Questions from a Chinese Scholar (Part 2.)

Jack Foley

I met him in 1986. I was running a poetry series in Berkeley. I admired Larry’s work and wanted him to read in the series. Barrett Watten gave me Larry’s phone number-not his address, only his phone number. I’ve never known whether this were some sort of joke on Barry’s part. I phoned and Larry answered, saying something like “UNGHHHHH.” I had known that Larry was disabled but hadn’t realized until that moment that the disability extended to his speech. I simply decided I would understand Larry. There is no other way to put it. By the time the conversation was over, Larry had given me his address and directions to his house, and we had agreed on a date when he was to read. One of his caregivers, Kathleen Frumkin, told me later that she had been listening in and had been ready to help out if needed. She never said anything. Larry had a lot of old-fashioned poetry in his head: his mother’s influence, no doubt. The first time I went to visit him, we both quoted from Longfellow.

Did you go to see him once a week until his death after you made friends with him?

Yes, that’s right. I’d see him once a week and hear from him on the telephone quite often. After he read at my poetry series, he asked to come back--offering to pay me the two dollars. I told him he could come back for free--and so I brought him every week. After the series ended, I went over to his house to visit every week. Our birthdays were two days apart: we had a joint party once. After his death, someone who had received a letter from Larry told me that Larry had mentioned me in the letter. Never knowing that I’d see the letter, Larry described me as “a kind man and a good friend.” He wrote a preface to my first book, Letters/Lights-Words for Adelle (1986). Except for the few remarks he made at the beginning of Ron Silliman’s early book, Crow, that was the only preface he wrote to anyone’s book. I had asked for a blurb. He responded with a preface. My book Exiles was at his bedside during the last conscious week of his life. His voice on a message machine was something to hear! He once left a message for Michael McClure. Michael couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but I was able to decipher it.

2) Did you take care of his publishing matters? Did you help his younger brother Richard to take care of Larry's household duties?

No, all of that was handled by other people. Robert Grenier was Larry’s link to publishers--as well as his editor--and Richard was the person who made sure the household was in good shape.

3) I vaguely remember that Larry’s younger brother is a medical doctor who seldom came to see him. A volunteer took care of his household duties. Who supported Larry's living expense? Richard? How about those volunteers? Did they get some pay from their service?

Larry’s brother Richard is a retired lawyer. His other brother Joe is also retired; I don’t believe he was a medical doctor. I believe that Richard took care of Larry’s living expenses. I don’t know but believe that Larry’s caregivers were always hired by Richard. I expect that they were paid in cash in addition to being given lodging.

4) How about his funeral? Did you take care of it?

No. Richard is the one who handled that.

5) I know that Michael McClure and Ferlinghetti are your friends, and that you had a connection with Ginsberg. Do you keep in touch with Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder and other living Beat poets ? Please tell us something about your personal impressions of them.

Sadly, Philip Whalen died recently. I wrote a memorial piece about him which was published in “Foley’s Books.” I met both Whalen and Snyder, but I can’t say that I knew them at all well. At Michael McClure’s wedding to Amy Evans, Snyder came over to me and said, “So you’re Jack Foley.” I’m sure he had heard of me from Michael, whom I regard as a close friend. I happened to be sitting next to Whalen and so I found myself feeding him the food Michael had provided. Whalen’s failing eyesight made eating difficult for him. Whalen had not written poetry in recent years. I had this telephone exchange with him:

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

 We then went on to talk about Borges, Milton, and other blind poets.

6) Did you attend Kenneth Rexroth’s talks or poetry readings? Did you have a chance to talk with Gregory Corso? If yes, please tell us something about them.

I never attended Rexroth’s talks or readings, though I used to listen to him on KPFA, have heard several recordings of his readings and have written a paper about him--published in “Foley’s Books.” I never met Corso, though I have heard many stories. My friend Neeli Cherkovski was a good friend of Corso’s.

7) Did you have a good connection with William Everson? If yes, please tell us something about your personal impression of him.

