Jack Foley (poet)

Biography

Jack Foley is a widely published San Francisco poet and critic. Born in Neptune, New Jersey (1940), raised in Port Chester, New York, and educated at Cornell University, Foley moved to California in 1963 to attend U. C. Berkeley. By 1974, deeply influenced by Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, he had dropped out of graduate school to pursue a career as a poet and writer.

Foley is well known throughout the Bay Area and elsewhere for his spoken-word performances—performances which often involved "choruses" (multi-voiced pieces) presented jointly with his late wife, poet Adelle Foley. After Adelle's death in June, 2016, Jack has worked with various other performers, including his new love, Sangye Land. Pamela Grieman wrote of Foley's book, Gershwin:

"Foley's poetry teems with multifarious voices, none of which take precedence. The poet doesn't privilege one particular voice or so much as hint at one specific meaning. There are multiple possibilities of meaning...The jumble of voices that inhabit "Chorus: Gershwin" speaks of night, sleep, frost, death, fire, sexual desire, and the creation of poetry, among other things...The possibilities and resonances are endless..."

Foley's poetry has been described by Heaven Bone magazine as "evolving from the linguistic musical tradition of the original S.F. 'Beat' poet/performers and extending that eye, ear and voice of penetrating clarity into a modern mythology." Dana Gioia called Foley's poetry "that rare commodity --genuinely avant-garde poetry...experimental poetry with depth and intelligence as well as intensity" and Michael McClure referred to Foley as "our firebrand experimentalist." Foley has also worked with traditional forms, though his work there always maintains some sort of experimental edge, as when he writes "between the lines" of other poets' poems, and an emphasis on performance. This is his poem, "Bukowski," a response to a poem by Charles Bukowski. The words in the first, third, fifth, etc. lines are Bukowski's poem; the words in italics are by Foley. When Foley performs the poem, he speaks the Bukowski portion in his "normal" voice; he speaks the italicized words in a whisper.

the mockingbird had been following the cat
there was this cat
all summer
and I only saw him
mocking mocking mocking
once
teasing and cocksure;
when he gave a
the cat crawled under rockers on porches
reading
tail flashing
and burped
and said something angry to the mockingbird
at the audience
which I didn't understand.

yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway
and he read this poem
with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,
about a cat
wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,
and a bird
feathers parted like a woman's legs,
and he was both
and the bird was no longer mocking,
the cat and
it was asking, it was praying
the bird
but the cat
and he was devouring
striding down through centuries
himself
would not listen.
through the poem.

I saw it crawl under a yellow car
And I listened
with the bird
letting him die
to bargain it to another place.

summer was over.
Bukowski.

Since 1988, Foley has hosted a show of interviews and poetry presentations on Berkeley radio station KPFA. For a number of years, Foley's Books, a review column, appeared weekly in the Gazebo section of the online magazine, The Alsop Review. Foley is also a contributing editor of the Berkeley journal, Poetry Flash. His poetry books, almost all of which feature accompanying CDs or cassette tapes, include Letters/Lights -- Words for Adelle, Gershwin, Adrift (nominated for a Northern California Book Reviewers Association award), Exiles, and (with Ivan Argüelles) New Poetry from California: Dead/Requiem. His Greatest Hits: 1974-2003 appeared from Pudding House Press—a by-invitation-only series.

Two companion volumes of Foley's essays and interviews appeared from Pantograph Press: O Powerful Western Star and Foley's Books: California Rebels, Beats, and Radicals. O Powerful Western Star, which has the distinction of being the only book of critical essays to include a CD on which the author performs some of the work in the book, received the Artists Embassy Literary/Cultural Award 1998-2000. Foley's most recent collection of essays, The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions, appeared from Red Hen Press in 2008. "The self of this book," Foley writes, "is not a unity but a multiplicity...Clarification is 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."

Foley is also the editor of ALL: A James Broughton Reader (White Crane Books, Wisdom Series, 2006), voted number one gay book of the year by AfterElton.com. Another book Foley edited, The "Fallen Western Star" Wars (Scarlet Tanager, 2001), is a compilation of responses to Dana Gioia's controversial essay, "Fallen Western Star." Foley's translations from the French include poems by Mallarme, Baudelaire and Houellebecq as well as a selection of songs by the French songwriter, Georges Brassens. Foley's play, The Boy, the Girl, and the Piece of Chocolate, was made into a film by Alabama filmmaker Wayne Sides in 2006. The poet’s monumental, two-volume Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line 1940-2005 has received international attention with reviews in both England (TLS, Beat Scene) and the USA. "Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line—Poets & Poetry 1940-2005," writes Foley, "is a chronoencyclopedia of a scene that stretches over sixty-five years. People, ideas, and stories appear, disappear, and reappear as the second half of the century moves forward. Poetry is a major element in this kaleidoscopic California scene. It is argued about, dismissed, renewed, denounced in fury, asserted as divine, criticized as pornographic. Poetry is as Western as the Sierra foothills, and the questions raised here go to its very heart. Beginning with the publication of Kenneth Rexroth’s first book, this all-encompassing history-as-collage plunges us forward into the 21st Century." Critic Marjorie Perloff called the two volumes "overwhelming": "I really am learning so much. A great read and great information. I don’t know how you did it." On June 5, 2010, Foley received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and June 5, 2010 was proclaimed “Jack Foley Day” in Berkeley.

"Grief Songs"--from the publisher, Sagging Meniscus Press: On June 4th, 2016, poet Jack Foley's 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.

THE DEAD EXIST ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR

What do we do with the dead
And with what the dead left behind
Especially when they left behind so much.
Dead the with do we do what
Behind left dead the what with and
Much so behind left they when especially

--Jack Foley

Works