Snyder’s goal is not merely to reproduce the experience of trail work but also to jolt the reader’s mind into higher levels of consciousness through close attention to natural facts and to words experienced as palpable objects. In the practice of Zen religion, masters sometimes deliver unexpected physical blows to surprise their students into satori (enlightenment). Snyder stated in a 1960 interview that he wrote the Riprap poems under the influence of “the five-and-seven-character-line Chinese poems I’d been reading at the time, which work like sharp blows to the mind.” From this foundation of hard physical facts and sharp, simple words, Snyder then launches the poem into cosmic realms: