Jack Foley – författare

Octogenarian Jack Foley's COLLISIONS is a book at play in the forests of the mind. The opening quotation from Dana Gioia defines the book's understanding of consciousness: "Human consciousness is an unstable republic of conflicting impulses, instincts, and appetites in perpetual flux." COLLISIONS is an attempt to honor that notion of the chaos of consciousness while at the same time giving the reader an experience of thought and feeling that is not so chaotic that it is overwhelming. It tries to tell the truth about the mind in a way that feels if not comfortable at least familiar: we too have felt that fire, that movement. The book asserts that the fundamental condition of poetry is words in motion, constantly dis/uncovering perceptions of the new. "Ecstasy seems to be linked to the instability of language." Familiar with the many forms of traditional poetry and comfortable with the making of new forms, Foley conceives of every living poet as an Orpheus attempting to rescue poetry-as-Eurydice. If poetry to some extent reveals the ramifications of the poet's identity, it does so in the context of the coruscations of words whose flashes move beyond identity into something more. The book deliberately plunges us into mystery as everything collides with everything else. Foley writes to a fellow poet, "'Home' is where you belong but 'home' isn't anywhere: it is always a profound absence: 'sound, noise that reaches for the ever-receding light.' I think that, underneath all the 'influences,' is this deep longing which is always asserted and always denied." Baudelaire: "heaven or hell who cares / In the depths of the unknown to find something new.

Octogenarian Jack Foley’s COLLISIONS is a book at play in the forests of the mind. The opening quotation from Dana Gioia defines the book’s understanding of consciousness: “Human consciousness is an unstable republic of conflicting impulses, instincts, and appetites in perpetual flux.” COLLISIONS is an attempt to honor that notion of the chaos of consciousness while at the same time giving the reader an experience of thought and feeling that is not so chaotic that it is overwhelming. It tries to tell the truth about the mind in a way that feels if not comfortable at least familiar: we too have felt that fire, that movement. The book asserts that the fundamental condition of poetry is words in motion, constantly dis/uncovering perceptions of the new. “Ecstasy seems to be linked to the instability of language.” Familiar with the many forms of traditional poetry and comfortable with the making of new forms, Foley conceives of every living poet as an Orpheus attempting to rescue poetry-as-Eurydice. If poetry to some extent reveals the ramifications of the poet’s identity, it does so in the context of the coruscations of words whose flashes move beyond identity into something more. The book deliberately plunges us into mystery as everything collides with everything else. Foley writes to a fellow poet, “‘Home’ is where you belong but ‘home’ isn’t anywhere: it is always a profound absence: ‘sound, noise that reaches for the ever-receding light.’ I think that, underneath all the ‘influences,’ is this deep longing which is always asserted and always denied.” Baudelaire: “heaven or hell who cares / In the depths of the unknown to find something new.”

Jack Foley has been prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene since the mid-1980s. The Light of Evening traces the arc of his life since his birth in New Jersey in 1940. Foley has spent his life in the pursuit of ways to continue writing poetry in a world in which the status of poetry has been seriously diminished. This candid autobiography offers a portrait of an artist who has continued to produce experimental as well as traditional work and who created theoretical underpinnings for that work. His exciting “choruses” – duets performed with his late wife Adelle – established him as a unique presenter of poetry in an area in which poets abound. Along with his creative work, Foley studied at Cornell with the brilliant and notorious deconstructionist critic Paul de Man. He lived through the 1960s in and around Berkeley, California, attending the university at the height of the Free Speech Movement. Following on the heels of Kenneth Rexroth, he has presented poetry on KPFA-FM, Berkeley’s radical radio station, for over thirty years. He produced a 1300-page history of Californian poetry from 1940 to 2005 that has been called “an oddball masterpiece ... the first adequate account of California's complex and contradictory literary life.” At eighty, Foley looks back at a life in which he managed to maintain himself as a contrarian poet who never resorted to the academy for sustenance and who never courted fame from the East Coast literary hegemony. The Light of Evening is the story of a complex, always-in-motion public intellectual for whom poetry was first, last, and always.

Jack Foley has been prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene since the mid-1980s. The Light of Evening traces the arc of his life since his birth in New Jersey in 1940. Foley has spent his life in the pursuit of ways to continue writing poetry in a world in which the status of poetry has been seriously diminished. This candid autobiography offers a portrait of an artist who has continued to produce experimental as well as traditional work and who created theoretical underpinnings for that work. His exciting “choruses” – duets performed with his late wife Adelle – established him as a unique presenter of poetry in an area in which poets abound. Along with his creative work, Foley studied at Cornell with the brilliant and notorious deconstructionist critic Paul de Man. He lived through the 1960s in and around Berkeley, California, attending the university at the height of the Free Speech Movement. Following on the heels of Kenneth Rexroth, he has presented poetry on KPFA-FM, Berkeley’s radical radio station, for over thirty years. He produced a 1300-page history of Californian poetry from 1940 to 2005 that has been called “an oddball masterpiece ... the first adequate account of California's complex and contradictory literary life.” At eighty, Foley looks back at a life in which he managed to maintain himself as a contrarian poet who never resorted to the academy for sustenance and who never courted fame from the East Coast literary hegemony. The Light of Evening is the story of a complex, always-in-motion public intellectual for whom poetry was first, last, and always.

