Remembering Katahdin on the Autumnal Equinox
Ten years ago on this day I summited Katahdin, the greatest mountain of Maine, after a seven month hike from Georgia along the Appalachian Trail. I mention this in the newsletter because I probably would never have hiked that over two thousand mile long trail were it not for poetry.
In the years leading up to that 2011 hike, I had been reading Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers without End and the Cold Mountain poems of the ancient Chinese poet Han Shan that inspired so much of Snyder’s poetry, and his portrayal as the mountain poet “Japhy Ryder” in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums. I was reading Chuangtse for the first time and every English language translation of Tao Te Ching I could find. From Shenryu Suzuki to Alan Watts, I soaked up everything I could about Taoism and Zen. I’m not sure how much of this reading saturated my poetry writing.
When I took off on foot from Amicalola Falls in the US state of Georgia, I could hardly imagine what a transformative experience that long hike would make in my life. Atop Katahdin in a shivering cold fog late that September, I was thirty pounds skinnier, but more importantly, my expectations and priorities had changed forever. What mattered to me then, and what still matters to me, are the truths one finds living in the mountains walking with a pilgrim’s spirit.
For me as a poet, one truth from the mountain is the ineffable nature of things, and the paradox that language is a necessary component to human experience, but it is inadequate in expressing the experience of being alive. Poetry is a high form (if not the highest form) of linguistic expression. We must speak and write poetry—all of us. But even the very best poetry only scratches a few layers of the mystery that is our existence. The mountain is older than Shakespeare or Han Shan or Homer. The mountain will likely outlast the human memory of these great poets.
So realizing the big picture, that Shakespeare is already forgotten dust in a sense, the practice of writing poems becomes something else. We are doomed to the wonderful void, so to speak. That takes so much pressure off from the expectation that we should be “successful” at poetry.
I followed my 2011 hike with a 500 mile section hike of the AT in 2014, and another 800 mile one in 2020. These pilgrimages are central experiences in my life as a poet. I have been alone and spontaneously invented poems that only a mountain might have heard in the fog. I have walked so far as to forget what a university education set upon my mind as expectations and assumptions. I know Han Shan better.