the orbit of mountains and rivers; likewise, it works as a thematic structural framework of the book. Through this core ku, the possibility of the union of some shared motifs on ecopoetry and ekphrasis may be established in MRWE, which helps the poet to produce a long ekphrastic ecopoem, or, differently conceived, a scrolling eco-tome. Etymologically, “ku” is the pronunciation of the Chinese written character 句, literally “sentence,” but as a Japanese term, it refers to “phrase.” “It is the /ku/ in the word ‘haiku’ which literally means ‘colloquial phrases’ or in the ‘Zenrinkushu [sic]’” (Tan, Han Shan 264). The Japanese anthology of Zenrin Kushu, first compiled by the Japanese monk Tōyō Eichō (1426–1504), and subsequently enlarged by Ijūshi (n.d.), is a collection containing “about six thousand Zen words, phrases, and verses” (Shigematsu 34) used for Zen students’ regular curriculum on koan practice, which are derived from “Buddhist sūtras, records of the Patriarchs, Taoist texts, Confucian canon, prose and poetry of numerous authors” (Heine and Wright 187). Snyder’s “Foreword” (Shigematsu 9–24) to the English selection of A Zen Forest: Sayings of the Masters (1981), to some extent, explains the influence of Zenrin Kushu on an idiosyncratic combination of both Chinese and Japanese culture in his literary production. It may be the sourcebook that inspired Snyder to employ the technical term “ku” as one of his creative poetic strategies. He explains that a ku means “an image, a focal image,” “a little phrase,” “a key phrase in a sense”; and a ku with “a content point” is like “the meat of the poem,” “that’s what you make the body,” whereas a ku predominantly with “a structure point” functions as “the bones of the poem” that “shows you what the whole structure of it is” (Faas 135–36). The openness and uncertainty of Snyder’s notion of “ku” as “an image” is very similar to Ezra Pound’s definition of “image,” that is, “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Jones 130). Like the body structure, the plural form “bones” demonstrates the complexity and interpenetration of a ku structure. Normally, the content or subject of a ku can be a koan, an epigram, a proverb, a saying, or poetic lines with two structures involved: superficial and deep. The former has superficial connotations,