The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Jack Foley are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
Thanks to Maw Shein Win for requesting this. At 83 I find myself in a strange, in many ways advantageous position: I have enough money to support myself, my time is my own to do with as I see fit, I have a wonderful female companion, Sangye Land, and my health––by no means perfect––is no hindrance to my writing or my thinking. At the same time, many friends of many years––and many poet friends––are no longer alive. I lost two of my closest friends, poet Iván Argüelles and artist Paul Veres, within five days of one another.
I ONLY
“Neeli
was
one of us”
said
Iván Argüelles
when
he learned
of
Neeli Cherkovski’s death—
outsiders
who
persisted
in
imagination.
I
remember
the
three of us,
Neeli,
Iván, me,
on
Solano Avenue
in
Berkeley, California.
were
we heading
for
an ice cream shop
or
is that another
memory?
three
old men
who
had trouble
walking.
I
also remember
Neeli’s
sudden
laughter
at
the spectacle
of
the three of us,
three
frail old men
in
whom imagination
thrived
and allowed
transcendence
of
all—
or
some of—
their
bodily
ills.
three
in
whom words
sang
freely.
how
strange
how
funny
it
was
to
see them there
stumbling
who
flew upon
imagination’s
wings.
two—Neeli,
Iván—
gone
now.
“I
only
am
escaped
to
tell thee.”
My “process” is simply to write whenever I feel like it. I feel like it frequently because I believe that almost anything––any thought, any feeling, any reaction––can be a “prompt” for a poem and that it is a poet’s business to know as much as possible––i.e., “everything”–– about the craft of poetry: know all the forms but know how to break free of them as well. (Most of my work is in free verse.) Know what Chaucer did but also know what Pope or Kipling or D.H. Lawrence or Emily Dickinson or T.S. Eliot or Gertrude Stein or Marianne Moore or Ishmael Reed or Peyton Houston did. Definitely know what James Joyce did: “Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher’s gone ashley.” (Discover the beauty and innovation of Finnegans Wake before you attempt to discover what it “means.”) Like Pound, I believe that a poet ought to have some knowledge of at least one foreign literature. (Collisions contains a few passages written in French.)
My publisher asked me to write something he could use to present Collisions to the public. Despite the fact that it is in the third person, I wrote what follows:
Octogenarian Jack Foley’s Collisions is a book at play in the forests of the mind. The opening quotation from Dana Gioia defines the book’s understanding of consciousness: “Human consciousness is an unstable republic of conflicting impulses, instincts, and appetites in perpetual flux.” Collisions is an attempt to honor that notion of the chaos of consciousness while at the same time giving the reader an experience of thought and feeling that is not so chaotic that it is overwhelming. It tries to tell the truth about the mind in a way that feels if not comfortable at least familiar: we too have felt that fire, that movement. The book asserts that the fundamental condition of poetry is words in motion, constantly dis/uncovering perceptions of the new. “Ecstasy seems to be linked to the instability of language.” Familiar with the many forms of traditional poetry and comfortable with the making of new forms, Foley conceives of every living poet as an Orpheus attempting to rescue Poetry-as-Eurydice. If poetry to some extent reveals the ramifications of the poet’s identity, it does so in the context of the coruscations of words whose flashes move beyond identity into something more. The book deliberately plunges us into mystery as everything collides with everything else. Foley writes to a fellow poet, “‘Home’ is where you belong but ‘home’ isn’t anywhere: it is always a profound absence: ‘sound, noise that reaches for the ever-receding light.’ I think that, underneath all the ‘influences,’ is this deep longing which is always asserted and always denied.” Baudelaire: “heaven or hell who cares / In the depths of the unknown to find something new.” Foley goes on: “I suggest in Collisions that whatever caused us to be here is not omniscient but is engaged in a vast attempt to understand itself: our actions as a species—even our destructive ones—are almost entirely modes of self-reflection, attempts at self-discovery or self-revelation. From this point of view, each of us is an experiment in knowing.
But perhaps this blurb by poet Kurt Luchs describes the book even more accurately:
COLLISIONS lives up to its title by acting as a literary particle accelerator, slamming two or more things together to see what mysterious energies are released and what enlightenment might be shed by the encounter. There’s a reason Foley’s subtitle describes these pieces as “violences.” Many are poems in the traditional sense, whether formal or free verse (and he is equally adept at both modes). Mixed in, however, are essays, historical notes, cultural commentaries, translations, collaborations, what could almost be called journal entries, and even reviews: the first piece is a magnificent prose poem of praise for Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The poet’s always lyrical voice expertly unifies these disparate elements. Everything becomes poetry when he says it. Underneath the voice, though, is the running theme of consciousness as a chordal phenomenon. There are many Jack Foleys represented here, and every man Jack of them is on a spiritual quest to understand the universe. The journey becomes ours as we read and peer over his shoulder in wonder, like watching an astronaut of the soul step onto a strange new world.
Here are two passages from the book:
[What
is the status of the poet?
What
can be said of the poet’s impact
If
any?
For
most of America and perhaps
The
world
Song
lyrics are their only poetry.
How
can we regain
The
lost dignity
Of
the poem?
Tous les poètes
Sont
Orphée:
Son histoire
Est
l’histoire de tous.]
PRENDS PITIÉ…
O Dieu qui n’existe pas
Dieu des choses imaginaires
I invoke thine aid
To adolescent poets
Whose rhymes reflect
Hormonal changes only,
To poets who collect
Rejection slips
And eventually give up,
To good poets whose work
Is never or only partially
Acknowledged,
To all the dark ones
Who slip through the cracks
Of poetic glory
Producers of doggerel
Or bad rhymes
Or of work no one understands
(Or is ever likely to understand)
To those who light a candle
That immediately goes out
And offers no illumination
Have mercy upon them
The talentless
The ignorant
The talented but ignored
All those who ply a thankless trade
All those whose souls
Are bared to no purpose whatsoever
And who suffer
The agonies of revision
To no avail––
Give them dreams
The Enoch Soames’s
Of our day,
God who is not only,
Like all gods,
Invisible
But actually
Non-existent,
Nothing but air, thought, desire,
The careless error
Of the longing heart,
Dieu qui n’existe pas
Dieu des choses imaginaires
Jack Foley has published 20 books of poetry, 5 books of criticism, a book of stories, and a two-volume, 1300-page “chrono-encyclopedia,” Visions & Affiliations: California Poetry 1940-2005. He became well known particularly through his multi-voiced performances with his late wife, Adelle. He currently performs with his new life partner, Sangye Land. Since 1988, he has presented poetry on Berkeley radio station, KPFA. He has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from Marquis Who’s Who and the Berkeley Poetry Festival as well as the K.M. Anthru Award from the Indian publication, Litterateur RW. June 5, 2010 was declared “Jack Foley Day” in Berkeley. His most recent books include the companion volumes, The Light of Evening, a brief autobiography, and “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” a psychobiography, a biography of the poet’s mind, and Bridget and Other Poems, a selection of Jack’s work edited and translated by German poet, Andreas Weiland. Creative Death: an octogenarian’s wordshop appeared in 2023.
Maw Shein Win's most recent poetry collection is Storage
Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern
California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book
Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the
inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous books include
full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins
of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates
with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series
features poets on their process. She teaches in the MFA Program at the
University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary
Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community.
Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is
forthcoming in Fall 2024. mawsheinwin.com