I saw Everson read a couple of times, but I didn’t know him. Some arrangements were being made for me to visit and interview him, but he died before we finalized anything. The first time I heard him read was an extraordinary experience. He had to be helped up to the stage and then seated. He was dressed like a cowboy or a frontiersman, with a cowboy hat and a fringed jacket. He sat there in the seat for quite a long time, his whole body constantly shaking, his mouth drooping. We didn’t know if he would ever begin. Finally, he spoke: “Today...is Holy Thursday...the night...of Christ’s...agony...in the garden.” He then began to read his poetry, but the remark about Holy Thursday created a setting, a context. There was something devotional and transformative about the entire reading. Amazingly, the shaking of his body seemed to echo the rhythms of his poetry--as if his body were shaking not because of his illness but because of the poetry: the poetry seemed somehow to be issuing directly out of that shaking body. Later, I saw him read again: he was reading poems and he was shaking, but there was no particular relationship between the two. It was nothing like that first experience.

8) You've an essay on Philip Lamantia in Foley's Books. Is he still alive? Please tell us something about your friendship with him.

Philip Lamantia is definitely still alive. He and his longtime friend Nancy Peters attended my first reading at Larry Blake’s--not to hear me but to hear my co-reader Ivan Argüelles. (This was in 1985, before I took over the series; during this reading, I was just a guest performer.) Philip and Nancy enjoyed my reading, including the choral piece Adelle and I read together. I know Philip casually and did a radio interview with him which pleased both him and me, but I don’t know him well. Philip is in a way a professional genius: his social interactions are based on convincing you of his brilliance--which is indeed considerable. But he is also, I gather, a difficult person. My friend James Broughton remarked, “Philip is impossible. He’s always been like that--even when he was young.”

9) Did you have good talks with Robert Duncan when he was alive? Please tell us something about your personal impression of him.

I saw Robert Duncan read but barely knew him personally. He was aware of my poetry series at Larry Blake’s and I spoke to him on the phone once about the difficulties of doing such a thing. He was very cordial. I read quite a lot of his work, and it was always exciting to be in his presence. He radiated brilliance. After his death, I got to know his lover, the great painter/collagist Jess. Jess would have me over to lunch in the house he and Robert lived in. Once, when it was raining and I didn’t have an umbrella, Jess gave me one of Robert’s hats to wear. Jess said, “Keep it, I don’t need it any more.” It hangs in the hallway of my house. Jess also showed me his signed copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a great influence upon both him and Robert. At a time when I had no money, Jess generously gave me a copy of the catalogue of his great exhibition, Jess: A Grand Collage 1951-1993. The catalogue has essays by various people about Jess. As he handed it to me, he said, “Don’t believe everything you read.” I understand that Jess now suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease. The man I knew was gentle and cordial and enjoyed reminiscing about his years with Robert. You could not guess from his demeanor the life and brilliance that springs from his magnificent paintings and collages. I first encountered his work in 1977; it was a life-changing experience. Much of my poetry springs not only from Duncan but from Jess. I wrote this about O!, Jess’s book of poetry:

 Robert Duncan rightly calls O! “a masterly hodgepodge.” Its prose and poetry, its fragments, its marvelous, resonant images create a picture of mind or self as an infinitely shapely chaos, charged at all points with what the artist will call later, quoting Shakespeare’s Troilus, “changeful potency.” In the book’s persistently free environs, boundaries are at once asserted and demolished; childhood merges into deep history; realism turns to magic. 

10) When I say you're essentially influenced by the Beat poets in your way of thinking and artistic style in addition to Black Mountain poets, am I right? Yes or no, why?

The idea of “influence” is always a problematical one. In brief: I was influenced by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in particular. I went from Pound to Charles Olson and Robert Duncan--so the Black Mountain label is accurate enough. Gertrude Stein was another deep influence, as well as James Joyce--i.e., I was influenced by High Modernism. I was less influenced by the Beats--though I deeply admire Jack Kerouac’s poetry (Mexico City Blues) and Michael McClure’s. When people think about “performance”--poets reading their work aloud--they often think of the Beats. This is one of the reasons people describe me as influenced by the Beats. In fact, however, the “Spoken Word” movement is one strand of Modernism, though for the most part the adherents of Spoken Word are unaware of the history of their own movement. In a recent review of Ezra Pound’s musical productions

