Jack Foley: California Poets Part 7, Five Poems
Jack Foley
July 1st, 2024
California Poets: Part VII
Jack Foley
Five Poems
I ONLY
“Neeli
was one of us”
said Iván Argüelles
when he learned
of Neeli Cherkovski’s death—
outsiders
who persisted
in imagination.
I remember
the three of us,
Neeli, Iván, me,
on Solano Avenue
in Berkeley, California.
were we heading
for an ice cream shop
or is that another
memory?
three old men
who had trouble
walking.
I also remember
Neeli’s
sudden laughter
at the spectacle
of the three of us,
three frail old men
in whom imagination
thrived and allowed
transcendence
of all—
or some of—
their bodily
ills.
three
in whom words
sang freely.
how strange
how funny
it was
to see them there
stumbling
who flew upon
imagination’s
wings.
two—Neeli, Iván—
gone now.
“I only
am escaped
to tell thee.”
***
TOM CLARK
suicidal tom
was hit by a car
top of Solano
survived
tried again
made it
on the second try.
interviewed him,
his Olson book.
he wouldn’t let me speak.
cut me off
if I tried
to ask a question.
found out why.
my son
was in a dance troupe.
I waited
in a near-by
book shop.
sometimes Angelica
was there.
nothing romantic
between us,
just friendly chatter.
but tom was told.
finally, furious,
Angelica weeping,
he told me
to leave his house,
tape recorder and all.
if he could have
killed me
he would have.
as I left he screamed,
“You’re not man
enough for her.”
Tom:
were you?
***
HISTORY
is my mother’s voice
informing me
that the stick in her hand
will come down
hard
upon my body.
I hear it still
and feel the blow.
once,
I took the stick
from her hands
and broke it in half,
tossing the pieces
on the floor.
she was furious
but she never
struck me again.
history
is the interruption
of events
that have gone on
without thought
for what seems
like centuries.
at some moment
something happens
to change us.
it is here
that history
and poetry
meet
in the moment
of transformational
ecstasy
in which the vast
confusion
of event
takes on the clarity
of a falling sword.
***
WHERE
do people go
when they die?
they go to the movies.
how can you doubt it?
last night I saw
Sunset Boulevard:
Gloria Swanson,
William Holden,
Erich Von Stroheim,
all dead.
the director dead too.
I saw Gregory Peck,
Gregory Ratoff,
Jean Arthur,
Irene Dunne,
James Stewart,
Eddie “Rochester” Anderson,
S.Z. “Cuddles” Zackall,
Elisha Cook, Jr.,
Betty Hutton,
Judy Garland,
Emlyn Williams,
William Demarest,
Paul Robeson,
Keye Luke,
Henry Hull,
Mischa Auer,
James Barton,
Bobby Driscoll,
Margaret Hamilton,
Ethel Barrymore,
John Barrymore,
Ethel Waters,
Henry Fonda,
Gene Kelly,
Cyd Charisse—
all there in the movies,
all dead.
where do people go
when they die?
they go to the movies.
***
FOR IVÁN ARGÜELLES
“He had a very difficult life which he accepted. The steady
soft glow of your friendship for him was a balm and your
understanding insightful and frequent reviews were a gift
to the community.”
––Malcolm Margolin
isn’t it just like you to die a las cinco de la tarde!
Bang ! Bang ! la vida la pinche vida, hombre !
and the deserts rolling
like futile seas towards Las Vegas and points east
“You’re not American, you’re an Indian.”
I met you something like forty years ago.
I knew Marilla from Park School
and I had told her that I knew Ishmael Reed a little:
“Oh. Ivan”––not Iván in those days––“would like to meet him.”
And so it began. you gave me a book, I wrote you back.
“What you wrote was closer to what I think I’m doing than
anything else I’ve seen. You say you write poetry. Listen.
I’m doing a reading at Larry Blake’s. Why don’t you read with me.
If your poetry is half as good as your criticism, I’m sure
you’ll be fine.” and so it began and so it began.
I was completely unknown. had done no readings
except for one that Iván attended at CCAC. there, Adelle and I did
one of the choral pieces I was writing:
that the hummingbird’s wings are of a remarkable rapidity
he had noted often––nothing could be done––the
shift of his breathing––
and hearing it you grew excited. then the reading at Larry Blake’s.
