The 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."
- ISBN10 0811207617
- ISBN13 9780811207614
- Publish Date 17 August 1980
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 26 September 2006
- Publish Country US
- Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Format Paperback
- Pages 189
- Language English