Jack Foley – författare

Jack FoleyÆs The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions deliberately challenges many conventional ways of thinking about poetry. Though extremely scholarly and aware of the \u201ctradition,\u201d Foley offers readings rooted in a consciousness which is simultaneously non academic and open to the new. \u201cThe self of this book,\u201d he writes, \u201cis not a unity but a multiplicity. Many people would agree with this idea of selfhood—the self as a \u2018multiplicity of voicesÆ—but clarification is still required as to how the concept of the self as multiplicity affects literary criticism, how it affects our actual reading of poems. It may be that the self we postulate as we read a poem contradicts the self we experience in the world; it is also possible that familiar poems may be experienced anew by being read in the light of multiplicity.\u201d FoleyÆs explorations lead him into radically new readings of \u201ccanonic\u201d work by poets such as Keats, Yeats and Mallarm\u00e9, into the world of opera, free jazz, New Formalism, and the writing of song lyrics, into \u201cethnic\u201d literature, theater, and finally into problems of \u201cspoken word\u201d and \u201cslam poetry.\u201d Throughout, his point of view, initially controversial, becomes finally compelling. \u201cIt is possible,\u201d he says quietly about the whole of Western culture, \u201cthat Plato was wrong, and that we must make an effort to think in a different way if we are to encounter reality at all.\u201d

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.

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.