BY TIMOTHY EGAN
Not long ago, I went to the top of Crater Mountain searching for a trace of the last living Beat poet, Gary Snyder. His fire lookout at 8,128 feet, where he scanned the summits of the North Cascades for the Forest Service in 1952, is long gone. But I later found his work — his words enlivening new generations at a camp below — and the man himself, kinetic in California.
Turns out, he’s not the last of the group of writers who included Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as he scolded me for implying. The poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, age 97, and Michael McClure, 83, are still stirring up trouble with verse and attitude. Snyder himself is a mischievous 86, a lifetime student of Zen and the art of coupling the perfect phrase to nature’s complexity...