The tape recorder often gives us wordy ramblings of egocentric writers. Fortunately Gary Snyder is neither wordy nor egocentric, and the interviews and lectures collected in [The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964–1979] show his usual wit and concision. He talks better than most people write. Anyone who wants to know how Snyder's thinking on social and literary issues has evolved since Earth House Hold in 1969 will find much to mull over. The six pieces collected in The Old Ways (1977) were an uneven batch, but these statements are consistently strong. (p. 55)

Much of the book is given over to social and political issues, but poetry is not ignored. The most illuminating remarks pertain to shamanism and poetry. Snyder has been attacked from a native American viewpoint in recent years for appropriating the persona of the shaman. His interview with Michael Helm sets the matter straight. Shamanism, Snyder points out, is a world-wide phenomenon, and its core is learning from the nonhuman, "not a teaching from an Indian medicine man, or a Buddhist master. The question of culture does not enter into it. It's a naked experience some people have out there in the woods." The crucial encounter in western American poetry, and often in the novel (thinking of Rudolfo Anaya and Frank Waters), is a spiritual encounter with the non-human. Snyder has written about the experience in his poetry and his prose has taught a generation where the documents of shamanism can be found. (pp. 55-6)

Snyder places himself at one point of a vast network of American intellectual life that embraces the cities and universities as well as the Allegheny Star Route in northern California. He doesn't speak as a solitary prophet although he does live in the hills. The scope of this network is shown by the sources of these interviews, which include academic journals, a health food magazine, poetry journals, counterculture newspapers—and there is an uncollected interview in a skiing magazine. Eclectic and esoteric as his interests may be, they are shared by a sizable community. (p. 56)