Thumb to Thumb. and Yet

If Emmy Award-winner Peter Coyote’s debut collection represents the culmination of a half-century’s devotion to writing poetry, his second functions as a true encore: triumphant and raw. Thumb to Thumb… and Yet presents eighty-plus years of living — the countercultural adventures, the journey from Zen Buddhist discipleship to priesthood, marriage and divorce, a public career in entertainment, and the private work and rewards of parenthood — not as a retrospective but as a perpetual process of becoming. Coyote captures often-elusive wisdom and infuses these pages with the fullness of human experience: weariness that labor never ceases, that we cannot outgrow suffering, that we’re like “Manteaux ducks, immobilized so the fat / of everything can be forced down our gullets,” the glut of gavage neverending and “no option to stop swallowing”; frustration that ambition and ego persist despite the “pre-dawn Zendo chill” and over five decades spent “thumb-to-thumb sitting” in devoted practice; the satisfaction of pleasure, “smiling in the ruined sheets”; gratitude for life consummated and life ongoing and life that will continue long after us, for the opportunity of existence, for the work itself, for the “single nuthatch [that] bows / upside down on the grand oak” and its reminder during meditation that “everything presents itself as a partner.” The titular qualification of that “and yet” is an argument against and a celebration of conclusion; in a masterful encapsulation of the lyrical moment itself, these poems find Coyote returning to the stage only to perform another finale, every end recycled toward beginning. One song cedes to another, and yet the music flows on.

Peter Coyote has performed as an actor in over 160 films for theaters and TV. He has worked with some of the world’s most distinguished filmmakers, including: Barry Levinson, Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodóvar, Steven Spielberg, Martin Ritt, Steven Soderbergh, Sidney Pollack and Jean-Paul Rappeneau. He is a double Emmy Award-winning narrator of over 150 documentary films, including Ken Burns’s National Parks, Prohibition, The West, The Dust Bowl, and The Roosevelts, for which he received his second Emmy in 2015. Recently, Peter has also completed Vietnam, The History of Country Music, a six-hour series on Ernest Hemingway and this year, a twelve-hour series for Mr. Burns on The American Revolution.

Since 1974, Coyote has remained a serious student and eventually a teacher of Zen Buddhism, studying at the San Francisco Zen Center and several years with Robert Aitken Roshi. Peter’s final teacher, Lewis Richmond, ordained and transmitted him, giving him autonomy as an independent Zen teacher.

Coyote’s memoir of the 1960s counter-culture, Sleeping Where I Fall, received universally excellent reviews and has been in continuous print since 1999. A previously published chapter of this book received a Pushcart Prize for Excellence. His second book, The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education, about mentors and the search for wisdom, was named one of the top five non-fiction books published in California in 2015. Coyote’s third book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet The Buddha, chronicles mask/improv classes he taught for 40 years, introducing people to ego-free reality experiences. Tongue of a Crow (Four Way Books, 2021), his first book of poems, selected work from 50 years of poetry writing. Zen in the Vernacular (2024) is his presentation of how Zen can be practiced in a secular environment. Coyote’s sixth book, Smothered by Riches, explores the 70-year history concerning the commitment of some of the nation’s greatest fortunes to subsidizing think-tanks and programs to undercut and eradicate government’s ability to regulate the corporate sector in its efforts to increase its profits without regard to the health and well-being of the nation’s citizens and the environment.