My mind returns always to poetry Not as a task but as a blessed relief It is the spontaneous, generous gift, “grace,” “Free, and totally unexpected, and Undeserved.” Someone remarked About Flannery O’Connor’s characters That they were all seeking grace But grace, like poetry, cannot be sought My mind returns to poetry Not as a task and certainly not as a job But as a sudden, spontaneous, often surprising Lifting of consciousness, a blessing surely, Like the moment when your sins are entirely forgiven Or the moment when you understand That the person looking at you Loves you entirely and without reserve And would, if it were possible, take on your death. “Poetry,” wrote W.H. Auden, famously, “Makes nothing happen,” but I think this is wrong. Poetry IS the happening, the chance encounter with the angel, The sudden blessedness. It announces itself as a “feeling,” A piece of “music” in the mind That tells you, “Now is the time.” It does not transform the world like a program to end unemployment Or a vaccine that will cure coronavirus, It transforms YOU–you become a beacon, a light, The sudden, submissive vehicle of a consciousness That holds you and forces you, often reluctantly, To stand unalterably in its shining. Today is the birthday of KPFA-FM. It is 71, nine years younger than I, Though I have been broadcasting on it since 1988. For more years than most people have been alive KPFA has honored not only the political, The transformation of the world, But the transformation that occurs within the listener, The transformation that comes with the infusion of words and ideas. Echoing Cocteau, Jack Spicer said the poet Was a radio. The device becomes the person When your ears are tuned to a channel of endless, eloquent hope.   HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO A COMMUNITY RADIO STATION OF VERY LONG STANDING     The post KPFA’S 71ST BIRTHDAY POEM appeared first on KPFA.

A celebration of the art of poetry, hosted by jack Foley. The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – April 1, 2020 appeared first on KPFA.

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Jack looked into his files and discovered a show with the late, wonderful Carolyn Kizer. It aired in 1996. Wikipedia: Carolyn Ashley Kizer (December 10, 1925 – October 9, 2014) was an American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. According to an article at the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, “Kizer reach[ed] into mythology in poems like ‘Semele Recycled”; into politics, into feminism, especially in her series of poems called “Pro Femina”; into science, the natural world, music, and translations and commentaries on Japanese and Chinese literatures.” Jack writes, Ecco Press asked Carolyn Kizer to contribute to its volume of Dante translations. Kizer responded by translating Inferno, Canto XVII, into what she calls “antique hipster”:   “Yo, Dan, just give a look at this repulsive creature Called Fraud, the wall-buster; He’s the prime polluter, The poison in his tail’s an added feature.” Then Virgil gave the high sign to that stink Of rottenness, to make a three-point landing on the shore . . . .   It is an amazing effect–a little like translating Paradise Lost into baby talk. Dante’s “Ecco” (like the press), usually translated, “Lo,” becomes here “Yo.” “Wall-buster is an accurate rendering of “rompe i muri,” but it carries overtones of “ball-buster,” a term with which a “pro feminist” like Kizer was surely familiar. “The prime polluter” (Dante’s “colei che tutto ‘l mundo appuzza“) brings us even more definitely into the twentieth century with its ecological concerns, but a moment later the end rhyme of “creature / feature,” alive with echoes of ancient American television, returns us to at least the suggestion of terza rima. Virgil signals the monster, “that stink / Of rottenness,” to make a landing, and we go on with Dante’s story.   Kizer’s version was, she tells us, “quite properly rejected for irreverence and ‘not fitting in'” by the editors at Ecco Press. She published it under the title, “In Hell with Virg and Dan,” first in the magazine 13th Moon and then in her book, Harping On. A note to the poem states, “I just don’t care for Dante’s obsessions with shit and revenge. For me, he ranks up there with St. Paul as one of the most destructive literary geniuses of all time.”   This is Kizer’s poem, “The Intruder”:   My mother—preferring the strange to the tame: Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung, Frog’s belly distended with finny young, Leaf-mold wilderness, harebell, toadstool, Odd, small snakes roving through the leaves, Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all Wild and natural!—flashed out her instinctive love, and quick, she Picked up the fluttering, bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet, And held the little horror to the mirror, where He gazed on himself, and shrieked like an old screen door far off.   Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing Came clattering down like a small black shutter. Still tranquil, she began, “It’s rather sweet …” The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint In the caught eyes. Then we saw, And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow, Nested within the wing-pits, cozily sucked and snoozed. The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud, Swiftly, the cat, with a clean careful mouth Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop.   But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor Remained, of all my mother’s tender, wounding passion For a whole wild, lost, betrayed, and secret life Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones, Whose denizens can turn upon the world With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw, To sting or soil benevolence, alien As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot. She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap, She washed and washed the pity from her hands.   …   Jack remarks,   “The Intruder” shows contradictory impulses in the same person. Similarly, is Dante a hero of poetry or a villain of religion for Kizer? Clearly, he is both, and what is said about him depends entirely on which context you are emphasizing. This is one of the exhilarating aspects of this poet’s work: it is never possible to predict what she will say about anything; she is constantly shifting perspectives…Kizer’s poems are frequently very funny, but they are also very touching and personal, and various other things besides. They are evidence of a mind which stays wonderfully open to its own potential contradictions.   This is from “Anniversaries: Claremont Avenue, from 1945.” It’s a marvelous example of a loosely pentameter line and the subtleties of free rhyming. It also remains relevant to the problems we still experience in 2020.   It’s 1985: in pain, my Mother-in-law has died. Appraisers from Doyle pick through her possessions: old furniture blistered by sun and central heat. Twenty-One Claremont is no longer ours. Recollections are blistered and faded too: My husband’s boyhood toys, my fragments of Chinese. Mothers have disappeared. Wars come and go. The past is present: what we choose to keep by a process none of us can ever know. Now those little girls are grandmothers who must remember, after fifty years the doll, the chill, the tears. Greatness felled at a blow. Memory fractured. Black and white apart. No sense of direction, we Americans. No place to go. The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – January 15, 2020 appeared first on KPFA.

