Introduction to Adelle Foley, Along the Bloodline
(Pantograph Press)

Jack Foley

      “The new year” is not the only thing that is being announced in that poem. It marks the beginning of a deliberately modest but persistent poetic activity which continues unabated twelve years later.

       Why should someone suddenly begin to write poetry? By 1989, Adelle had been performing poetry--my poetry--for about four years. She was familiar with the “poetry circuit,” the book stores, bars, coffee houses and universities in which poets perform their work. We also had a rather wide circle of friends who wrote poetry. Perhaps she felt that she could do as well as they--as indeed she can.

       But there is a reason behind such reasons: I believe it is the desire to endure, to last, to put down one’s most fleeting impressions-and haiku deals with fleeting impressions-in a form in which other people can experience them too. The haiku in this book are not Adelle’s whole life, but they are the life she sees:

       That is, most vividly, a sudden moment in downtown Oakland, where she goes every day to her place of employment.

       Though full of subtle visual details and at times multilayered, the poems in this book are not “visionary”: they are not an attempt to use language to contact a world “beyond” this world. This world, Adelle suggests, is not only what we have but all we have. Yet it is an odd, complex world, full of arresting images. Except for one vers libre haiku, it is a world which manifests in the traditional haiku form of five-seven-five, seventeen syllables. Whatever the “shock” of what the author sees--in one poem she writes, “I don’t want to look”--she is able to couch it in a form which is traditional, well-known, and comforting. She is very good at numbers. Speaking of the five-seven-five form of her poems I said to her once, “You like it because it lets you count.”

       There is something particularly moving in witnessing someone you have known and loved awaken into poetic consciousness. It is a moment of transformation one feels privileged to attend. Along the Bloodline is testimony to the seriousness of the engagement which began in 1989 and to the author’s success in witnessing. The life detailed here is one she and I have shared since the early sixties. I would never have thought to have written it in this way.

Jack Foley