Richard Taruskin suggests, “Pound insisted that poetry was not ‘literature’ but a performance art.” The idea of performance is something which permeates Modernism--is part and parcel of it. This fact is not generally known because the considerable body of criticism which Modernism amassed is completely unaware of Modernism’s interest in performance--or regards it as unimportant. It wasn’t Modernism which insisted on the “literary” as opposed to performance: it was the influential literary critics who wrote about Modernism. These critics made Modernism famous (and even gave birth to “Post Modernism”), but they also misunderstood certain aspects of the movement. I arrive at performance not through the Beats but through Modernists such as Pound--who is of course an ancestor of the Beats.

As I write in my Gale Research autobiography (vol. 24), I came into poetry through the experience of a poem called “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a formal poem written by an 18th century Englishman. I read English Romantic poets--Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Blake--and the Irish William Butler Yeats with tremendous interest. I of course read T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the complex, beautiful poetry of Dylan Thomas. The lyrical prose writer, Thomas Wolfe, was a powerful influence--particularly his book, Look Homeward, Angel. I was also interested in American song lyrics--Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin--and “light” verse by various hands, including Ogden Nash. Later, I found Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound fascinating. (Dana Gioia believes that I am working out of an essentially Poundian tradition.) The work of Charles Olson was an extraordinary experience. I went on from Olson to various others, including Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Louis Zukofsky and Michael McClure. I read and liked Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, but I can’t say that it was an “influence” exactly. French verse--particularly 19th-century French verse--has always been important to me: I have translated Charles Baudelaire and Stefan Mallarmé. I loved the work of the great German poet/playwright, Bertolt Brecht--especially the work he wrote in collaboration with the composer Kurt Weill. (I have an essay about that in “Foley’s Books”: “Mahagonny as Zeitgeist”--4/09/03). There were also influences from other fields: Martin Heidegger and Walter J. Ong in philosophy, Charles Ives in music, Abel Gance in film--not to mention Alfred Hitchcock, on whom I have written rather extensively. Ong’s brilliant discussion of the oral as opposed to the written has been a constant inspiration for me. Ives’ musical use of various voices in “collision” rather than harmony and Gance’s idea (in his film, Napoleon) of “polyvision” (simultaneous images played against one another) were certainly influential in the creation of my multivoiced pieces--the choral poems I perform with Adelle. Charles Olson’s work was a powerful and liberating experience for me, so I would definitely have to accept the Black Mountain label to some degree. I would say, however, that both Beat poets and Black Mountain poetry arose out of a Romantic/Modernist impulse (Modernism = Eliot and Pound) which has been working itself out over the years--and it is this to which I owe my deepest allegiance.

11) Is Adelle an inseparable part of your performance poetry reading? Does she offer some advice for your poetry writing? Or does she just accompany you in reading?

Adelle has been a part of my performances from their inception. The poems are written, by me alone, for performance by two or more people. Adelle offers no advice about my compositions--though she may later make suggestions of ways she would like to perform. She writes poetry herself and has recently published a book of haiku, Along the Bloodline.

As I said in the previous response to your questions, my work begins with the strong conviction that the individual “I” is a falsehood, a misapprehension of experience. What we call “consciousness” is a multiple realm, a realm which cannot be represented under the rubic of any “I.” At the same time, my work has a strong push towards performance, which is often used as an assertion of the I. The problem my work deals with is how to assert “performance” without also asserting the I. Adelle and I-two voices- perform kinds of works which are usually the province of the single, “individual” consciousness, the single “voice”: essays, poems. Even in the poems which I read solo, there are often a number of “voices” present.

I recently wrote an extensive commentary on Dana Gioia’s essay, “Disappearing Ink,” which you can find at his web site: http://www.danagioia.net/. Here are some excerpts from my essay; you can find it in its entirety in my column, “Foley’s Books.” I deal here with the general situation of poetry and with ways in which Adelle and I function within it. Again, it’s important to realize that, while performance was definitely an issue for many Modernist poets, it was not an issue for the criticism which Modernism gave birth to.