Jack’s guest is, again, Lola Haskins. This is the Author’s Note to her new collection, Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare: “The quotes in this book are taken from the diary the poet John Clare kept in 1841, describing his escape from Dr. Matthew [Allen’s] private insane asylum in Epping Forest and his subsequent struggle to reach his home in Northborough, where he hoped to reunite with Mary, who’d been his childhood sweetheart. He made the eighty-mile journey in four days, sleeping rough and staving off starvation by eating grass, which he said tasted like fresh bread. Six months after this odyssey, Clare was again declared mad and sent to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum where he died twenty-three years later. “I chose this frame for my collection for three reasons: first, because having been solo my entire writing life, I too have often felt like the only soldier in my own army; second, because I thought it relevant that Clare’s journal addresses how hard it is to be free; and third, because the fact that “asylum” implies both lunacy and refuge resonates for me. I consider these poems improvisations because I see Clare’s changing mental states as matches and my poems as the resulting fires, fire that I hope may, from time to time, burn out of control.” This is John Clare’s most famous poem, “I Am!”:   I am–yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes– They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live–like vapours tossed   Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; Even the dearest that I loved the best Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.   I long for scenes where man hath never trod A place where woman never smiled or wept There to abide with my Creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie The grass below—above the vaulted sky.   And this is by Lola Haskins:   In Tide Pools   lavender-spined urchins reside. And anemones with wavy mouths. And periwinkle snails, full of themselves because they have been given such a beautiful name. And over these low-dwellers, fine- haired grasses drift as if underwater there were always a wind. And since these communities, not touching, are like language groups that have grown apart, it is not surprising that each has its legends. In one, it is said that the Maker, taking pity on the rocks’ empty cups, filled them. In this way, the rocks, once beggars, became kings. In another, that certain stars, unhappy to be among multitudes, found solace in these smaller skies. Elsewhere, it is said that long ago the dwellers in these valleys lived deep. But slowly and slowly, wave-rush drew them upward. And now they are visited every day by her who, breaking over them, leaves parts of herself, which they drink and want for nothing. It is not only humans who have religion. On the edge of the ocean, the finger limpets see the Almighty, and cling.   Part Two of Two The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – January 8, 2020 appeared first on KPFA.

The year ends, the year begins as we cycle from light to light, darkness to darkness, from time to time. We’ll keep an eye out for whatever awaits us in 2020. One friend made a calendar of 2020. He took many famous paintings and gave their inhabitants eyeglasses. Vision. Insight. Old friends Nina Serrano and Jack Foley, KPFA’s interwoven pair, welcome the new year with one of their special radioromps. Listen as these elderyoung’uns give you the news–about themselves, about the world, about (yccch) what is the name of that presquedent? “King Liar lives in a house of White.” A special feature of today’s program will be songs by Tony Perez. Here is a poem by Nina:   BENICIA SUNSET   We brought folding chairs and blankets to the grassy cliff top surrounded on three sides by the Sacramento River to listen to John on his indigenous flute accompany the sun as it set slipping behind the Carquinez Straights into the glowing horizon Amazing! And yet it has been happening every night of my life unwatched and unappreciated by me So many moments of note going unnoted by me Me is missing the planets’ major daily events They happen without my awareness My awareness is unaware My awareness is unaware   Missing Mother Earth’s glories Missing Mother Earth’s glories only an eyeful away   And here is Jack on the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats (1856-1939):   W.B.Y.   Gone at 73, Poet of Ireland Poet of the Other World Looking for its traces In the Wind Among the Reeds None like him For the passion Of renunciation “O what a sweetness strayed To barren Thebaid” “The foul rag and bone shop Of the heart”– Three books Quote that line And leave “foul” out– None like him For the continual Recognition That language Always goes beyond itself– Innisfree Haunted by the words Of a 3rd-century Neo Platonist– The immense distance between This world And that other From which The “voices” came. Love of the woman Love of the woman as symbol The tragedy That spirit Lodges itself In the mire Of flesh And that a woman Must grow old– Not “unity” But the fierce knowledge That all we have Is the power to know What we cannot be or emulate. The swans Leap up in the pool And descend again, and leap again. I love him for the clarity of his monumental, daring, unerring vision.   .   I have lived with him throughout my life Lived with the symbols The magic that leapt about his table Lived not where he walked But where he thought In that sky to which Helena Blavatsky brought him Demon Est Deus Inversus   .   In the dark you entered in 1939, Did Plato and Plotinus welcome you?   Did your soul rise, a falcon in the air Ignoring cries to bring it back to earth?   Did Cúchulainn honor you, show you the sword That killed in battle frenzy the hound of Culain?   Did Emer soothe the wounds that ended you And bind them deeply with a purple cloak?   Did honeybees ignore you in that dark Where wild swans flew and fire sweetly burned?   Did all the gyres end, did darkness sing? Did you become a consecrated bone?   .   Nothing is true, dear love, nothing is true.     [for Robert Sward] The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – January 1, 2020 appeared first on KPFA.

