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Jack Foley Interview
Jack Foley is a widely published poet and critic who, with his wife, Adelle, performs his work frequently in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the past several years he has hosted a show of interviews and poetry presentations on Berkeley radio station KPFA. His poetry collections include Letters/Lights--Words for Adelle, Gershwin, Adrift (nominated for a Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award), Exiles, and (with Ivan Argüelles) New Poetry from California: Dead / Requiem. A contributing editor to Poetry Flash, he has published three chapbooks: Advice to the Lovelorn, (with Ivan Arguelles) Saint James (an homage to James Joyce) and Some Songs by Georges Brassens (translations of work by the late French singer).
He
has also edited Fallen Western Star Wars, a collection of essays dealing
with the controversy caused by Dana Gioia's essay, "Fallen Western
Star." O Powerful Western Star (which won the Artists Embassy
Literary/Cultural Award 1998-2000) and Foley’s Books (companion volumes
of Foley’s essays, reviews and interviews).
He also writes and performs songs.
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino lives in New York City where he edits the online journal, eratio postmodern poetry. His poetry and prose have appeared in a variety of print and online publications including Barrow Street, jubilat, The Germ, Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, 5_Trope, In Posse Review, Nthposition, Xcp: Streetnotes, Cordite Poetry Review, Softblow, Rattapallax--Fusebox, Aught, Malleable Jangle, Movement One: Creative Coalition and can we have our ball back? He has a degree in philosophy from Fordham University.
GVST:
Happy Birthday, Jack! Today is Tuesday, August 9th, and today you
turn 65! I had the pleasure of being in your company recently and, if you
don’t mind me saying so, my impression of you, of your spirit, is that you are
an ancient man, sort of like a time-traveler, one who has traveled through the
consciousness of the ages, as that consciousness is found, is documented in
poetry, and has absorbed so much of it; the ease and comfort with which you
traverse the different periods, via their poetry: I say I am very impressed by
someone who can recite Chaucer, in Chaucer’s language, as easy as he can
Browning or Frost or Eigner! I can’t say this about just any poet, but about
you I think I can situate you in any poetic period, the troubadours for
instance, and think that you are at home there. Certainly, your poetry, your
lyrics, are both amorous and satirical and political, and you were obviously
made for courtly love. Our ages say so much about us, our mundane chronological
age places us into context, culturally, historically, poetically,
intellectually: so why don’t we begin in the present tense, where you find
yourself now; how is Jack Foley at 65, the man, the poetry, and what does he
make of his current context? This
past April (April ’05) you and Adelle were in New York City for two readings
(at the Where Eagles Dare Theater and at The Bowery Poetry Club). These readings
were billed as your “first readings in New York City”. "First readings"?
That strikes me as, well, as counter-intuitive. How is it that this was your
first reading in NYC? Is there a cultural indicator in here somewhere? JF:
My wife Adelle and I have had much to do with New York City throughout our
lives. She was born there; I grew up in Port Chester, New York—not too far
away. I have been writing poetry since about the age of fifteen, but my
“career” as a poet didn’t begin until some thirty years later when Adelle
and I first performed my work in public in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the
twenty years since our first performance in 1985 (in Berkeley) we have performed
in various places—including Mexico City, Paris, Damascus—but we had never
performed in New York City. I came to New York City as a California poet. In
some ways, my work may be nothing more than an attempt to recreate the ecstatic
initial moment in which I first discovered poetry—and so I’d like to begin
by talking about that. I have a clear memory of the moment at which I
“became” a poet. It was about 1955, when I was 14 or 15. I was writing
seriously—but not poetry. I was writing prose and some songs, both music and
lyrics. For the prose my model was primarily Thomas Wolfe. A teacher suggested
that I read Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”,
originally published in 1768. I thought it very unlikely that Gray’s poem
would appeal to me. Why should a blue-collar, Irish-Italian kid living on the
East Coast of the United States have any interest in the work of an
aristocratic, 18th-century Englishman? But I looked up the poem in
the library. It turned out to be an epiphany of my life at the time: The
curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The
lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The
ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And
leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now
fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And
all the air a solemn stillness holds…. The
word “homeward” in the third line is very important. I had encountered it in
the title of Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 novel, Look Homeward, Angel; Wolfe took the phrase from Milton’s “Lycidas”.
