Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gary Snyder’s "Hitch Haiku" is a collection of short, imagistic verses capturing the transient, often solitary experiences of a traveler moving through landscapes, cities, and human interactions. The haiku form, with its emphasis on immediacy and the essence of a moment, is well-suited to Snyder’s subject matter—hitchhiking, labor, nature, and the road. Each poem encapsulates a fleeting moment of perception, merging natural imagery with the rhythm of human existence in ways that reflect both deep attentiveness and an acceptance of impermanence.

The opening haiku sets the tone of isolation and quiet observation: “They didn’t hire him / so he ate his lunch alone: / the noon whistle.” The moment is stark and unsentimental—a man rejected from work, left to eat alone as the factory whistle sounds. There is no overt lament, only the bare fact of the moment, captured with the precision of haiku’s minimalism. Snyder’s depiction of human solitude is without embellishment, allowing the reader to feel the weight of an unnoticed life moving through time.

This human solitude extends into nature, as seen in “Cats shut down / deer thread through / men all eating lunch.” Here, the presence of men resting at midday creates a shift in the natural order—machines pause, and wild animals move in. The poem reveals an ecosystem where human labor is a temporary disruption, with nature resuming its rhythms in the absence of movement. The simplicity of the scene underscores the quiet tension between civilization and wilderness, a recurring theme in Snyder’s work.

Other haiku evoke the stark beauty and hardship of the road, such as “A truck went by / three hours ago: / Smoke Creek desert.” The vast emptiness of the desert is measured by the passing of a single truck, hours in the past. The economy of language intensifies the feeling of isolation—Snyder’s traveler is alone in an immense landscape, aware of the vast distances between signs of life. This sense of openness, where time is marked by rare interruptions, is echoed in “Jackrabbit eyes all night / breakfast in Elko.” The sleepless night, haunted by the reflective eyes of jackrabbits, is followed by the simple comfort of a meal. Snyder compresses a long journey into a momentary contrast—wild vigilance giving way to human routine.

Some haiku carry a sense of historical layering, as in “Old kanji hid by dirt / on skidroad Jap town walls / down the hill / to the Wobbly hall / Seattle.” The faded kanji inscriptions on a wall, remnants of a Japanese community, lead down to the hall of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), suggesting the buried histories of immigrant labor and radical movements in the Pacific Northwest. The poem acts as a compressed historical meditation, where the traces of past struggles remain, half-forgotten but still present.

Snyder also turns to images of industrial labor, merging human work with the elements: “Spray drips from the cargo-booms / a fresh-chipped winch / spotted with red lead / young fir— / soaking in summer rain.” The imagery of wet machinery, with the rawness of fresh-cut wood exposed to the elements, captures the immediacy of physical labor while maintaining haiku’s characteristic stillness. Here, the presence of industry does not overpower nature; instead, the two are inseparably interwoven.

The poem’s scope extends beyond American landscapes, briefly touching on classical themes and international scenes. The haiku “Over the Mindanao Deep / Scrap brass / dumpt off the fantail / falling six miles” juxtaposes an image of industrial waste sinking into the ocean’s depths with a profound awareness of scale. The simplicity of discarded brass falling through miles of water hints at both ecological loss and the obliviousness of human action against the vastness of the natural world.

In other moments, Snyder shifts to personal experience, as in “After weeks of watching the roof leak / I fixed it tonight / by moving a single board.” This haiku, humorous in its quiet realization, captures the way problems sometimes resolve in the simplest of ways after prolonged frustration. Snyder’s appreciation for small, decisive actions reflects a Zen-like understanding of effort and patience.

The poem also moves through different terrains, from “Cherry blossoms at Hood River / rusty sand near Tucson / mudflats of Willapa Bay” to “Pronghorn country / Steering into the sun / glittering jewel-road / shattered obsidian.” These haiku create a montage of geographies, each location distilled into a defining visual or sensory moment. The phrase “glittering jewel-road / shattered obsidian” conveys a stark beauty, where the highway reflects the sun like the fragments of volcanic glass that scatter the Western landscapes.

The human presence in these haiku is often momentary, dwarfed by the scale of nature. In “The mountain walks over the water! / Rain down from the mountain! / high bleat of a / cow elk / over blackberries,” the natural elements take on an almost mythic motion, where mountains and rain seem to possess agency. The cow elk’s cry over blackberries is a fleeting but poignant reminder of wildness.

Snyder also captures the experience of night travel with “A great freight truck / lit like a town / through the dark stony desert.” The massive, glowing presence of the truck in the barren landscape turns it into a moving city, a reminder of how human industry extends even into the most remote regions.

The final haiku, “Switchback / turn, turn, / and again, hard- / scrabble / steep travel a- / head.” conveys the physical challenge of navigating mountainous roads, both literal and metaphorical. The repetition of “turn, turn” mimics the rhythm of ascent, evoking the perseverance required for both travel and life’s obstacles.

Throughout "Hitch Haiku," Snyder’s fusion of travel, nature, and human labor presents a vision of the world as a place of ceaseless motion and change. The haiku form, with its brevity and attentiveness to the present moment, suits his perspective—one that finds meaning in the smallest details of landscape and movement. Whether capturing the loneliness of a jobless man at lunch, the history embedded in urban walls, or the stark beauty of a freight truck glowing in the night, Snyder’s haiku are both deeply personal and expansively universal. In distilling these moments, he offers a portrait of life on the road, where every instant, no matter how small, is a world unto itself.

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