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”? The show begins, On Christmas Eve, my father had to work late at his Western Union office. We had a tree and there were presents, but I couldn’t open them until he returned. The excitement was always intense. It was a mixture of desire, love, greed, astonishment. There are people who tell children that if they are good, they will receive Christmas presents, but if they are not good–if they don’t do what adults want them to do–they will not. This has always seemed to me a betrayal of the spirit of Christmas. Christ is the “gift,” but he does not give of himself because mankind has been good. He gives of himself because mankind has been wicked and can no longer find any means of salvation. He gives of himself because mankind has been bad and has not obeyed the great authority figure. Christmas is one of the primary means of uniting the Old and the New Testaments, and the figure in whom it centers is not God the Father but God the Son. I too was a son. Thirty years earlier, sometime in the early 1920s, my father stood on a stage somewhere outside of New York City and sang Irving Berlin’s song, “All By Myself.” He was stunned to discover he had stopped the show. He understood himself to be a good tap dancer but only a fair singer. “It wasn’t my singing,” he explained later. “The people there had never heard that song. It was the song they were applauding.” Many of Irving Berlin’s songs cause a sense of wonder and amazement—a sense that an enormously familiar, even trite sentiment is being presented in a totally unexpected way. “What care I who makes the laws of a nation,” Berlin wrote in 1929—paraphrasing Arius, perpetrator of the Arian Heresy, who said, “Let me make a people’s songs and I care not who makes their laws”—   Let those who will take care of its rights and wrongs What care I who cares For the world’s affairs As long as I can sing its popular songs.   Unfortunately, as Irving Berlin became an all-too-familiar cultural figure—first an icon, then a dinosaur—that quality vanished. The songs became that terrible word: standards. There they “stood,” announcing to everyone their “excellence”—these are “good” songs, like them!—and their energy wasted away. If the early Irving Berlin celebrated “Satan”– “Satan’s melodies makes you want to dance forever, / And you never have to go to bed at all”–the later Irving Berlin seemed to be an embodiment of Respectability. The demonic energy which fueled his early songs and made the composer an often extraordinarily difficult person (when the Allies bombed Berlin, one of Berlin’s rival songwriters remarked, “They bombed the wrong Berlin”) this demonic energy stepped aside and took up its abode in the young, the teenaged, the rebellious, the “simple-minded.” Irving Berlin couldn’t stand rock ’n roll, and rock ’n roll didn’t give a damn about Irving Berlin. “You’ll be doin’ all right,” crooned Elvis with just a hint of a tear and a snarl in his voice, “with your Christmas of white, but I’ll have a blue—blue blue blue—Christmas.” When Elvis actually recorded “White Christmas,” Irving Berlin was furious and attempted to persuade radio stations not to play the record.   …   This is Jack’s Christmas song:   WHAT ONCE WAS MAGIC: ANOTHER CHRISTMAS SONG   How can we write Another Christmas song When we know That “giving” means “buying” And “brotherhood” means “buying” The green not of holly but of our cash flow “Commercial” they say When the season comes along And we go Into the stores in masses– All, lower to upper classes– With the green not of holly but of our cash flow And yet you remember 25th of December A time you were told That magic happened In days of old A child’s sense fills you As you buy more and more And fall to the folly The deep, deep folly Of the frantic,  fantastic,   fabulous department store… And you sing That giving means giving And brotherhood means brotherhood And you sigh Remembering What once was magic And is magic still Became a lie   (softly) Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas To all!   *   JACK’S DRAWING OF IRVING BERLIN:   somewhere inside him still was the little jewish boy who had to sing in the streets because his people were so poor The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – December 25, 2019 appeared first on KPFA.

A celebration of the art of poetry, hosted by jack Foley. The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – December 11, 2019 appeared first on KPFA.

