Jack Foley

A backward glance o'er travel'd roads (eBook, ePUB)

a reminiscence and a presentation of the various forms i have employed throughout my long, long life

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

"A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads"-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, "Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute me" 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 "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1750) changed all that: "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 "Elegy," in the same stanzaic form and with the same rhyme scheme as the original. 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." 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 "what will suffice." 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 "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads."

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Academica Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Februar 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781680538946
• Artikelnr.: 61403658

Autorenporträt

Jack Foley has published 17 books of poetry, 5 books of criticism, a book of stories, and a 1300-page "chronoencyclopedia," Visions & Affi liations, detailing "California Poetry 1940-2005." He has presented poetry on Berkeley radical radio station KPFA-FM regularly since 1988 and is currently one of the hosts of KPFA's literary program, "Cover to Cover." He has received two Lifetime Achievement Awards, one from Marquis Who's Who and one from the Berkeley Poetry Festival. June 5, 2010 was declared "Jack Foley Day" in Berkeley. His recent publications include EYES (selected poems); The Tiger & Other Tales, a book of stories; Riverrun, a book of experimental poetry; and Grief Songs, a book documenting his grief at the death of his wife, Adelle. Two new books of Foley's poetry, When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs and Duet of Polygon, a collaboration with Japanese poet Maki Starfi eld, have recently appeared, and poets/scholars Dana Gioia and Peter Whitfi eld have published Jack Foley's Unmanageable Masterpiece-a book of essays dealing with Visions & Affi liations. In a review, Micah Zevin writes, "Foley's When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs is a collection that speaks multitudes, gives voice and voices to the human condition in all its tragic and celebratory facets, compels us to keep singing until the last song is sung."