Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – August 28, 2019
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.
