Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979

American poet Gary Snyder on poetics, tribalism, ecology, Zen Buddhism, meditation, the writing process, and more.
The Real Workis the second volume of Gary Snyder’s prose to be published by New Directions. Where his earlierEarth House Hold(1969) heralded the tribalism of the "coming revolution," the interviews inThe Real Workfocus on the living out of that process in a particular place and time––the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California in the 1970s. The talks and interviews collected here range over fifteen years (1964-79) and encompass styles as different as those of the Berkeley BarbandThe New York Quarterly. A "poetics of process" characterizes these exchanges, but in the words of editor Mclean, their chief attraction is "good, plain talk with a man who has a lively and very subtle mind and a wide range of experience and knowledge."