I wanted to write something special for it––
something elegant & long––
and as I wrote it bit by bit I phoned you and read you
what I’d done.
“Is it all right?”
“Yes, yes, it is. Keep it coming.” your beautiful voice
assured me. I was amazed. no one, literally no one
had ever even liked my verse. yet I had continued,
if no one else was subject to its power, at least I was.
and then there was Iván. we were a great success
at Larry Blake’s. someone had made a poster
and there we were. a young woman
came up to me afterwards and singled out the long, special poem
I had written, “Sweeney Adrift.”
“What a poem!” she kept repeating. “What a poem!”
Nancy Peters and Phillip Lamantia were there to hear Iván
but they heard Adelle and me as well.
“Something original,” said Nancy about my choral piece.
“welcome to the house of failure,” I had written in “Sweeney Adrift,”
“see these are the structural bases of the house
its beams and arteries
its artificial light its hands its vast appendices
who is
not here?
the range of things
delights us welcome welcome
see there is the door it opens for us
welcome”
yes.
suddenly that door of poetry opened
and it was all Iván’s doing.
everything I have ever done
was in that moment
which I shared
with a man
who would be my lifelong
friend.
dear man,
do you remember our many
times in Saul’s Restaurant and Jewish Delicatessen
in Berkeley?
“Are you going to say it again?” you asked.
“Yes, I am,” I answered.
and when the waitress served me
my matzoh ball soup, I asked her, deadpan,
as I did every time a waitress
served me such soup,
“And what do they do
with the rest of the Matzoh?”
“ARGH,” said Iván.
will you tell me in a dream
if there is matzoh ball soup
in Poet Heaven?
our times together
flood over me,
there was so much
and so much richness
in them.
“Do you want to hear a poem?” you asked.
“Of course,” I answered
and you read me
something beautiful.
“THIS IS DEDICATED TO THE ONE I LOVE
on earth to say there are couples that don’t match
and flames of equidistant breath their smoke release
the sign is higher than summer and the cipher
cannot be discerned all sites and directions weathered
and grasses of twilight lift weary shadows to a god
whose nature is as unknown as death and what’s
to sacrifice if not the soul’s plagiarized copy afloat
in clouds where sleep is buried and poetry too
descant and folio of vast unremembered lines”
your lines will be remembered
and because of you perhaps some of mine as well
and perhaps our friendship.
goodbye, my loving, wonderful friend.
I’ll go to Saul’s and order matzoh ball soup
and I will say, as I always do,
“What do they do
with the rest of the Matzoh?”
and I will hear your laughter
and your moan
and I will know
some things survive
even the dark, dark hand
of Death.
Iván Argüelles, January 24, 1939-April 28, 2024
Interview
July 15th, 2024
California Poets Interview Series:
Jack Foley, Poet, Editor, Radio Host
interviewed by David Garyan
DG: Your poetry is as much crafted for performance as it’s written for the page. Can you talk about why performance is an organic part of the poem itself and not merely a vehicle to transmit the poem?
JF: Performance is an aspect of some of my work, a fair amount but not of all of it. I have written poems which cannot be performed, which can only be read silently, with the eyes.
In the West, poetry begins as performance: Homer. It begins as an art like singing. It’s only with the rise of writing and reading silently that performance ceases to be an aspect of the art. Book six of Augustine’s Confessions has a wonderful passage in which Augustine sees his friend St. Ambrose reading. For Augustine, “reading” means accumulating a crowd of people and reading aloud to them. Ambrose is reading silently, not communicating to anyone what he is reading. He is by himself, absorbed in the book. Augustine realizes that the new dispensation is Christian, inward, and silent before the page. To put it another way, he realizes that Christianity is moving in a different direction from what had been before. In this situation, the situation of silent reading, what is the statis of an art whose primarily means of communication had been speech? We are in fact all taught to read as Ambrose did: not to speak the words aloud but to read silently. With the coming of electronic media, however, the possibility of the assertion of the oral/aural aspects of the art arises again. As I was growing up, recordings of poets—particularly Dylan Thomas—were becoming popular. I felt that in many ways the visual aspects of poetry, poetry on the page, had usurped the sound aspects of poetry. Silent reading had had its impact. It was an important aspect of my first deep experience of poetry that I should speak it aloud. I felt that in some way I was recreating the poet in my own body, resurrecting him through his words. All this is what I think of as the current crisis of poetry.
