Gary Snyder

“Taroko Gary” by Leonardo Flores

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Open “Taroko Gary” by Nick Montfort

Screen shot from “Taroko Gary” by Leonardo Flores. Light brown colored background of mountains, rivers and trees. Over the natural view there is a poem. The verses read: “Vague peak slip the streambed./ Forest clearing the torrent./ grind the leafy -/ Mountain climbing the water./ Outcrop climbing the water./ get along the broad slow damp braided -/ Mountain slip bridge./ Torrents floated/ Walls lost.” At the right corner there is a text as well with names in orange color: “Taroko Gary/ Nick Montfort/ Gary Snyder/ Leonardo Flores” Nick Monfort and Gary Snyder are crossed over with a line.

When I read “Taroko Gorge,” by Nick Montfort, something about the endless scrolling through a natural landscape made me think of Gary Snyder’s masterpiece Mountains and Rivers without End, inspired largely by Chinese landscape scroll paintings.

As a longtime reader and admirer of Snyder’s poetry this mashup arises out of deep respect for both Snyder’s and Montfort’s work. This is not intended to imitate or generate lines by Snyder: merely to gestures towards his poetry. “Taroko Gary” is a path through a digital landscape, built out of Nick’s trailblazing poetry generation code and using some of Snyder’s words from “Endless Streams and Mountains” as cobbles.

So I have to thank Gary Snyder for his amazing poetry, Nick Montfort for “Taroko Gorge” and for inviting me to actualize the affinity I felt between his poem and Snyder’s work, and Mark Marino for starting this discussion thread in the Critical Code Studies Working Group 2012.