Foley's Books
Pantograph Press

Jack Foley

Last week's column was the Author's Preface to my forthcoming book, O Powerful Western Star. This week's column is the Author's Preface to its companion volume, Foley's Books. Next week: books by other people!

Jack Foley to Philip Whalen: Have you been writing anything recently?
Whalen: I can't write, I'm blind!
Foley: So was Homer!
Whalen (after a short pause): Homer who?

Foley's Books is the companion volume to O Powerful Western Star, a book about poetry and art in California. The earlier book quotes Walter J. Ong's phrase, "a powerful form of movement." Ong is referring to the Homeric epithet, "winged words," which, he writes,

suggests evanescence, power, and freedom: words are constantly moving, but by flight, which is a powerful form of movement, and one lifting the flier free of the ordinary, gross, heavy, "objective" world.

Like Homer's language, the various rebels, beats, and radicals in this book are all, in various ways, lifted "free of the ordinary, gross, heavy, ‘objective' world."

Foley's Books is also a name invented by Jaimes Alsop, editor of the online magazine, The Alsop Review. When Alsop offered me a weekly column, he suggested "Foley's Books" as the title. Alsop is by origin British, so he thought of the name as a play on the famous London book store, Foyle's Books.

Many of the articles and interviews in Foley's Books come from my Alsop Review columns, though almost everything has been revised for this volume. In putting the book together I tried to mingle famous names with names few have ever heard of. And I tried to emphasize California and the West, though, naturally, people from other states will find their way in--visitors and tourists like William Jay Smith, Jake Berry, and William Butler Yeats.

None of the pieces included here was originally conceived of as material for a book--though, in revising, that possibility was kept in mind. One of the pieces, "Yeats' Poetic Art" is a tribute to a teacher, Paul de Man; another is a letter to convicted murderer, Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Like the interviews in O Powerful Western Star, the interviews contained here are transcriptions from my radio show, Cover to Cover, heard every Wednesday at 3 p.m. on KPFA-FM in Berkeley. Like O Powerful Western Star, this book ranges widely--perhaps too widely--but a good many themes emerge: the relationship of the oral aspects of writing (writing as "language") to the visual aspects of writing (writing as "drawing"); the nature of the numinous; problematical definitions of selfhood—how, and in what way, does "the self" exist? Problematical definitions of poetry and of "the west." Ethnicity and multiculturalism; the nature of the "unconscious." Does the unconscious exist? In an interview published in O Powerful Western Star, Allen Ginsberg makes the extraordinary statement that "In a sense, there's hardly any unconscious. You know what you think."

Despite Ginsberg's assertion, the primary insight of the fast-fading twentieth century is probably the idea that in various important ways we do not have access to our minds--we don't know what we think. The question then arises of how such access might be gained. Through dreams? Through language? Through "images"? The artist's psyche is doubtless enormously meaningful, but so is his medium, which is "speaking" at every turn. Indeed, psyche may be caused by medium. For a writer, the struggle with language is constantly revelatory. The writer is the catalyst of the revelation, yet he is by no means necessarily its object. Whatever he may have "intended," it--the writing --has intentions too. As Paul de Man suggested, the artist may well be "blind" to the labyrinthine world of sub-texts, qualifications and ambiguities his work opens up. To paraphrase Robert Duncan, he enters into the open field of language, an area in which his "intentions" are only one element of what amounts to an experience of freedom so radical it can scarcely be traced and is often denied. The artist himself may well retreat from that experience--I didn't mean this, I meant that--but the work retains its open character. What Freud designated as "the Unconscious"--"we call a process ‘unconscious' when we have to assume that it was active at a certain time, although at that time we knew nothing about it" --may in fact be nothing more than the appearance of a medium; may in fact be the medium. In the dynamic interplay of contexts which is the substance of any work of art, psyche is constantly being revealed or--to put it another way--created: "soul-making."

I think I know what this book is about, but I might be wrong.

Foley's Books is as much a book about what I don't know as it is a book about what I know.

From a journal:

Was there something there before the writing? Yes, surely. But once the writing begins, who can tell what it was? And is writing in this respect any different from the various "voices" in our heads by which we represent ourselves? "I'm this, I'm that." Aren't they really modes of writing, the place where it begins? To put it another way: What is "consciousness," which can be represented in so many different ways? What does it mean to have a capacity for self-representation?

There are over twenty-five poets discussed in this book, and most of them live in California. What does it mean to be a poet? More particularly, what does it mean to be a poet here? As Philip Whalen put it: Homer who?

Jack Foley