The Real Work: Interviews & Talks, 1964-1979The Real Work is the second volume of Gary Snyder's prose to be published by New Directions. Where his earlier Earth House Hold(1969) heralded the tribalism of the "coming revolution," the interviews in The Real Work focus 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 Barb and The 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." |
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Popular passages
Page 3 - As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and re-birth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.
Page xiii - There, those great whorls, the stars hang. Who can get outside the universe? But the poem was born elsewhere, and need not stay. Like the wild geese of the Arctic it heads home, far above the borders, where most things cannot cross. Now, we are both in, and outside, the world at once. The only place this can be is the Mind. Ah, what a poem. It is what is, completely, in the past, present, and future simultaneously, seeing being, and being seen.