(Wolfe later wrote You Can’t Go Home
Again, published posthumously in 1940.) Gray’s ploughman goes
“homeward”, but the speaker of the poem—presumably Gray himself, the
poet—remains “outside”, in the churchyard. The churchyard is a sort of
“home” but it is a home of the dead, a necropolis. Somewhere at the edge of
my consciousness was the thought that my “home town”, Port Chester, was
itself—at least for me—a necropolis. Look
Homeward, Angel concludes with the image of its hero, Eugene Gant, turning
his back upon the town and moving towards parts unknown: “he was like a man
who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say ‘The town
is near’, but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges”. You Can’t Go Home Again is even more explicit: At
the end of it he knew, and with the knowledge came the definite sense of new
direction toward which he had long been groping, that the dark ancestral cave,
the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back—but
that you can’t go home again. The
message was clear: One had to leave home, and once one had left home, one could
never go back again. Yet home was all one knew. The speaker of Gray’s
“Elegy” is not at home, though presumably his home is not far and, like the
ploughman, he could go there if he wished. He is in a state of distance, a state
of what he calls “darkness”. The landscape is “there”, but it is not
overwhelmingly there: it is merely “glimmering”, part of a “solemn
stillness”. For him, that “stillness” contains the possibility of thought,
meditation, poetry—of writing: Let
not ambition mock their useful toil, Their
homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor
Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile, The
short and simple annals of the poor. The
boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r, And
all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Awaits
alike th’inevitable hour. The
paths of glory lead but to the grave… Full
many a gem of purest ray serene, The
dark, unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full
many a flower is born to blush unseen, And
waste its sweetness on the desert air. Note
the word “homely”, used here in a positive way. Nothing the poet says is
“new” though he is putting what he says in a deliberately “elevated”
tone. Yet his position—between the realm of the dead and the realm of the
living—is of considerable interest. I surely thought that, caught in my home
town, with all its limitations and ignorances—its “deadening” aspects—I
was “wasting my sweetness on the desert air”, that the town had far to go
before anyone in it “fathom’d” my particular “ocean”. Later, I learned
the virtue and usefulness of the “homely”—of slang, for instance. At this
point I was learning how to distance myself from that. Gray’s position
encompasses both the present and the past—history. He is, precisely, not at
home, yet home is his subject. His language even glances at
sexuality—certainly an issue for me at that time. His rose “blushes” and,
virginal, “wastes its sweetness”. Moreover, his primary theme is
death—always an issue for adolescents. For adolescents, “death” is not so
much the awareness of the end of life as it is the perception of a radical
change in themselves, the perception that they must change their mode of being.
Like all transformations, this change involves the conclusion of something as
well as the beginning of something. For the adolescent, the “paths of glory”
not only “lead…to the grave”: they begin with the grave—with death.
