A backward glance o’er travel’d roads

Jack Foley

Description

“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.”

Sujets

• Jack Foley
• Biography
• American studies
• American literature
• Poetry
• Autobiography
• California

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781680538946
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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
Ah,
Speaking with
A bit of the brogue
Primrose said of
Leonard
(Who was famous for stealing
Bows),
He might
Stop the show entirely-
Not with his act,
With his bowing.
Jack Foley
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
Jack Foley
Academica Press
Washington~London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Foley, Jack (author)
Title: 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 Jack Foley
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2021. Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020952304 ISBN 9781680538922 (hardcover) 9781680538939 (paperback) 9781680538946 (e-book)
Copyright 2021 Jack Foley
For Sean, Kerry, Sangye and to the memory of my late wife, Adelle
Contents
AUTHOR S NOTE
#POETMENOTLEAVE PROJECT
DAY ONE
DAY TWO
DAY THREE
DAY FOUR
DAY FIVE
DAY SIX
DAY SEVEN
DAY EIGHT
COMMENTARIES: RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE ART OF POETRY AND ON A FEW OTHER THINGS, TOO
JACK FOLEY ON THE INTERNET
FOLEY S PREDECESSOR, KENNETH REXROTH drawing by Jack Foley
AUTHOR S NOTE
In this world of whimsy and wisecracks
In this world of make believe
Life is what you do while waiting
For another dream to leave
-Jack Foley, Song Lyric
This (scrap)book is a companion volume to my autobiography, The Light of Evening , also published by Academica Press. If the latter book is the history of the events of my life with some excursions into the events of my mind, this book is a history of the events of my mind with some excursions into the events of my life. One s spiritual history cannot be separated from the way one encounters the world, but emphases may be different. Nonetheless, there will necessarily be some overlap, and, as Kipling put it in his great poem, When Omer Smote Is Bloomin Lyre, the reader familiar with The Light of Evening will find that old songs turn up again. Poetry arrived in my 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, like most of my friends, I thought of poetry as more or less inconsequential, old-fashioned, dull. A teacher s suggestion that I 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 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. He published only thirteen poems during his lifetime. I 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 matters. 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, I began to interrogate the entire history of poetry. The story of my intellectual life is the story of my finding-or trying to find-what Wallace Stevens called what will suffice. But the history of the mind is not like the history of a tree. It is not a traditional, linear Bildungsroman . The mind moves in various directions more or less simultaneously until one suddenly finds oneself in the magic castle on the edge of the sea looking at a mate who is both deeply familiar and completely unknown. If the cowboy usually jumps on the horse and rides further West, the mindboy jumps on the horse and rides off in all the directions that are. It all began with my acceptance of a Facebook challenge issued by a friend, the Japanese poet/artist, Maki Starfield.
CHIQUITA BANANA AND THE LANGUAGE OF VERSE
Anyone of my generation
or a little later
remembers it:
bananas must be treated
in a special way
never put bananas
in the refrigerator
Why?
Because it would take longer
for the bananas to rot:
buy a new banana instead .
It was a lie
not as great a lie
as the cigarette companies produced
when threatened with the truth
but a lie nonetheless
Eventually, we all knew it .
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
a particular language for poetry emerged
Though other modes existed
it was the primary language .
It was flexible, easy to memorize ,
could be used
for drama, comedy, epic, almost anything .
It was named for its elements: iambic pentameter, 5 iambs .
It is still in use today
though it is no longer the primary language of poetry .
Prose, with its greater clarity of syntax
and ease of understanding ,
did not destroy but greatly diminished it
and the prose-based novel became
the fundamental mode of consciousness .
Free verse is verse adjusted to prose
an attempt to keep both verse and prose
in an uneasy balance .
Though formal modes continue ,
if there is a current language for verse
free verse is it .
Formal modes continue
especially in the popular songs
to which my poet friends
owe so much allegiance .
When something happens
that makes them happy or sad
they do not go to poetry ,
they go to rock n roll ,
and this despite the fact that they are poets
learned in the art
and for the most part produce
free verse .
At eighty, looking through my own vast work
and the works of Modernism
I began to see Modernism
as a search for a language
that was neither free verse
nor prose
nor formal modes .
Whitman s word for his work was song,
though he did not mean by that
anything genuinely involving music .
Wallace Stevens Sunday Morning
is a magnificent last blast
of iambic pentameter
though of course it also shows up ,
often loosely ,
in Stevens later work
and in writers like Robert Frost
and many of the English .
If only that so many dead lie round,
wrote Philip Larkin .
But Pound, Joyce ,
Eliot in his attempt to find
an equivalent to iambic pentameter
for his theatrical pieces ,
Thomas Wolfe in what people have labeled
singing prose,
Vallejo in Spanish with Trilce,
so many others, Lorca, Stein, Heidegger ,
break with prose
as well as with traditional verse
and produce a language that is-
in the great word of Modernism-
new .
So many look back not to Shakespeare
but to Homer ,
to the very beginning of the Western poetic tradition
and attempt to try again .
I listened to all that
and to the lies of the media-
to all the Chiquita Bananas-
and knew
that the language I heard ,
the language of everyday ,
was not sufficient .
I did not know
what kind of language
was sufficient
and my first poem ,
a deep response to Gray s Elegy,
was in iambic pentameter .
Looking back at my work as I reach eighty
I realize
that so much of it was this search
for a language ,
for what Wallace Stevens called what will suffice.
The search has produced
a wild collage
of stylistic experiments
which recently I have thought of
as the sounds made
by the severed head of Orpheus .
Eurydice is many things
but she is also
the dazzling language
the verse that threatens all our prose
but which has not yet
achieved existence ,
verse that remains caught
in the deep underground
of consciousness .
The Waste Land, Ulysses,
Finnegans Wake, The Cantos
are all a mournful cry
to hear her voice
Yes, I said yes, I will, yes
but she remains
deep in the ground
deep in the ground
the longed-for ,
the language spoken
by the dead .
They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.
#POETMENOTLEAVE PROJECT
What you really need is an agent.
-Dana Gioia
I have been nominated by my dear friend, Maki Starfield to participate in the poetic marathon #PoetMeNotLeave. During eight days, I will publish three poems a day along with photos.
DAY ONE
The multiple voices within the mind trajectory
has really gotten me thinking-never formally studied
psychology-but it certainly is an
intriguing explanation for much. And makes the multi
voice poem revolutionary in more than one way maybe
prophetic as much as
revolutionary.
-Lee Slonimsky on Jack s work as a whole
POEMS WRITTEN BETWEEN THE AGES OF FIFTEEN AND EIGHTEEN
I had come to my hometown, Port Chester, New York, in 1943. When I left in 1958 I understood myself to be a poet. I discovered poetry in 1955, at the age of fifteen. Someone-probably a teacher, perhaps Angela Kelley-suggested that I read Thomas Gray s 18th-Century poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. I have no idea why the teacher thought t