Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
JAST : JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES OF TURKEY), sa.63, ss.11-24, 2025 (Hakemli Dergi)
Gary Snyder has a profound impact on various facets of the American
ecological movement. His work bridges ecological consciousness with Eastern
philosophies, challenging dominant human-centered worldviews through
his ecopoetic vision. In This Present Moment, Snyder highlights the themes
of interconnectedness, biocentrism, and agency for all sentient beings. His
poetics foreground the idea that human beings are embedded within the
fabric of the Earth along with all other sentient beings; nevertheless, while
his language is inevitably grounded in human semiotics, his poems strive
to strip themselves of anthropocentric expression. Snyder utilizes sparse,
unembellished diction that resists symbols and abstraction; that is, he seeks
to reflect the rhythms and flow of nature beyond the boundaries of human
perception and meaning. His ways of overcoming linguistic constraints create
a space for non-human presences to speak for themselves or to be present
without being appropriated through an anthropocentric lens. By exploring
these themes in This Present Moment, this article aims to demonstrate how
Snyder reconfigures the web of relations between humans and the non-human
world by generating a poetic practice that welcomes reciprocity and resists
domination. The purpose of this study is to trace how Snyder’s late poetry
employs a biocentric mode of perceiving ecological relations and challenging
human exceptionalism.