Jack’s premium is Sketches Poetical, a 72-page collection of 60 sketches of poets and writers by nonagenarian Berkeley artist Helen Breger with poetic commentary by Jack Foley. The book also has a CD of Foley reading selections from the book. Sketches Poetical is a limited edition “artist’s book”—not a trade publication. It is currently available only through KPFA, not through amazon.com or abebooks.com or anywhere else on the internet. Jack Foley notes, “Writing is a form of drawing” and asks of his subjects, “What do their looks/ tell of their books?”
Poet Jake Berry writes of Sketches Poetical: “Historical, descriptive, playful, lyrical, cubistic, animal noise pure, eloquent and sublime. The collection is a splendid example of multiple selves—not only because of the many actual people, but of the way a poet can become so many things other than one’s self, one self. This is a clinic in the art of ek-stasis. Beside, outside, in constant motion becoming, slipping away, becoming something else. The poem is not a made thing any more than a person is merely what you see. What a sketch can do is reveal to our eyes, ears and mind what we cannot see and perhaps cannot know in the conventional sense. It can transform us toward all the possibilities of the subject.”