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 poetry advice book, an exploration of fifteen Florida cemeteries, and a book of prose-poem fables about women, illustrated by Maggie Taylor. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, The London Review of Books, Georgia Review, Southern Review. She taught computer science at the University of Florida for 28 years. Then, from 2004 until 2015, she was on the faculty of the Rainier Writer’s Workshop, a low res MFA program based at Pacific Lutheran University.” Jack writes: Lola Haskins’ book, Asylum, is haunted by the institutionalized (“asylum”) poet John Clare, who functions here as her muse. She regards both herself and Clare as “an army of one” that soldiers on. The book is extremely wide-ranging stylistically (haiku-like “music boxes,” a sort of unrhymed sonnet, etc.); the poems are often riddling (you have to guess the connections) and sometimes funny. One begins as a parody of Frost (“Something there is that doesn’t love a squirrel”) and goes on to parody Christopher Smart’s poem to his cat, Geoffrey. In another there is a swan and there is an old Saxon woman: what is their relationship? Haskins taught computer science for 28 years: there is frequently something binary about these poems. Nature—often named in a fanciful, myth-making, sometimes animated way—is a constant presence, as it is in John Clare’s poetry. Haskins has an excellent poem about a Florida river. She also asserts that “the sun wants only to be touched.” There is in addition the constant juxtaposition of the past (Clare, Romanticism, the Nineteenth Century and even further back) and the present. She has a poem about Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia, a work which also juxtaposes the past and the present, though she refers to Stoppard only as “T.S.” Another reference we have to guess. A sense of mortality is present too—the author, like me, is no spring chicken—and a parodied (?) desire for heaven. There’s a poem that is “after” the Catholic French poet Francis Jammes: “I am Frances Jane and I am going to heaven.” Another poem is called “Dead Stars.” Still another punctuates its stanzas with the words “dot” or “dash,” words which are played upon within the stanza: they turn out to be Morse Code for SOS. Clare’s “I Am” is relevant to it all. Is poetry a port, a haven, an “asylum” or is it a madness (“asylum”)? There’s an interesting typo in the book’s opening sentence: “The quotes in this book are taken from the diary the poet John Clare kept in 1841, describing his escape from Dr. Matthew Arnold’s private insane asylum in Epping….” Not Matthew Arnold: Matthew Allen. But as you read on you wonder whether it is a subtle joke rather than a typo: “Wandering between two worlds, / One dead, the other powerless to be born.” This is the opening poem of Haskins’ book:   Mortality   Every thrown stone falls. But there is a moment first as it hangs in the air   that the blurred hand that tossed it will not come again, thinks the stone as it flies.   And this is “Altar”:   Between Rhylstone and Cracoe the plague stone lies, tangled in nettle and fern, where once the villagers in the one that had not sickened left sustenance for their neighbors in the other—turnips and potatoes, tobacco and vinegars, and woolen mantles, cotton shifts dyed with tea, caps, scarves, trousers and skirts for those cold with fever—then crept off home to sit by their firesides from whence, though they found no tokens on their breasts or backs nor risings under their ears or armpits, they swore they could feel in their chests the coughs that poured from the dying like the blood of Christ. And in the mornings while their own babies slept, the pale faces of children— they all saw them—would drift over their roofs like mist off the hills, then vanish as if they had never been.   Part One of Two   The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – November 20, 2019 appeared first on KPFA.

“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. Tolkien’s great myth of quest and redemption. Jack’s October 30 show featured Tolkien’s reading of part of “Riddles in the Dark,” the great fifth chapter of The Hobbit, first published in 1937. As Tolkien worked on The Lord of the Rings he realized that he needed to revise this crucial chapter to make it work within the structure of the larger book. In the revised text of The Hobbit, published in 1951, Tolkien writes, “More important is the matter of Chapter Five. There the true story of the ending of the Riddle Game, as it was eventually revealed (under pressure) by Bilbo to Gandalf, is now given according to the Red Book, in place of the version Bilbo first gave to his friends, and actually set down in his diary. This departure from truth on the part of a most honest hobbit was a portent of great significance…Its explanation lies in the history of the Ring, as it is set out in the chronicles of the Red Book of Westmarch, and it must await their publication.” The version of Chapter V that Tolkien recorded in 1952 was neither the version published in 1937 nor the version published in 1951 but something in between. It begins,   “Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum—as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes. He had a boat, and he rowed about quite quietly on the lake; for lake it was, wide and deep and deadly cold. He paddled it with large feet dangling over the side, but never a ripple did he make. Not he. He was looking out of his pale lamp-like eyes for blind fish, which he grabbed with his long fingers as quick as thinking. He liked meat too. Goblin he thought good, when he could get it; but he took care they never found him out. He just throttled them from behind, if they ever came down alone anywhere near the edge of the water, while he was prowling about.”   Note that there is nothing here about Gollum being invisible when he makes his attack: “He just throttled them from behind.” Tolkien is still working out his conception. “I don’t where he came from, nor who or what he was.” Later, the author asks, as if he himself does not yet know, “What was Gollum talking about? What useful thing could he keep out on the dark lake?” It is only then that “one very beautiful thing, very beautiful, very wonderful” enters the story: “He had a ring, a golden ring, a precious ring.” On today’s show we’ll hear the conclusion of the story along with other readings by Tolkien. Wikipedia: “The impact of Tolkien’s works is such that the use of the words ‘Tolkienian’ and ‘Tolkienesque’ has been recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary.”   Jack writes,   LEGENDARIUM   Fondness for forests, sadness at tree felling… At last a war that he could order and control And poems that he could write In old, outmoded forms For a world entirely his own In languages he had conceived He is everyone in the book, Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Legolas, Strider Gollum is a portion of his mind My precioussssss And the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie. All of it colored by the Roman Faith (“Hmmmm, I’m devout”… Answered in Latin when everyone else spoke English) And a longing for a past that was not a past Old tales made new… Beren, son of Barahir: Day is ended, dim my eyes, but journey long before me lies. Farewell, friends! I hear the call. The ship’s beside the stony wall. Foam is white and waves are grey; beyond the sunset leads my way. Foam is salt, the wind is free; I hear the rising of the Sea.   Concluding lines quoted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s poem, “Bilbo’s Last Song.”   Part Two of Two. The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – November 13, 2019 appeared first on KPFA.