I’d like to add this as well:
in the 60s
an audience
which was
generally
ignorant
of poetry
was “blown away”
by the admirable
work
of Bob Dylan.
the audience
was equally
ignorant
of the work
of the great lyricists
of the 20s
and 30s––
Cole Porter,
Ira Gershwin,
Lorenz Hart, etc.
for them these lyricists
were part
of what John Lennon
scornfully called
“grannie music.”
though Bob Dylan
clearly regarded himself
as a songwriter,
not as a poet,
his audience
wished to call him
something more
elevated than that:
they wished to call him
“poet.”
because they had
little knowledge
of the actual art
of poetry,
for them and for others,
what Dylan did
was poetry.
there was no
other kind.
and so for them poetry
ceased to be
what Chaucer did
or what Spenser did
or what Pope did
or what Byron did
or what Wordsworth did
or what Emily Dickinson did
or what Paul Lawrence Dunbar did
or what García Lorca did
or what Neruda did
or what Eliot and Pound did
or what Gertrude Stein did
or what Iván Argüelles did
and became
essentially
and entirely
song lyrics,
usually
of some sort
of personal
nature.
Dylan is
a marvelous lyricist
and song lyrics are a mode
of poetry
but they are not
poetry as such,
and now the incredible and moving expanse
of the art of poetry
begins to disappear,
and the ignorant and vicious
hatred of poetry
once again finds space
to reaffirm itself.
“Shakespeare was a lousy
lyricist,” said the author
of “That isn’t thunder, dear,
It’s only my poor heart you hear
And its applause.”
Lament for the Makaris.
I that in heill wes and gladnes,
Am trublit now with gret seiknes,
And feblit with infermite;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Our plesance heir is all vane glory,
This fals warld is bot transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Fend is sle;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
DG: Your late wife, Adelle Joan Foley, was an invaluable guide in your creative journey. Can you talk about her influence on your work and how your writing process/performances changed after that?
JF: Adelle’s influence was mostly in performance, not in the creation of my verse. I of course had both her strengths and limitations in mind when I wrote choral pieces, but these things were never all that important in determining my writing process. I gave the poem to her after it was done. She was usually able to do what I asked and to do it well. If she had an idea, she suggested it and we discussed it. She eventually became a poet herself and she regularly read her work at our readings.
I’m still working that way with Sangye.
To put it another way, I see the “I” as a front man for a situation in which there are many voices—some of them in conflict—asserting themselves: “an unstable republic of conflicting impulses, instincts, and appetites in perpetual flux” (Dana Gioia). Our natural situation is not an I but multiple. How to express that in a poem? The word “individual” is by etymology “not divided.” In political terms, I think the rights of the “individual” are everywhere to be respected. But if I attempt to understand what’s going on in my mind, I’m as divided as I can be: and if I’m fundamentally divided, I’m not an “individual.” My word for what I am is a “multiplicity.”
DG: Over the years, you’ve used the radio to bring poetry into conversation with the greater community. These kinds of programs have been steadily decreasing in number. How much of that activity remains on the scene in California and do you see the possibility of a resurgence?
JF: I don’t think there are that many poetry programs on the air. There have been, in addition to mine, a few others on KPFA and I’m sure other stations have done them as well. Nina Serrano does one. So does Avotcja. Perhaps there are some others. I’ve been doing mine since 1988. I’m afraid that I don’t generally listen to poetry programs other than my own. I feel that poetry is in general not understood very well and that fact gets itself reflected in interviews and presentations.
DG: In honor of your tireless work as poet and promoter of poetry, the city of Berkeley, in 2010, proclaimed June 5th to be “Jack Foley Day.” About that, you’ve said in jest: “Most people get 15 minutes. But I've had my day." What are things you love most about working in Berkeley and what are things that have gotten more difficult?