Wolfe was telling me that I must “lose the life you have, for greater life”. Of
course none of this was very clear to me on the day I read Gray’s elegy. All I
could tell for sure was that the poem seemed to me to be the most beautiful
sound I had ever heard. I kept repeating Gray’s lines aloud. In fact, the poem
affected me so deeply that I wanted it to have come out of me, not out of Thomas
Gray. I immediately sat down and wrote my own Gray’s “Elegy”, in the same
stanzaic form (“Sicilian quatrains”) and with the same rhyme scheme as the
original. Unlike Gray, I took myself as the subject of my elegy. But its
mournful tone and words like “mem’ries” were directly traceable to him. I
understood the state of mind named in Gray’s “Elegy” to be the state of
mind of poetry itself; and in reacting so deeply to it, I understood myself to
be a poet. It
was by no means a simple state of mind. It had to do with the enormous power of
words not merely to reflect or “express” but to create a “reality” which
moved me away from the daylight world in which I ordinarily functioned and had
identity. Speaking the words aloud let me experience them physically, with my
own breath: they were an affirmation not only of “ideas” but of my own
physicality. In this situation, mind and body seemed not to be at odds, as at
times they seemed to be when one was doing other kinds of “intellectual”
work. Thought seemed sensuous, sensuality seemed thoughtful. Self and other were
joined here too. Thomas Gray was a long-dead English poet of the 18th
Century. It was his mind that was being expressed in his elegy. Yet his poem
seemed to be expressing my own inmost thoughts. It was almost as if Gray’s
passionate words allowed him to be reincarnated in my body. In
fact, of course, the Thomas Gray I was experiencing in the “Elegy” was not
the man who actually existed and who did a number of things beside write poetry:
I was experiencing Gray the poet, the bard. Aspects of both our lives seemed
suddenly to fall away, to be of little consequence. What did it matter who the
man Thomas Gray was? What did it matter who I was—born in New Jersey, growing
up in New York? My powerful reaction to Gray’s words allowed me to recognize
not only who he was but who I was: I was a poet. And to be a poet meant to
be transformed, to move away from the person who lived at “home” (58
Prospect Street) and who was fifteen years old and had a mother named Juana and
a father named Jack. Poetry offered me another identity, that of the poet, and,
in so doing, it offered me another “home”—that of words. The life I led
“at home”—in my “house”—was one thing; the life of words was
another. But
a person with two homes can be understood to be an “exile”—or perhaps an
immigrant. Writing moved me into a world of words. It was not a world I could
touch or taste or see, but it was not a “fantasy” world either. It was a
world which words caused, which could not exist without the words, but it was no
less real for that. In that world, words were the substantial “reality”, and
at that moment in 1955 I took the word-world to be my true “home.” Writing
became a “home” which allowed me, in good conscience, to leave my
“home.” I might perhaps have been able to find a better balance between
these two “homes”, to have felt less like an exile as I moved from one to
another, but the pressure from Thomas Wolfe and others was too great. My true
life would have to begin elsewhere. First, of course, I had to get out of town. GVST: “I understood the state of mind named in Gray’s ‘Elegy’ to be the state of mind of poetry itself; and in reacting so deeply to it, I understood myself to be a poet. And to be a poet meant to be transformed.”
And in this way, Jack
Foley, poet, was born, was born into a world of words, his true home, and
yet—he is an exile. Exile is a major theme in your work—it’s also the
title of a book of poetry you published in 1996. But is it only a matter of
place, a need to skip town, or is this also an exile from those first fifteen
years? A good-bye to all that. Is there any sustenance for you—for the poet
and for the man, I don’t want to separate the two—to be found, to be had,
from those first fifteen years? Anything idyllic there, anything to draw from,
to measure by? So
you had an awakening, an insight, and at such a tender season. And now you saw
yourself, you knew who you were or who you had to become, but now you had to
cultivate that. And in a sense you were causa sui, perhaps the most awesome
state of exile of all. But you had poetry, and you had your insight. Was anyone
there for you? A mentor? Did you read philosophy? How did you begin the work on
yourself? JF:
The feeling I am describing was less a sense of destiny—what I was to
“become”—than it was a sense of recognition: without knowing it, I had
been a poet. And the state of consciousness represented by “poetry”—not
just by Gray’s poem but by poetry—was one I wished to return to. Writing a
carbon copy of Gray’s poem was not a bad thing to do, but I realized that it
was not sufficient. How to open that door? Other poets—Shelley, for
example—could do it for me, and that was wonderful. But it was even better if