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 fear and daring, too When forces of evil meet “The Squad” And oh, the fearful hullabaloo Goes all the way up to the ears of God She (God) says, “Heavens, look to Me, Don’t those people have any brains? May Trump and Pence forever flee— May Nancy Pelosi take the reins! YEAH! May Nancy Pelosi take the reins!”   So opine Nina and Jack. And perhaps others too.   Nina writes,   Poem   Flame that burns in my heart pumping the urge to fan the fires and fulfill my desires as strong as any wind I’ve ever felt blow my hair and the palm leaves in one direction   *   Climactic Conditions Condition You   Shaken awake last night by an earthquake Today “Sheltered in place” by an oil refinery tank burning “Close your doors and windows You are under clouds of toxicity and smoke” Last week we were told our electric power would be shut of because of high winds and threat of fire No light or refrigeration or electrically powered medical devices Explanations and orders emanate from computer and TV screen The night sky a backdrop for the silent moon herself under threat of invasion and siege   …   Jack writes,   CALIFORNIA   wind bangs tree limbs against my roof      lament of the burned houses: as if the trees suddenly revolted      we have souls, like you as if the trees were aware      they scatter into ashes of what we have done to them      and foul your air over the centuries      MALOS AIRES but I know      we house this is only my fancy:      your most intimate possessions I have heard of the evacuations, the vineyards, the foul air, the flames      they vanish with us I know why my eyes are beginning to sting      into the dangerous wind   *   waiting for the axe to fall           waiting for the axe to fall the bell to chime at midnight           the bell to chime at midnight waiting for godot to finally show           waiting for godot to finally show waiting for götterdämmerung           waiting for götterdämmerung waiting for the kiss           waiting for the kiss to reach the lips           to reach the lips (the stretch of time between)           (the stretch of time between) waiting for the murderer           waiting for the murderer who you know is merciless           who you know is merciless and who has you in his power           and who has you in his power to do you in           to do you in waiting for the age of anxiety           waiting for the age of anxiety finally to end           finally to end waiting for the apple           waiting for the apple to fall to earth           to fall to earth from the ancient tree           from the ancient tree waiting for the white pill you have just swallowed           waiting for the white pill you have just swallowed to do its work           to do its work waiting for PG&E           waiting for PG&E to turn it all off           to turn it all off The post Cover to Cover with Nina Serrano and Jack Foley – November 6, 2019 appeared first on KPFA.

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 and The Followship of the Ring,   “This record is based on a tape recording that J.R.R. Tolkien made when he was staying in my house in Malvern, Worcestershire. It was in August, 1952. For the whole of that summer he had been depressed because THE LORD OF THE RINGS, the book on which he had worked for fourteen years, had been refused by publishers, so that he had almost given up hope of ever seeing it in print. But the fact that they had all returned it made it possible for my wife, Moira, and I to borrow the only complete typescript and to become with our friend, C.S. Lewis, about the first passionately enthusiastic Tolkien fans. There arose the question of how to return it to its author. Since it could not of course be entrusted to the post, I wrote to ask when he would be at home in Oxford for me to deliver it. His reply indicated that he would be quite on his own in the second half of August and perhaps even rather lonely. We therefore invited him to come to Malvern to pick up the typescript and to stay for a few days. “It was easy to entertain him by day. He and I tramped the Malvern Hills which he had often seen during his boyhood in Birmingham or from his brother’s house on the other side of the Severn River valley. He lived the book as we walked, sometimes comparing parts of the hills with, for instance, the White Mountains of Gondor. We drove to the Black Mountains on the borders of Wales, picked bilberries and climbed through the heather there. We picnicked on bread and cheese and apples and washed them down with perry, beer or cider. When we saw signs of industrial pollution, he talked of orcs and orcery. At home he helped me to garden. Characteristically what he liked most was to cultivate a very small area, say a square yard, extremely well. “To entertain him in the evening I produced a tape recorder (a solid early Ferrograph that is still going strong). He had never seen one before and said whimsically that he ought to cast out any devil that might be in it by recording a prayer, the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic, one of the extinct languages of which he was a master. He was delighted when I played it back to him and asked if he might record some of the poems in THE LORD OF THE RINGS to find out how they sounded to other people. The more he recorded, the more he enjoyed recording and the more his literary self-confidence grew. When he had finished the poems, one of us said: ‘Record for us the riddle scene from THE HOBBIT,’ and we sat spellbound for almost half an hour while he did. I then asked him to record what he thought one of the best pieces of prose in THE LORD OF THE RINGS and he recorded part of The Ride of the Rohirrim. ‘Surely you know that’s really good?” I asked after playing it back. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s good. This machine has made me believe in it again, but how am I to get it published?’ “I thought of what I myself might do in the same difficulty. ‘Haven’t you an old pupil in publishing who might like it for its own sake and therefore be willing to take the risk?’ “‘There’s only Rayner Unwin,’ he replied after a pause. “‘Then send it to Rayner Unwin personally.’ “And he did. And the result was that even during his lifetime over three million copies were sold. “When he got back to Oxford, Tolkien wrote to thank us for having him, a letter in Elvish that is one of my most valued possessions… “Some of the strength of his work comes from its folk-quality or earthiness. It was in his blood: his brother spent his life tilling the soil in the vale of Evesham, and he himself was happy to garden.”   …   Here is the famous poem that begins, “A Elbereth Gilthoniel.” Tolkien was a lifelong, devout Roman Catholic. It is his version, in Elvish, of The Hail, Mary.   A Elbereth Gilthoniel silivren penna míriel o menel aglar elenath! Na-chaered palan-díriel o galadhremmin ennorath, Fanuilos, le linnathon Nef aear, sí nef aearon!   O Elbereth Starkindler, white-glittering, slanting down sparkling like a jewel, the glory of the starry host! Having gazed far away from the tree-woven lands of Middle-earth, to thee, Everwhite (“Fanuillos”), I will sing on this side of the Sea, here on this side of the Ocean!   Part One of Two. The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – October 23, 2019 appeared first on KPFA.

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.”   Jack writes (in 2011),   POETRY AT THE EDGE OF THE CONTINENT Westward is the world’s motion, and time’s, If not memory’s. —Joe Bolton   Charles Bukowski and Neeli Cherkovski (then Neeli Cherry) prowled the noir streets of L.A. Jack Spicer set up shop at The White Horse Tavern in Berkeley and at The Place in San Francisco, where “Blabbermouth Night” attracted crowds anxious to make their voices heard. Jaime de Angulo read his “Old Time Stories” (later Indian Tales) on KPFA, a radical FM station on which many poets—including Dylan Thomas—read their work. Kenneth Rexroth, paterfamilias of San Francisco poetry, reviewed books of all sorts on that station as well. Yvor Winters, Formalist poet and New Critic, took charge of the poetry program at Stanford; his students included Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, N. Scott Momaday, Robert Pinsky, and Timothy Steele. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, and Barrett Watten flourished in the East Bay and San Francisco. Their work had an impact throughout the country. Experimentalists Leslie Scalapino and Michael Palmer were frequently associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group. Feminists Judy Grahn, alta, and Susan Griffin made the Bay Area their home. Experimentalist Kathleen Fraser taught for years at San Francisco State College (later, University). James Broughton, who liked to think of himself as a “wonderful fairy,” wrote poetry and plays and made experimental films. Etel Adnan, born in Lebanon, lived, wrote and published in Sausalito. Victor Hernández Cruz taught at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and San Francisco State College. Teaching poet Thomas Parkinson became a link between theUniversity of California and the bohemian world of The Berkeley Renaissance, where Robert Duncan held forth on myth and magic. In 1953, the San Francisco Poetry Center was founded by Ruth Witt-Diamant; it continues today as an active force in the poetry community. In 1954, Bob Kaufman moved to San Francisco, and Jack Kerouac wrote his first book of poetry “in the Cameo Hotel on Third Street Frisco Skidrow.” In 1955, Weldon Kees and Michael Grieg parodied the formality of the conventional poetry reading (including what Witt-Diamant was presenting) with their “Poets’ Follies.” That same year, Kees may have committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge: his body has never been found. At the legendary Six Gallery reading in October 1955, Allen Ginsberg electrified the audience by reading the opening section of “Howl.” In 1964, California Poets in the Schools (CPITS) began at San Francisco State University; originally “The Pegasus Project,” it initially placed poets in classrooms to read poetry to children but quickly became a program to include students’ active participation. Greek poet Nanos Valaoritis taught for many years at San Francisco State. Street poets Jack Micheline and Julia Vinograd produced interesting, demotic work and sold their books directly to their listeners. In 1969, Objectivist poet George Oppen became the first California poet to win the Pulitzer Prize. “One man-experimental movement” H.D. Moe edited Love Lights magazine and did many