“It wasn’t going to go anywhere”

Sara Laws identifies Kyger’s approach to Buddhism as messier and more mundane than that of Gary Snyder, whose Buddhism appears clean, orderly, and masculine, as well as grounded in traditional Rinzai Zen practice. Laws presents Snyder as a foil to Kyger in order to bring out new ways to see Kyger as a Buddhist poet. Laws’s reading of the Platform Sutra of the 6th Patriarch, Huineng, carries into an analysis of Kyger’s Penelope poems in The Tapestry and the Web, with emphasis on mundanity not grandeur, the empty mind expressed in her poetry’s attention to the ordinary aspects of daily life. Laws’s analysis extends beyond Japan to poems of Kyger’s life in Bolinas in the 1970s.