I could do it myself. What Gray had shown me was possibilities of my own
consciousness. I loved music, painting, art of all sorts—and practiced as many
arts as I could. But poetry was the door. As
for mentors, there were surely some people who were of use to me—the teacher
who suggested that I read Gray’s “Elegy”, for example—but I had very
little sense of any peers and no guides except for the people I read, the
“mighty dead”, inhabitants of their own “churchyards”. Thomas Wolfe’s
“poetic” passages were, I realized, a kind of preparation for Gray’s poem
and for the experience of poetry. Wolfe showed me that consciousness was like
the sky—an infinity—and that loss of some sort was a necessary aspect of its
growth. That moment in 1955 was a moment of ecstatic isolation and of sheer
potentiality. Through anthologies I immersed myself in poetry from all periods,
but I was particularly interested in the Romantics—and there, particularly in
Shelley. Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” was for me a poem of almost
equal importance to Gray’s “Elegy”. Whenever you see any references to
“leaves” in my poems, it is always Shelley. George Bernard Shaw was also a
great liberator, and I noted with delight his admiration for Shelley. When
I went to Cornell to study literature, I discovered that Shelley was completely
out of fashion. The "New Criticism" had little use for him. Teachers made
disparaging remarks about him. But I knew Shelley was a great poet because of
the way he had made me feel. I realized—and it was a very useful
realization—that the teachers were “wrong”, not Shelley. Both
Shelley and Shaw plunged me into philosophy—a labyrinth from which I have yet
to emerge. Insofar as any mentor presented himself, it was Paul de Man, whose
readings of Romantic literature and of Yeats I found fascinating. It was he who
led me to Heidegger. While everyone else was talking about irony and
paradox—buzz words of the New Criticism—de Man was talking about
consciousness and being. But de Man influenced only my thought, not my poetry.
Later, Charles Olson’s “Maximus” poems opened up poetry for me yet again.
Someone commented to me about literature courses that only the lesser students
believe themselves to be in competition with each other: the better students
understand that they are in competition with the teacher. Perhaps the very best
students understand themselves to be in competition with the subject matter.
Literature offers you possibilities of selfhood which are precisely not found in
your environment—though of course where else but in your environment can you
find them? Rilke’s broken Apollo says, “You must change your life”—and
that is indeed one of the deep messages of literature. But if Apollo is not in
some sense already there you will never be able to “discover” him. GVST:
At this time, at Cornell, were you already making music? Did you do any acting,
or, were you interested in the theatre? You have music and acting in your
background—or, maybe I should say, in your blood. Do you think the theatre was
ever an option for you? Was it also Shaw’s plays as well as his philosophy? This
consciousness, it is greater than, it is beyond language—is that so for you?
And yet language is the mode in which it finds expression. Do you ever
articulate it in such terms? Language is your medium—or, how do you think
about language, language as the mode in which consciousness, in which poetry,
finds expression? I mean both oral language as well as the written/printed word. Would
you compare this consciousness to the poetic imagination, and what about
Keats’ notion of the “self-destroying” power of the poetic imagination,
his “negative capability”? JF:
I had been making music prior to my poetry. And you know that my father had been
a tap dancer in vaudeville. When I was a child he gave me lessons—and I have a
couple of poems in which I tap dance a bit. I have played the guitar throughout
most of my life, and I continue to do so. Theatre was always an interest,
yes—both “straight” theater and musical. Shaw’s plays were certainly an
influence. By my junior year at Cornell, I had discovered the great Brecht/Weill
opera, Mahagonny. In 1962—before the
movie opened—I wrote the lyrics to a musical version of Fielding’s Tom
Jones; the book was co-written by Michael Abrams and Stephen Sahlein and the
music was by Warren Wechsler. In the tradition of Porgy
and Bess, we began with a lullaby. I also performed a tap dance and sang a
song. Warren
recently visited me in California and we wrote some new songs together. This is
one:
A
ROSE If
you were a flower, you’d be a rose They
say that’s the best flower that grows If
you’d rather be a petunia I
wouldn’t thumb my nose But
I’d prefer a red, red rose Just
like the poet’s rhyme I’d
watch you sway In
the wind all day And
never waste my time And
were we near To
Spain, my dear Where
they eat much rice and doze I’d
call you “a rose,” my sweetest love But
they’d hear it as “arroz”… You
remember the line By
Gertrude Stein: Arroz
is arroz is arroz.
But I’m just as likely to produce poetry like this—not comic but ecstatic, barely verbal:
bending
over the in the
the |