Organizing Leisure and Human Services

Welton, George

Foley, Jack

Benest, Frank

Business & Money

Kendall/Hunt Pub. Co.

Poetry. AHADADA READER 3 is a compendium of four chapbooks: Australia Dreaming by Mary-Marcia Casoly, Fog and Light by Katherine Hastings, The Memory of Paper by Melanie L. Moro-Huber, and A Disordered City by Jack Foley. "The poems in this collection, despite the interestingly various voices of the four poets, have one thing in common: they do what poems are meant to do, take you to places you've never been, show you things you've never seen, test the limits of what we've come complacently to accept as poetic language, and take the risk of being honest to themselves. How exciting to see four poets doing their own thing, the real thing"—R. H. W. Dillard.

Ahadada Reader 3

Literature & Fiction

Casoly, M-M

Hastings, K.

Moro-Huber, M L

Poetry

Ahadada Books

Poetry. "Jack Foley's work represents that rare commodity—genuinely avant-garde poetry. He takes the polyphonic forms of Pound and Eliot and pushes them into possibilities open only to performance-based art. This is experimental poetry with depth and intelligence as well as intensity."—Dana Gioia

EYES

Poetry Hotel Press

Literary Nonficton. Poetry History &amp; Criticism. California Studies. VISIONS &amp; AFFILIATIONS: A CALIFORNIA TIMELINE 1940-1980 is the first of a two-volume 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. California authors keep generating massive anthologies in an attempt to tame the chaos of California, to pretend it isn't there. Yet there it is—staring them in the face like a great bear, alive, hungry and more than a little dangerous.

Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line Part One

ADRIFT (nominated for a Northern California Book Reviewers Award)

Greatest Hits 1974-2003

Ash on an Old Man's Sleeve

and "A Disordered City

History & Criticism

Pantograph Press

Literary Nonficton. Poetry History & Criticism. California Studies. VISIONS & AFFILIATIONS: A CALIFORNIA TIMELINE 1980-2005 is the second of a two-volume 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. California authors keep generating massive anthologies in an attempt to tame the chaos of California, to pretend it isn't there. Yet there it is—staring them in the face like a great bear, alive, hungry and more than a little dangerous.

Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line Part Two

BEA, " chapbook included in AHADADA READER 3. His books of criticism include the companion volumes

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.

COLLISIONS: violences by Jack Foley

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Academica Press

The light of evening: a brief life of Jack Foley

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.

Biographies & Memoirs

Regional U.S.

Jack Foley has played a major role 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 in which he might continue to write poetry in a world in which the status of poetry has been seriously diminished. This book 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. At eighty, he 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 hegemony. As a young man he experienced Berkeley in the sixties and the political passion of that time. As he came into his own as a poet, his admirers included some of the most prominent poets of California: Michael McClure, Ishmael Reed, James Broughton, Al Young, Judy Grahn, Larry Eigner, Dana Gioia, many others. The Light of Evening--along with its companion volume, "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads"--is the story of a complex, always-in-motion public intellectual for whom poetry was first, last, and always.

A backward glance o’er travel’d roads: a reminiscence and a presentation of the various forms i have employed throughout my long, long life

"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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Books by Foley, Jack