DANCING BEAR: You seem like a very good person to comment on the "Fallen Western Star Wars" controversy.

JACK FOLEY: We should perhaps begin one step back from where you might think to begin it-- with Dana Gioia's article, "Fallen Western Star." The title of my book "O Powerful Western Star" is taken from Whitman's poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." But Whitman actually wrote, "O powerful western fallen star!" I deliberately left out the "fallen." Dana Gioia wrote the introduction to my book, "O Powerful Western Star." It was very generous of him--and of course his work is always wonderful: I tell people to read the introduction but not to bother with the rest of the book! After he had finished the introduction, Dana had a lot of energy left over, and the "Ruminator Review" (then the "Hungry Mind Review") asked him to write an essay on this area as a literary region. And he obliged. He wrote a very interesting essay which in fact originated in some of the things he said in the introduction to my book. It's a long essay, and it's called, in reference to my title, "Fallen Western Star." Dana is talking about some problems of this area. That essay came out and I thought it was marvelous, and a lot of people thought it was marvelous, but it also got under the skin of other people. You know how it is if you have an agenda of certain people and feel that this is what it's like here and someone comes along and challenges that. It's not as if Dana is an outsider: he was born in Santa Rosa. He's a Californian, he's a Westerner for heaven's sake! But the people he named as important in current California writing--particularly in Northern California writing--that group of people is different from the group of people that would ordinarily be spoken of by, let's say, Richard Silberg, who didn't like Dana's essay at all. Richard Silberg is a good friend of mine, but we're often at loggerheads esthetically. (Different strokes for different folks!) Richard wrote an essay attacking Dana's essay; I wrote an essay attacking Richard's essay; Richard answered my attack. Various other people--Howard Junker, Jonah Raskin--had their say about this as well. These essays will all be published in a book called "The Fallen Western Star Wars." It will be published by Scarlet Tanager Press in Oakland.

DANCING BEAR: Is Scarlet Tanager a West Coast publisher?

JACK FOLEY: Yes! We are not publishing this in New York!

DANCING BEAR: You know, I read this thing as it fell out, so I read Dana's article first and I went, "You know, actually that makes a lot of sense." Then I read Silberg's and I went, "Yeah!" And then I read yours...

JACK FOLEY: That isn't what I went when I read Silberg's article. I went "Not yeah" to Silberg's article. A lot of the trouble has to do, I think, with an understanding of what it means to be in the West and whether you like the kinds of conditions that are here. Most of the people who read Dana's article say, "Of course that's true."

DANCING BEAR: If you put it to the backdrop of all the economics that's going on here-- everything's moved to New York basically because it's all conglomerated.

JACK FOLEY: As someone at New College said, "I tell my students to publish in New York." There's a lot that's going on here, but the question is really whether it's genuine activity or stuff that's more or less in a vacuum. And this is a problem. It's a problem for a lot of people, not just for me and for Dana. One needs to ask whose work gets featured and talked about as "prominent." Also, the ways in which people talk or do not talk to one another here are certainly problematical. What can be done about all this? Well, one of the things you can do is write articles which stir up a bit of dust--and that happened. You'll find in the current "Poetry Flash" (No. 286, September October 2000) both my response to Richard Silberg's article (which was published in the previous "Poetry Flash") and Richard Silberg's response to my response. You can also find all of these things, including Dana's essay, in my column, "Foley's Books," in "The Alsop Review" (http://www.alsopreview.com).

DANCING BEAR: I wanted to ask you one more thing. Going off the premise of what Dana Gioia wrote in his essay and what you followed up on, in that there is no real, serious publishing of literature going on in the West Coast the way it is in New York--where you would expect it to be a major hub of activity--if you look at the Internet, where a lot of publishers are going online, I see a sense of community there where I don't see it at times in the physical world here.

JACK FOLEY: You know, I go to a lot of readings and I've put on a lot of events. These things begin to build some community. That's certainly true: there is a poetry community of people who know each other. The question is whether this community is genuinely vital, whether something is happening here, as it certainly did happen here when the Beats were here and in fact before the Beats, with the "Berkeley Renaissance," which involved Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer and others. That pre-dated the Beats. Something was afoot then. Something was also afoot in the seventies when the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets were happening. What's afoot now?

DANCING BEAR: I correspond a lot with writers on the net. I've never met them, yet we share ideas and talk about things--poetics and all sorts of things--and I almost feel as if the Internet then becomes the next big "Powerful Star," a community.

JACK FOLEY: Well, I think that there is a difference, that there are things that happen in the poetry reading that you can't get anywhere else. One of the principal effects of just about every modern "convenience" has been to isolate people in their houses. Insofar as we're communicating with people on the Internet--and I do it too--we are disembodied. One of the things we need to remember is that human existence is to some degree always local and from the body. A poetry reading is one of the few places where we can actually physically connect with an artist. We have this funny relationship to people we don't know, can't know, and who may well have no conception of us at all: movie stars, rock stars, whatever. We may fall in love with them. Ivan Arguelles wrote a long poem, "The Madonna Septet," about an obsession with the pop star Madonna, whom he's never met, doesn't know in any way, will never meet. We have these deep feelings for these people we don't know and who don't know us. And that is, on the one hand, wonderful in some ways, but in other ways, as Jimmy Durante used to say, it's a catasterstroke. It's distressing and awful in other ways. The physical aspect of people--bodies, just bodies connecting--is something one can find at a poetry reading. So both of these things are true. Yes, the Internet is a kind of community, but there are also aspects to a physical community which you ain't gonna get from the Internet.

DANCING BEAR: That's true. I hadn't thought of that part.

JACK FOLEY: It's important, I think--especially when people start talking about poetry that's written from the body. Adelle and I perform, and there are certain things that happen in a performance which will be different from what happens in film, in video, on radio. It's a different kind of experience. The fact that we're all breathing the same air, that we're physically present to one another, makes a difference--and it's something that can be exploited by your performance. The "Fallen Western Star Wars" dispute raises the question of exactly what sort of specific locality we have here--which is an important question--but it also raises the question of what constitutes a locality.

Jack Foley