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“If only I were reviewed I could be famous,”
the speaker in Jack Foley’s “The Poet’s
Tango” decides as he dances, weaving increasingly
wishful thoughts with his own intricate dance steps.
Clear experimentation in the facet of voice and structure
seems inherent in this chapbook of poetry, Jack Foley,
Greatest Hits 1974-2003 (ISBN 1-58998-274-6, Pudding
House Publications, Columbus Ohio 2004).
Self-proclaimed as first enjoying writing at the age
of fifteen and waiting another eighteen years to “rediscover”
his own capacity for poetry at thirty three, Foley has
a definitive sense of style and assuredness, often making
statements rather than asking questions. He touches
on topics such as history (“Bridget, Pronounced
“Breed””), politics (“Eli, Eli”),
heredity (“On Hearing Irish Tenor Frank Patterson
Sing”), death (“For Norman Goldstein 1925-1994”)
and is clearly unafraid to discuss matters of the personal
self, such as aging (“Portrait at Sixty”).
Many of Foley’s poems sport a unique form for
free verse that is a maze all its own- placing words
(for effect, meaning and a multitude of reasons which
the reader might only grapple with) multiple spaces,
even lines apart, imploring the use of italics, colons,
dashes and all sorts of punctuation, seamlessly coalescing
non-English phrases into his work. Poems, such as “Bridget,
Pronounced “Breed”” even go so far
as to create their own visible art on the page:
your body-endless-time
sweeps everything (wait and
and see) In the field the children “dance.”
I wish.
My son
“chases”
the
ball.
Time fixes everything-in the sense of
affixes it, immobilizes it-
light
covers everything, touches it
deeply
Where Foley succeeds is in the assertation, the brash,
the blunt, “her lipstick turned her mouth into
a scar.” He is undaunted in pushing deeper meaning
into the mundane, to scatter images, to play with voice,
often juxtaposing many within a particular piece. He
also touches on a distinctiveness that is both fascinating
and thought-provoking in poems such as “Bukowski”
and “Dickinson,” creating patterns of thought
and sound that are so masterful as to stand alone, though
much more successful as they are presented - carefully
constructed cogs placed within the rigid structure of
preemptive beams. “Bukowski,” specifically,
is a particularly pleasing achievement in an experimental
form which takes a preexisting poem and creates it anew.
His “Portrait at 60” is similar to Stephen
Dunn’s “Sixty” in an intrinsic way,
each trying to capture the essence of something very
big and very blurry, something which may or may not
truly be there, the reality of aging. There must be
something which tugs at the wrists during a specific
time in life, imploring those such as Foley to hang
a portrait that is him but fails to really look like
him (being somehow more pure, real), in “ a place
where the light shines deeply” and Dunn, to “keep
on describing things to ensure that they really happened.
Listening to the included CD-ROM, which offers recordings
of Foley reading his poetry, adds an entirely new level
to the volume. Speech is a medium in of itself, and
Foley has certainly mastered the craft. The softness
of his voice mixed with precise inflections and incantations
create not only a pleasant and soothing auditory melody,
but a cathartic presence not often attainable though
the brash laser tracks of a compact disk.
Foley’s words are touched with a deep sense of
careful placement, consideration and purpose. His poetry
has the ability to touch his audience on increasingly
meaningful levels, allowing the reader to take from
his art as much or as little as they chose. “It
seemed an amazing discovery to realize that words on
a page were made of letters,” states Foley in
his foreword. Indeed, letters create words which create
phrases, sentences, encompass thoughts, feelings, voice
and meaning. As Foley says,
“the page is not the
natural diving point”.
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