Jack Foley has been prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene since the mid-1980s. The Light of Evening traces the arc of his life since his birth in New Jersey in 1940. Foley has spent his life in the pursuit of ways to continue writing poetry in a world in which the status of poetry has been seriously diminished. This candid autobiography offers a portrait of an artist who has continued to produce experimental as well as traditional work and who created theoretical underpinnings for that work. His exciting "e;choruses"e; - duets performed with his late wife Adelle - established him as a unique presenter of poetry in an area in which poets abound. Along with his creative work, Foley studied at Cornell with the brilliant and notorious deconstructionist critic Paul de Man. He lived through the 1960s in and around Berkeley, California, attending the university at the height of the Free Speech Movement. Following on the heels of Kenneth Rexroth, he has presented poetry on KPFA-FM, Berkeley's radical radio station, for over thirty years. He produced a 1300-page history of Californian poetry from 1940 to 2005 that has been called "e;an oddball masterpiece ... the first adequate account of California's complex and contradictory literary life."e; At eighty, Foley looks back at a life in which he managed to maintain himself as a contrarian poet who never resorted to the academy for sustenance and who never courted fame from the East Coast literary hegemony. The Light of Evening is the story of a complex, always-in-motion public intellectual for whom poetry was first, last, and always.

California poet Jack Foley has been called “a brilliant critic and a unique poet whose work energetically records the disintegration of the patriarchy” and a writer of “genuinely avant-garde poetry.” His collaborative, multimedia poetry performances are both seminal and shamanic, evolving from the linguistic musical tradition of the original San Francisco Beat poets and extending their eye, ear and voice of penetrating clarity into a modern mythology. “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” – a title from Walt Whitman – is a spiritual history, an attempt to show, as Wordsworth put it many years ago, “the growth of a poet’s mind.” Where did I begin? What forces moved me in what directions? What is the result of the effort to create art in a medium that is currently simultaneously respected, misunderstood, and discredited? What kind of poetry is possible in a dark time? “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” throws light not only on Foley’s life and work, but also on the history of twentieth-century poetry, and on the efforts, successes, and failures of Modernism.

"e;A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads"e;-title from Whitman-is a companion volume to poet Jack Foley's autobiography, The Light of Evening. As the autobiography treats the events of Foley's life, A Backward Glance treats his intellectual history. Poetry arrived in Foley's consciousness in more or less the same way that the words, "e;Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute me"e; arrived in the consciousness of the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. At the age of fifteen, Foley, like most of his friends, thought of poetry as more or less inconsequential, old-fashioned, dull. A teacher's suggestion that he read Thomas Gray's "e;Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"e; (1750) changed all that: "e;The poem seemed to me the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. It affected me so deeply that I wanted it to have come out of me, not out of Thomas Gray, and I immediately sat down and wrote my own Gray's "e;Elegy,"e; in the same stanzaic form and with the same rhyme scheme as the original. I understood the state of mind named in Gray's "e;Elegy"e; to be the state of mind of poetry itself; and in reacting so deeply to it, I understood myself to be a poet."e; On the face of it, it seemed like an extremely unlikely event. Thomas Gray was an English poet, a letter writer, a Classical scholar, and a professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Foley was an ambitious Irish-Italian working-class kid who was aware of what the British had done to the Irish. Yet at such life-changing moments, none of that mattered. To be a poet meant to change your life. The fifteen year old, half-Irish child suddenly transformed himself into an adult, eighteenth-century, British formalist. From there, Foley began to interrogate the entire history of poetry. The story of Foley's spiritual history is the story of his finding what Wallace Stevens called "e;what will suffice."e; The range of his mind moved into radical poetic innovation as well as into deeply traditional modes and a recognition of the legacy of Modernism. At age eighty, Foley has led a unique life as a writer/performer of poetry, a radio host, and an all-around West Coast gadfly of the poetic establishment. If you want the interesting events of his life, read The Light of Evening. If you want the life of his mind, read "e;A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads."e;

Jack Foley's autobiography begins, "What is a life but stories?" The stories collected here are not his life but a fantastic consciousness in which he is as lost as anyone. Foley writes what he does not know; he writes what he can imagine. The dead sprout up here as easily as leaves of grass. Stylistically the stories range widely -- some are comic, some bring tears. All manifest "the strangeness and the power of poetry", plunging us into the enigma of the human heart.

On June 4th, 2016, poet Jack Foleys wife, Adelle Foley, who was (as she told her doctor) never sick, was diagnosed with stomach cancer; she died on June 27th. They had been married for nearly fifty-five years and were an exceptionally close couple. Adelle was also a poet and, like Jack, had published widely. He wrote about her, How can there be sunlight and you not in it? In the months after her death, with extraordinary courage and directness, Jack opened his heart with a series of poems and letters to his friends, many of whom responded with poems of their own. These documents of intense necessity, brought together, make up the deeply moving collection that is Grief Songs: an expression, certainly, of a year of desperate grief, but more essentially, of a lifetime of love.

Poetry. California Interest. In his new poetry collection, Jack Foley revels in a wild and varied display bringing together many styles and preoccupations, from the depths of grief to love to the heights where light has its source. We might turn the title into a question: When sleep comes, can light be far behind? The diversity of forms and themes in this collection amply demonstrate Foley's concept of mind as being not one but multiple, a dark cinematic chamber peopled with many voices and masks. Foley is our contemporary vaudeville performer, tap dancing on his own stage and singing in multiple voices with many a nod and shake to poets alive and dead.