3:00 PST Wednesdays
A celebration of the art of poetry. A well-known poet himself, Jack Foley’s considerable historical knowledge and his awareness of the current “scene” are incorporated into his radio shows and have made them a kaleidoscopic, always stimulating attraction for anyone interested in poetry.
Jack’s show for Christmas Day deals with a song written in the year of Jack’s birth: 1940. The song is called “White Christmas,” and it was composed by a man whose given name was Israel Isidore Ballin–Irving Berlin. How was it that a Russian Jewish immigrant came to write one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time? Does Christ have anything to do with “White Christmas”?
A celebration of the art of poetry, hosted by jack Foley.
Jack’s guest is Lola Haskins. Her new book is Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare. Wikipedia: “She was born in New York, and raised in northern California. Lola Haskins has lived in San Francisco, Greece, and Mexico. She now divides her time between Northern England and North-Central Florida. She has published fourteen books—the outliers being a … Continued
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” So begins J.R.R. … Continued
COVER TO COVER with Nina Serrano and Jack Foley Wednesday, November 6, 2019, 3:00 –4:00 p.m., KPFA 94.1 FM (available at the KPFA website) These are the times that try men’s souls And women’s too—may they try Trump These times of rigs and rigmaroles And, Darling, do you feel that lump? These times of … Continued
Today’s show is a tribute to the great fantasy writer and poet J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973). You will hear Tolkien’s own recitations of his work. George Sayer, biographer of C.S. Lewis and a teacher at Malvern College, writes in the liner notes to the 1975 Caedmon LP, J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings His The Hobbit … Continued
Today’s show is the second in a series of shows presenting excerpts from Jack’s book, Visions & Affiliations: California Poetry from 1940 to 2005. In Jack Foley’s Unmanageable Masterpiece (Monongahela Books, 2019), Dana Gioia and Peter Whitfield write: “In 2011 a tiny press in Berkeley published Visions & Affiliations, an eccentric 1300-page chronology of post-war California literature in two massive paperbound folio volumes. With no commercial distribution or publicity, the book sold about two hundred copies and soon vanished from sight—but not from the memory of the small audience that read it. Some of them considered the elaborate time-line the first adequate account of California’s complex and contradictory literary life. Others recognized Foley’s radical innovation in changing how literary history could be written. A few even considered these strange and sprawling yet compulsively readable tomes an oddball masterpiece.”
A celebration of the art of poetry, hosted by jack Foley.
Today’s show deals with Jack Foley’s Unmanageable Masterpiece, a new book published by Monongahela Books and edited by Dana Gioia and Peter Whitfield. The book deals with a book Jack published with Pantograph Press in 2011: Visions & Affiliations: California Poetry from 1940 to 2005. Gioia writes: Jack Foley has been such an active figure in California letters over the past forty years that it would seem impossible to make sense of West Coast poetry without reference to him. Yet most critics do exactly that. Foley has published on the margins of official literary life. Conventional critics don’t know his work. Time will correct the oversight, but there is no harm in speeding up the process by offering a few observations on his prolific career. There are singular aspects of his work that deserve attention, especially his experimental poetry written for and performed by multiple voices. But poetic innovation is what one expects from a Bay Area Beat. What astonishes the reader is Foley’s critical prose. No one expects a Beat poet to write a major work of literary history or to develop a radically new and revelatory approach to the genre.
Today’s show deals the word “white”—meant here not as a color but as a way of describing people.
