Jack W. Foley

In his career, Mr. Jack Foley has utilized his interests in writing, playing guitar and writing lyrics to explore the world around him. Poetry remained on the sidelines of his interests until it was suggested to him to read a Thomas Graves poem in the churchyard when he was a teenager. After getting the work from the library, he followed the instructions to read it in the churchyard and recounts that it was an amazing experience that inspired him to write his own poem. From then on, Mr. Foley has been penning meaningful words and prose to paper.

Mr. Foley describes discovering poetry in this kind of way as a kind of baptism. Upon reading the Thomas Graves poem, Mr. Foley felt that he was connected to the writer and knew who he was. Mr. Foley felt that Graves had been reincarnated in his body when he read the poem and continued to write his own poem on the dissolution of boundaries. What he found in the poem was echoes of himself in a way that he had never seen before and the beauty of language that he never heard before, so all of these factors were instrumental in choosing his profession as a poet.

Mr. Foley continued to explore the intricacies of language by earning a Bachelor of Arts in English literature for Cornell University in 1963. He continued at the University of California, Berkeley to receive a Master of Arts in English literature in 1965. In addition to writing and publishing works throughout his career, Mr. Foley has been a literary critic since 1985 and has been an executive producer-in-charge of the poetry program for the KPFA-FM station since 1988. From 1990 to 1995, he was the editor-in-chief of Poetry USA.

Mr. Foley’s work is that of a strenuously active intellectual, which he feels puts him immediately at a disadvantage as America must be the only country where the prejudice against intellect is so great that even many of the writers run from the aspersion as from a rabid dog. Mr. Foley is a passionate intellectual, and his work is the expression of a person as deeply humane as he is deeply aware. He is a poet in the ecstatic tradition of Whitman as refracted through the lenses of Pound and Olson and varieties of post-structuralism (where the open-faced smile of the American Emersonian, that happy existentialist, meets the European Nietzschean’s burned grimace), with bits of vaudeville, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and tap dancing thrown in, all of this mixed and blended in a mind, unique but all-inviting, individual yet multitudinous, a spirit deep as day and as broad as history. He considers the Lifetime Achievement Award he received from the Berkeley Poetry Festival, which involved poetry reading, was the highlight of his career. He and his late wife, Adelle, had done that together, so it was as much her day as it was his. He was completely unknown until the age of 45, and she stood by him through that, believed in his work, and never complained. In addition, in 2010, Berkeley, CA named a day after him.

In 2019, authors Dana Gioia and Peter Whitfield published “Jack Foley’s Unmanageable Masterpiece” which highlights the history of some of Mr. Foley’s most prolific work  with “Visions & Affiliations” and “California Poetry 1940-2005.”