Anyone deeply involved in the whirl-a-gig poetry world will appreciate the truth of Gioia’s arguments. A poet who opens himself up to this world soon discovers that it is in constant motion: it’s not that there is no there there; it’s that the number of there’s is often surprising and baffling. “Poetry” is not one thing but a complex of activities, some of which are very much at odds with one another. In a situation in which our poets laureate often speak for the art as a whole--poetry “is” this, poetry “is” that--Gioia’s important essay demonstrates how genuinely dense the actualities of the situation are. In addition, he gives us a terminology by which we can make some sense of the chaos that faces us. Most essays dealing with poetry as such are really nothing more than the manifestation of one partial view--often one sentimental, partial view. “Disappearing Ink” is a genuine beginning, something which we can use as we try to assess what is happening to poetry as a whole--if in fact one can even speak of “poetry as a whole”...

When William Carlos Williams insisted that “the modern poem...should be heard,” he was echoing a statement we come upon often over the course of the twentieth century. Readers have frequently remarked about poetry that they “understand” it better when they hear it than when they read it silently, or that the poem “on the page” seems different--better--after they have heard the poet read it aloud. Such readings are transformative. Dylan Thomas was a master of such readings: his beautiful renditions of his poems placed in question our capacity to read them silently...When the Beat poets read poetry to jazz accompaniment or when my wife Adelle and I perform multi-voiced poems--whatever the value of such performances--an attempt is being made to transform the poem as it exists on the page: we are doing something which silent reading cannot represent. If we recall the fact that poetry begins with oral recitation--and that Homer is represented as being blind and therefore without any relationship to the visual art of “writing”--we realize that the printing of poetry too represented a “transformation”: it was no longer necessary to hear someone (a specific person in a specific place) read the poem aloud; we could “see” it instead.

For various reasons, written poetry has always maintained an uneasy relationship to poetry’s oral past--a past which, paradoxically, was to some extent preserved through works of writing. I suggested in O Powerful Western Star that at the heart of Western poetry is a split, a confusion, a multimedia situation which is never resolved but which remains in a continual, and at times enormously creative, state of tension. What Walter J. Ong calls “the new orality” of the electronic era has caused critics--Gioia among them--to recognize this hidden history of poetry, a history which was not made clear by earlier critics: certainly not by the New Critics, for whom the poem was entirely a written object. Ironically, it was only by analogy with presentations in the electronic media that poetry found its way into the current “national consciousness.” To put it bluntly: poetry is the one branch of “literature” which has a performative aspect; it is the one branch of “literature” which can be made to resemble rock-and-roll. (The narrative elements of drama--the other performative literary activity--make it a very different experience from the rock-and-roll show.)

 There is a famous passage in the sixth book of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. “When he was reading,” wrote St. Augustine of his friend St. Ambrose, “[Ambrose’s] eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest.” In Augustine’s previous experience, if someone read a book, he would speak the words aloud as he read. For the first time Augustine came upon a person reading silently, reading with his eyes alone. He was aware that a momentous change had come upon the world. The new consciousness embodied in Ambrose was Christian, inward, and silent before the page. The privacy of the reading figure who does not pronounce his words to anyone, who does not perform, is of enormous importance. “Who durst intrude on one so intent?” asks Augustine. Poetry, like all of writing, becomes at that moment a private activity, not a public one.

My work is to some degree a movement away from the silence of that reading figure--from everything, including Christianity, which the figure of Ambrose represents. Adelle and I stand before an audience; we speak our words aloud and--because of the choral nature of the work--we often present verbal acts which cannot be represented on the page. Holding our books in our hands as we perform, and speaking our texts--loudly--we are in a way the opposite of Saint Ambrose. My work is a deliberate movement back to the condition of the Homeric singer, to a condition of consciousness which preceded Christianity. This attempt is part of the general thrust of Modernism--you find it clearly enunciated in the work of William Butler Yeats, D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound--though Modernism also makes various attempts to find common cause with Christianity, as in the work of T.S. Eliot and William Everson. Are the labels “Beat” and “Black Mountain” sufficient to cover such things?

Jack Foley