Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gary Snyder’s "Anasazi" is a brief yet intense invocation of the ancient Puebloan people, whose cliff dwellings and agricultural adaptations defined their presence in the American Southwest. The poem is not an elegy but a summoning, a lyrical incantation that conjures the physical, spiritual, and sensory world of the Anasazi as if they are still present within the landscape they once inhabited. Snyder does not present them as a lost civilization but as an ongoing presence embedded in the land itself, woven into the cliffs, crops, and canyons.

The poem opens with direct address: "Anasazi, Anasazi," a chant-like repetition that immediately sets the tone for something both reverent and intimate. The name itself, derived from a Navajo word meaning “Ancient Ones” or “Enemy Ancestors,” carries layers of meaning—both historical and contested. Snyder uses it not to define the people but to invoke them, calling them forth from their cliff dwellings, from the deep canyons where their legacy remains.

The second line, "tucked up in clefts in the cliffs," immediately situates the Anasazi within their dramatic, vertical landscape. Their homes, built high in the rock faces of Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and other sites, were both protective and precarious, requiring a deep attunement to place. The phrase "growing strict fields of corn and beans" emphasizes their agricultural precision, their disciplined relationship with the land. Unlike the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the region, the Anasazi committed themselves to the earth, cultivating sustenance in an unforgiving climate, their survival dependent on careful water management and knowledge of the seasons.

Snyder then shifts into a more visceral, almost hallucinatory register: "sinking deeper and deeper in earth / up to your hips in Gods." This image suggests both literal and spiritual immersion. The Anasazi’s religious and ritual practices were deeply tied to the land, with underground kivas serving as ceremonial spaces that connected them to ancestral spirits and cosmic forces. To be "up to your hips in Gods" evokes a world saturated with sacred presence, where the boundary between human and divine is fluid, where daily life is an act of devotion.

The next few lines transform the body into an extension of the natural world: "your head all turned to eagle-down / & lightning for knees and elbows / your eyes full of pollen / the smell of bats." These lines evoke a shamanic transformation, a merging with elemental forces. "Eagle-down" suggests both reverence for the bird as a spiritual messenger and the softness of ritual adornment. "Lightning for knees and elbows" conveys a body charged with power, connected to the unpredictable energy of the desert storms. The "eyes full of pollen" reference the sacred role of corn pollen in Puebloan ceremonies, where it symbolizes fertility, blessing, and continuity. The "smell of bats" anchors the vision in the tangible world of caves and night air, a reminder that the Anasazi’s lives were intimately tied to the creatures and spaces around them.

Snyder then grounds this mysticism with a tactile image: "the flavor of sandstone grit on the tongue." This line collapses the division between human experience and geological time. Sandstone, the very material of the Anasazi’s dwellings, becomes something tasted, ingested, lived with on an elemental level. The image suggests a life so closely bound to the land that it literally becomes part of the body.

The poem takes an intimate turn with "women birthing at the foot of ladders in the dark." This stark image places the most fundamental human act—childbirth—within the architectural and cultural context of the Anasazi. The ladder, a defining feature of their multi-story dwellings, becomes not just a practical structure but a symbol of movement between worlds: between the home and the sky, between life and death, between the known and the mysterious. Birth happens in the dark, suggesting both secrecy and protection, a reminder that even in a landscape as exposed as the desert cliffs, life emerges in hidden, sheltered places.

The final lines expand outward, encompassing the flowing water that sustains both people and crops: "trickling streams in hidden canyons under the cold rolling desert." Water is precious in the desert, and the Anasazi relied on its careful use for survival. The "hidden canyons" evoke both physical geography and the secret knowledge required to find and preserve water in such an arid land.

The closing phrase, "corn-basket wide-eyed red baby rock lip home, Anasazi," fuses multiple images into a single breath. The "corn-basket" reiterates the agricultural richness that sustained their civilization. "Wide-eyed red baby" suggests both a literal newborn and a kind of spiritual innocence, a being newly emerged into a vast world. "Rock lip home" circles back to the cliffs, to the ledges and openings that provided shelter and security. The poem ends with the Anasazi’s name, not as a conclusion but as a continuous echo, a presence still felt in the land they shaped.

"Anasazi" is a poem of invocation, bringing the past into the present through sensory immersion and elemental transformation. Snyder does not approach the Anasazi as an artifact of history but as a living, breathing force embedded in the sandstone, the wind, the cornfields, the hidden streams. His language moves between the mystical and the physical, portraying a people whose survival was both pragmatic and sacred. By merging bodily experience with the landscape, the poem suggests that the Anasazi are not gone—they remain in the textures of the desert, in the trails of animals, in the hands that plant and harvest, in the smell of bats and the taste of dust. Through this invocation, Snyder reminds us that the land does not forget, and neither should we.

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