JF: Actually, I don’t really work in Berkeley. For reasons of health I no longer do public readings and no longer attend them. I’m ok if they’re on Zoom. There have always been many venues for poetry in the area and therefore many poets in the area: Berkeley, of course, but also San Francisco and Oakland. At the moment, I record my radio shows in my Oakland home and email them to KPFA for broadcast. Jack Foley Day––it was only that one day––was because I received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Berkeley Poetry Festival; it wasn’t an Award decided by the city of Berkeley.
DG: There’s no shortage of bookstores in the Bay Area. Apart from City Lights, which are your favorite?
JF: Again for health reasons, I don’t much go to book stores (nor to the supermarket, etc.). My sense is that the number of bookstores has been diminishing. I guess Moe’s would have to be the top of the list. I’m not sure which ones are still functioning. Because of my radio show, people are constantly sending books to me. And because of my health, it’s difficult for me to go places.
DG: It’s not possible to talk about your work without discussing Visions and Affiliations—a 1,300 page (in two volumes) or so encyclopedia that undertakes a grand sweep of California poetry from 1940 to 2005. To say there’s a more ambitious project of this kind would be ambitious. Can you talk about the struggles and joys you encountered putting such a project together and to what extent California poetry is both a unique force in America, but also a literature that is quintessentially American and fits within the greater literary conversation of our country?
JF: There’s a book about Visions and Affiliations that goes on about what is special about California poetry: Jack Foley’s Unmanageable Masterpiece, edited by Dana Gioia and Peter Whitfield. They write: “Some...considered the elaborate time-line the first adequate account of California’s complex and contradictory literary life. Others recognized Foley’s radical innovation in changing how literary history could be written. A few even considered these strange and sprawling yet compulsively readable tomes an oddball masterpiece.” Someone dubbed the book a “chronoencyclopedia.”
It was not difficult to do though it took about ten years. I just kept a file. I finished it two or three times and then each time realized that it wasn’t finished, that I needed to include more.
Michael McClure felt that he had learned from Kenneth Rexroth that being a California poet meant being more attuned to nature and looking to Asia rather to Europe for inspiration. I’m sure I’ve been influenced in these directions too, but I certainly still maintain European connections. My girlfriend Sangye is Buddhist.
DG: Who are the poets from that 1940 to 2005 period that have, in your view, received far less recognition than they should’ve had and are there perhaps specific poems, too, which come to mind?
JF: Many, many. To name just a few: Larry Eigner, James Broughton, Adrienne Rich, Michael McClure, Harold Norse, Robert Duncan (especially), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ron Silliman, Carolyn Kizer, Jack Spicer, Al Young, Iván Argüelles, H.D. Moe, Dana Gioia, David Mason, Diane di Prima, Alan Bern, Neeli Cherkovski, Jerome Rothenberg, Deborah Bachels Schmidt, Rusty Morrison, etc. etc. etc. Duncan’s “My Mother Would Be a Falconress” has to be high up on the list of great California poems. I have championed Peyton Houston as a poet who simply disappeared and who was first rate. Alas, he remains more or less unknown. I have done in-depth interviews with various Beat writers: Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, McClure.
DG: In 1974 you dropped out of grad school because you wanted to be more like Charles Olson than the critics who didn’t understand him. These days, the academy has even more institutional control over criticism and literary creativity. Has it all been for the worse or do you see some redeeming qualities in having greater opportunities to study and publish the art we love?
JF: I think the academy has not had a particularly positive affect on the art of poetry, though, on the other hand, where else can you get people to read John Dryden or Alexander Pope? One example I return to is that of William Butler Yeats. Collisions has a long essay on Yeats as well as new poetry by me. The essay begins,
Part of what fascinates me about Yeats is that his work became—rightly—immensely famous but, I believe, at the expense of being genuinely understood. The groundwork laid by Richard Ellmann in 1948 was immediately accepted and continues to this day, but it contains some serious misreadings of central poems. (Paul de Man remarked to me that he thought Ellmann’s work was “bad biography and bad criticism.”) I think what Ellmann wrote was taken up with considerable relief because no one wanted to deal with Yeats’ many esoteric influences—with the highly prolific Madame Blavatsky, for instance. Here was one of “ours,” a good academic rather than a religious fanatic, who took care of all that, who elucidated Yeats’ complex, quasi-religious symbol system with great clarity. When Paul de Man implicitly challenged Ellmann’s readings, he was immediately vilified by the Yeats industry. Two personal examples: Thomas Parkinson, who wrote two books on Yeats, said to me, “I wish Paul de Man had never written about Yeats.” After F.D. Reeve and I had done a joint reading in Berkeley, we began to strike up a friendship and were writing back and forth. Encouraged, I sent him some of what I had to say about Yeats. He immediately ended all communication with me.
