Join Seattle Arts & Lectures and North Cascades Institute in welcoming Gary Snyder back to the Pacific Northwest for a very special engagement at Benaroya Hall. Snyder is the author of several volumes of poetry, including Turtle Island, Mountains and Rivers Without End and Danger on Peaks, and collections of essays like The Practice of the Wild, A Place in Space and Back on the Fire. The year 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of his landmark compendium of mountain poetry, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. Snyder served as a fire lookout on Sourdough and Crater Mountains in the North Cascades during the summers of 1952-53, writing some of his most inspired verse on a ridge high above North Cascades Environmental Learning Center. Earlier this year, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize for his body of work; he had previously won the Pulitzer, Bollingen and Levinson Prizes and the John Hay Award for Nature Writing and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1987. Snyder is professor emeritus of English at University of California, Davis, and lives in the foothills of Northern California's Sierra Nevada range.

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

—Gary Snyder, Rip Rap, 1959

Tickets are available to Poetry Series subscribers and single-ticket buyers at www.lectures.org or 206-621-2230 ext. 10.