SOURCE: "Pattern of Flux: The 'Torsion Form' in Gary Snyder's Poetry," in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, July-August, 1989, pp. 41-7.

In the essay below, Lavazzi documents the connection between Snyder's cosmology and his poetic structure.

It would be best to consider this a continuing "revolution of consciousness" which will be won not by guns but by seizing the key images, myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and ecstasies so that life won't seem worth living unless one is on the transforming energy's side.

Snyder's view of social reform is the inevitable consequence of a poetics that pushes beyond the margins of the page and asserts itself as a psychosocial mode of existence. To change a culture is not to overthrow its social-political institutions, but to change its mind, its world view. The dialogue among text, self, and the world—both the public world and the non-human, other world of nature...