These are some lines from a poem, not from the essay:
the problem is that Ellmann’s interpretations,
now enshrined and repeated endlessly,
were not necessarily accurate.
the “great-rooted blossomer” is not
the same as the leaf, the blossom and the bole:
the answer to Yeats’ question is no.
the poem’s equally famous concluding question is not
a rhetorical one asserting the identity
of dancer and dance:
it is a genuine, anguished question.
Yeats’ inability to tell
the dancer from the dance,
documented in the body of the poem,
may cost him his immortal soul.
the poem is not an assertion
of certainty:
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning.
The essay was also published in the latest Exacting Clam. You can get it online.
DG: When asked to give young poets advice, most established ones say “write what you know.” Instead, in a short interview with Dennis Morton, you said: “Write about what you don't know; steal.” That was quite a while back. Do you still hold to the maxim or was that in fact said in jest—the spur of the moment, the desire to answer an oft-asked question in a more provocative way?
JF: I think of writing as a journey of exploration: the words that come to me give me news about myself, often things I didn’t know before. Of course, they also bring me news of other things as well. I do not think of writing as the expression of things I already know. I was not the first to suggest that a good poet should steal: T.S. Eliot did so before me.
DG: Who are your favorite California poets?
JF: I have poets I return to all the time––poets like Yeats, Joyce, Duncan, Stein, McClure, etc.––but they are not necessarily California poets. I enjoy living here but that doesn’t mean that I have to limit myself to California poets. Do Duncan or Ferlinghetti or McClure think of themselves as “regional poets”? California poets, as all poets should be, are open to the full range of poetry.
DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?
JF: I have three books coming out this year. Collisions, a collection of poetry plus the essay on Yeats; Ekphrazz, a collection of ekphrastic poetry, a collaboration with collagist Mark Fisher. Collisions is already out. Ekphrazz should be out in a week or two. The third will be later this year. It’s being published by a press in India and is called (quoting Emily Dickinson) Telling It Slant.
I’d like to conclude with two passages. The first is a commentary on Collisions. Though it’s written in the third person, I’m the author.
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’” (Iván Argūelles). 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.” Foley goes on: “I suggest in Collisions that whatever caused us to be here is not omniscient but is engaged in a vast attempt to understand itself: our actions as a species—even our destructive ones—are almost entirely modes of self-reflection, attempts at self-discovery or self-revelation. From this point of view, each of us is an experiment in knowing.”
***
What is the status of the poet?
What can be said of the poet’s impact
If any?
For most of America and perhaps
The world
Song lyrics are their only poetry.
How can we regain
The lost dignity
Of the poem?
Tous les poètes
Sont Orphée:
Son histoire
Est l’histoire de tous.
July, 2024
Author Bio:
Jack Foley has published 20 books of poetry, 5 books of criticism, a book of stories, and a two-volume, 1300-page “chrono-encyclopedia,” Visions & Affiliations: California Poetry 1940-2005. He became well known particularly through his multi-voiced performances with his late wife, Adelle. He currently performs with his new life partner, Sangye Land. Since 1988, he has presented poetry on Berkeley radio station, KPFA. He has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from Marquis Who’s Who and the Berkeley Poetry Festival as well as the K.M. Anthru Award from the Indian publication, Litterateur RW. June 5, 2010 was declared “Jack Foley Day” in Berkeley. He has a Wikipedia page. His most recent books include the companion volumes, The Light of Evening, a brief autobiography, and “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” a psychobiography, a biography of the poet’s mind; Bridget and Other Poems, a selection of Jack’s work edited and translated by German poet, Andreas Weiland; and Creative Death: an octogenarian’s wordshop. Forthcoming: Collisions, new poetry, and Ekphrazz, a collaboration with Mark Fisher, collages and ekphrastic poetry.
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