{"id":7971,"date":"2012-03-21T07:34:20","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T11:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=7971"},"modified":"2012-03-21T07:38:12","modified_gmt":"2012-03-21T11:38:12","slug":"jack-foleys-big-boke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/jack-foleys-big-boke\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack Foley’s “Big Boke”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Nice big homage last August to Foley & his\u00a0very large new book \u2014 nearly 1300 pages, two volumes \u2014 by Evan Karp in SFGate. Opening paras below:<\/p>\n

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Jack Foley a rich chapter in Bay Area poetry scene<\/h3>\n
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\"\"Mathew Sumner \/ Special to the Chronicle<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Jack Foley, 71, took a decade to write his 1,300-page book, \u201cVisions and Affiliations,\u201d covering 65 years of Bay Area poets and poetry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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If Jack Foley were a book, he\u2019d be a 1,300-page chrono-encyclopedia of Bay Area poets and poetry that spans 65 years and is written in the present tense. But that\u2019s just the latest chapter in the rich and ongoing story of the Oakland poet and critic.<\/p>\n

Foley, 71, describes both himself and the book, \u201cVisions and Affiliations\u201d (Pantograph Press), which he has spent over a decade composing, with the same statement: \u201cIn story, our lives tend to take on a coherence and purpose which they may well have lacked in actuality. As circumstances arise we discover\/invent selves to deal with them. And the circumstances change in response to those selves.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the house in the Maxwell Park neighborhood that he has occupied with his wife, Adelle, since 1974, Foley laughs, \u201cThat means I\u2019m crazy, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem with unity,\u201d he continues, \u201cis that in order to achieve it, you leave all these things out that might glitter around it and contradict it. So you don\u2019t want unity, because it simplifies. What you want is to have something like the feeling of the complexity of life as it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

He refers to Michel Foucault\u2019s statement in \u201cThe Order of Things\u201d: \u201cI mean the disorder in which a large number of possible orders glitter separately.\u201d To sustain this, Foley composed \u201cVisions and Affiliations\u201d in bulleted items organized by year, with representative quotations preceding each decade. People, ideas and stories appear, disappear and reappear as poetry is debated, renounced, renewed, asserted as divine and criticized as pornographic \u2013 all within the ever-shifting cultural context of the turbulent second half of the 20th century.<\/p>\n

(ctd. here<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jack mentions in an email that there was however one error in the piece, & his wife Adele wrote this\u00a0letter to the editor:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Editor:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing to make a correction to \u201cA Lifetime in Poetry,\u201d Evan Karp\u2019s otherwise excellent story about my husband Jack Foley\u2019s book, \u201cVisions and Affiliations\u201d (Datebook, August 20, 2011). The story states that Jack\u2019s book is about Bay Area poetry. In fact, though Bay Area poetry is covered extensively, the book is about California poetry and features, among many others, such Angelean luminaries as \u201cTommy the Commie\u201d (Thomas McGrath), Philomene Long, William Pillen, Amy Gerstler, and David St. John.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Nice big homage last August to Foley & his\u00a0very large new book \u2014 nearly 1300 pages, two volumes \u2014 by Evan Karp in SFGate. Opening paras below: Jack Foley a rich chapter in Bay...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,90,91,93,94],"tags":[1183,1181,1182],"class_list":["post-7971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-poetics","category-poetry","category-poetry-readings","category-poets","tag-evan-karp","tag-jack-foley","tag-sfgate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7971"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7978,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7971\/revisions\/7978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}