readings. George Hitchcock’s kayak magazine was founded in 1964. Chicano poet Francisco X. Alarcón has taught for years at UC Davis. San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, home to the late Surrealist poet Philip Lamantia and to the Communist poet Jack Hirschman, continues to be a haven for the bohemian. Beat poet Michael McClure—participant along with Lamantia and Ginsberg in the Six Gallery reading—continues to teach and write in the area. Lawson Fusao Inada was born in Fresno, where Philip Levine was teaching. Philip Whalen—poet friend to Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac and another participant in the Six Gallery reading—became a Zen monk and served as abbot at the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco. Mitsuye Yamada announced that “I have thought of myself as a feminist first, but my ethnicity cannot be separated from my feminism” and founded “The Multicultural Women Writers of Orange County.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti (initially “Lawrence Ferling”) came to San Francisco in 1950; his work continues to have immense circulation, and his bookstore, City Lights, is one of the crown jewels of the city. In 1997, Ferlinghetti became San Francisco’s first Poet Laureate. Janice Mirikitani, devorah major, and Jack Hirschman followed. In June, 2002, poet, educator and author Quincy Troupe was appointed the first limited-term, Official Poet Laureate of the state of California; in October, 2002, after admitting he had lied on his resumé, Troupe submitted a letter of resignation. In 2002, peace activist Mary Rudge became the first Poet Laureate of the city of Alameda, California. In 1996—after twenty years in New York City—native Californian Dana Gioia returned to his home state, though he was to leave again in 2003 to serve as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. 1975-Pulitzer-Prize-winning Beat poet Gary Snyder, another native Californian and another participant in the Six Gallery reading, lives in Nevada City, California and is frequently seen in the Bay Area. Joanne Kyger, a long-time resident of Bolinas, has produced exquisite work of Buddhist orientation. In 1968, New Yorker Diane di Prima took up residence in California. William Everson (“Brother Antoninus”), born in Sacramento, California, wrote out of a powerful Catholic spiritual tradition and taught for many years at UC Santa Cruz. Poet/anthologist Jerome Rothenberg taught for many years at UC San Diego, as did “talk poet” David Antin. Post- (or Neo-) Surrealist poet Ivan Argüelles came to California in 1978; he published widely throughout the country and, with Andrew Joron, co-founded Pantograph Press in Berkeley. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass teaches at UC Berkeley; Josephine Miles and Nobel-Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz taught there as well. Hass’s wife, poet Brenda Hillman, teaches at St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga. In 1996, Hass’s “Watershed: An Environmental Poetry Festival,” sponsored by Poetry Flash, was held in Golden Gate Park; the annual festival, now celebrated in Berkeley, still continues. In Venice, California, Stuart Z. Perkoff, Philomene Long, Frank Rios, Tony Scibella, William Margolis and others were part of a bohemian artists’ community; fueled by a “powerful drive for nonrecognition,” their community became suddenly famous when Lawrence Lipton’s book, The Holy Barbarians, appeared in 1959. In 1978, leaving his home in Swampscott, Massachusetts, Black Mountain poet Larry Eigner moved to Berkeley, where his brother Richard fashioned a house in which the disabled Eigner could function; one of Eigner’s caregivers was L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Robert Grenier. In 1987, Herman Berlandt inaugurated San Francisco’s National Poetry Week, a high-profile, diverse festival presented by the National Poetry Association. The festival continued annually for the next several years. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Spoken Word poets—“Babarians”—were thriving at the Café Babar in San Francisco, on the border of the Mission and Noe Valley neighborhoods. The National Teen Poetry Slam Championships were held at the Regency Theater in San Francisco on Earth Day—April 22, 2000. In 1972, Ishmael Reed and Al Young began publication of the influential Yardbird (later Y’Bird) magazine; both Reed and Young continue to write and teach in the Bay Area. In 2005, Young became the state’s Poet Laureate. In 1985, Carolyn Kizer’s book, Yin, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; in that same year, Howard Junker founded ZYZZYVA magazine. Joyce Jenkins—editor in chief of the free newspaper Poetry Flash since 1980—continues the heroic task of listing in her publication all the poetry events in the state, though she now lists them on the internet as well. Noted Native American poet Gerald Vizenor taught for years at UC Berkeley. There are many other names, many other dates that might be mentioned…   memory the sun turns back The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – September 18, 2019 appeared first on KPFA.

A celebration of the art of poetry, hosted by jack Foley. The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – September 11, 2019 appeared first on KPFA.

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. The Gioia-Whitfield book has this to say about Visions & Affiliations: “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.” Jack writes:                               MY UNMANAGEABLE MASTERPIECE   “It’s not a conventional work of history or criticism, it’s a gathering of spirits.” — Peter Whitfield   It was the opinion of the great Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca that life is a dream. If life is a dream, what is a book? I have recently been considering a book that has my photo on the cover though I had nothing to do with its production. It’s called Jack Foley’s Unmanageable Masterpiece and it was written and edited by Dana Gioia and Peter Whitfield. It deals with my book, Visions & Affiliations: California Poetry from 1940 to 2005. I think of Gertrude Stein’s remark, “I master pieces of it.” I don’t think I ever found the book “unmanageable.” It’s a strange feeling to be the subject of a book. My books have been reviewed in the past. I’m used to that. But this book is something different from that. It is extraordinarily literate propaganda for a book I have written. Was what I wrote “eccentric”? Was it in any way a “masterpiece”—even an “oddball” one? The book discusses myself, my person. Dana Gioia believes me to be a Beat poet. I have and have had friends who definitely were Beat poets—Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure among them—but I never thought of myself as part of that most noble, occasionally disreputable company. Scott Timberg describes me in the following way: “There was something otherworldly about him; he seemed like a medieval monk and a jazz-loving, Beat-era hedonist at the same time.” Is that an accurate description of me? Otherworldly? Medieval Monk? Was my old Catholicism showing? Further: Do Beat poets even exist anymore, or were they a reaction to a particular historical moment which has more than seen its day? Is the fascination with the Beat Generation part of a tendency of our culture to replace “history” with “nostalgia”? I sometimes think that the term “Beat” has become a kind of advertising slogan, a selling point, almost a brand name by which certain poets or publishing houses can hawk their wares. Towards the end of his career, Kerouac himself rejected the term, which he felt had gone far beyond anything he had wished it to mean. Indeed, apart from Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure, I don’t believe any authenticated Beat writer ever actually agreed that he was “Beat.” In saying all this, I don’t mean to suggest that I am ungrateful for what was obviously a labor of love—and a labor of scholarship—on the part of these wonderful people. I am deeply grateful. But I have a sense of being slightly posthumous throughout this extraordinary book. What is being said about me seems a bit like what is said about rock stars when they are about twenty-five or about ordinary people after they have passed away. I feel a little as though I am present at my own funeral service. And yet: what an extraordinary thing to have happen to you at the age of seventy-nine. (Copies of the book actually arrived on my birthday!) It’s as if my entire life is being validated—and not in a sentimental, mushy way but in a way that is extraordinarily intellectually respectable: these are intelligent essays; this is praise that often carries with it deep understanding. Did I do all that? Maybe! I can’t help but think of D.H. Lawrence’s famous line: “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me.” Thank you to all the people involved in the book. Grand Merci! “It’s such a short time,” wrote George M. Cohan, “from ‘Lights On’ to ‘Lights Out.’” Today’s show will present various passages from this “book about a book about books.” …   DANA GIOIA: 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. The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – August 28, 2019 appeared first on KPFA.

Today’s show deals the word “white”—meant here not as a color but as a way of describing people. I wrote the following paragraph to my friend Jan Steckel after the mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, July, 2019. And now we have the El Paso massacre and the Dayton, Ohio massacre: The old racist slogan, “If you’re white, you’re right,” seems to have become “If you’re white, you’re a blight”—a precise description of our Racist in Chief. I’m Irish and Italian. The Irish and the Italians were only marginally white for many years. I think we ought to resign any membership in the group. The concept of “white” as a word for people didn’t exist—it’s not in Shakespeare though one of his plays features a “Moor”—until the advent of the slave ships. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first appearance in print of the word “white” meaning “A white man; a person of a race distinguished by a light complexion,” was in 1671—some years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616. The second was in 1726. The speaker is a ship’s captain: There may be about 20000 Whites (or I should say Portuguese, for they are none of the whitest,) and about treble that number of Slaves.   Note in what he says, especially, that the opposite of “white” is not “black”; the opposite of “white” is “Slave.” “White” does not refer to the dubious concept of “race”: it refers, deeply, to power. To be “white” is to be a master, not a slave. Has slavery, in any sense, ever ended in this country? One person answered that question with, “Not only has it not ended. There are more people in bondage now than there ever were.”   At the conclusion of the great Brecht-Weill theater piece, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928), the Street Singer narrator, seemingly alone on the stage, sings,   Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln Und die andern sind im Licht. Und man siehet die im Lichte Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.   For some are in darkness / And others are in the light / And you see the ones in the light / You don’t see those in darkness (in Marc Blitzstein’s rhymed translation: There are some who are in darkness / And the others are in light / And you see the ones in brightness / Those in darkness drop from sight). Suddenly, behind the singer, the stage lights up and we see—beggars (what we would call “street people”). They are precisely what the theater audience went to the theater to avoid. It is a moment of violent contradiction and illumination. For a moment, the theater, in all its falseness, is alive with reality. That impulse to illuminate what Langston Hughes called “the darker brother” (“I, Too”) has been at the heart of one of the great struggles of the twentieth/twenty-first century, and it has taken place both in the realm of politics and the realm of the psyche. What is “the Unconscious” if not “the darker brother” understood as a fact of mind? Und man siehet die in Lichte / Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht. I recently wrote this poem about “white privilege”:   The term “white privilege” Has one word too many White means privilege It is the opinion of some That they have lost their privilege That their whiteness is in question It is the opinion of some That they have been Deprived of their birthright And that “the darker brother” Has taken their world away. They are angry Confused And unaware of the closeness Of their DNA To that of the darker brother To that of all darker brothers They wish to regain Their privilege A privilege Which In fact They have never Possessed. Whiteness Is the flag they wave They are A huge blank In a world of color. Is not the philosopher John Searle Defender of landlords Attacker of Derrida Purveyor of academic plums In exchange for plummy sex With young women A white male? Did he not enjoy the privileges Of the white male? Has he not been stripped of his titles And shamed in his profession? Has he not become Another victim Not only of his own greed And desire for power But of Whiteness? …   To speak of “multiculturalism” is to speak of a way of seeing the world without whiteness. The post Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – August 21, 2019 appeared first on KPFA.