The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions

Foreword

Foreword Back before we could Google the worldwide web or access by computer a library’s shelves, we leaned on curiosity, happenstance, ingenuity and footwork to zero in on information. Now, at a time when data and knowledge are routinely misconstrued, the picture has changed. The need to make often practically imperceptible distinctions grows. While information technology has hastened the pace at which we bombard ourselves with facts, dates, and endless takes, this same technology threatens not only to slow to a trickle the natural rush of passion, but to dull as well all sense of wonder. So what? What do search engines, internet research, iPod, MP3 or DVD have to do with this valuable book you’ve entered? Many an artist and thinker of my generation might dance around such a question. I can’t. Neither can Jack Foley. After all, we both come from a time when practically everything creative — or, in any case, fresh — had to be planted, nurtured and plucked by hand. The telling question to ask is this: What fueled and ignited Jack Foley’s interests in the subjects his emotional spark and intellectual flame illuminate in these pages? And in a nation whose intellectuals are oddly anti-intellectual. Whether re-thinking particular poems by William Butler Yeats, John Keats, Stéphane Mallarmé, E.E. Cummings, Louis Zukofsky and Allen Ginsberg, works long regarded as classics, or walking straight down the midway of the contemporary poetry scene (from Garrison Keillor, Adrienne Rich, Francisco X. Alarcón, Diane DiPrima, Dana Gioia, to the late free jazz saxophonist-composer Glenn Spearman on out to slam and spoken word) Foley speaks his whole heart, always cutting his ever-inquiring mind some slack. Plug into Foley a year from now, six months, a few weeks, and chances are he will have shifted position on many opinions he previously championed. He is, after all, his own person: a talented poet, commentator, broadcaster, lecturer, performer, publisher and cultural activist. S ix Jack Foley’s late-life takes and re-takes on the art and meaning of works by classic and contemporary poets pull you out upon a receding tide, where wonder and passion reside. What’s in it for this man, who isn’t pumping out commentary and criticism to shore up or defend an academic career? Foley does all this for love. He loves to pull back and take the grand pan-infinity overview of life and art, and he loves just as much to crowd in on technical, esthetic or socially meaningful minutia. It would be easy to trace his allegiance to the performing arts (the song lyrics of Andy Razaf, the music of Glenn Spearman) back to his father, a working vaudevillian. As alert to music, cinema and other dramatic forms as he is to poetry in particular and literature in general, Foley brings his thoughts and feelings for all of the arts into every essay and lecture he delivers. In an age of fractious specialization, Foley slides into place enough little pieces to come up with a big picture. What makes these pages fun and stimulating is the ever-widening range of Jack Foley’s concerns, enthusiasms, passions and loves. The interests of Kenneth Rexroth, the influential 20th century poet and thinker whose work Foley re-assesses, were similarly diffuse. Both men – the one self-educated, the other formally educated – look out at the world with every faculty intact, then translate into fine and lively language what they see, hear, taste, feel and recall. In this collection of warmly crafted essays Foley takes unblinking looks at everything he loves, and this would include plenty of stuff he genuinely doesn’t like. In each of these “classics” Foley either locates a passage he had previously neglected or overlooked, or he brings new personal experience and insight to his re-readings. For example, who but Jack Foley would take the time to point out that poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth – the flamboyant San Francisco auto-didact whose thought and works influenced what came to called the Beat Generation – had no trouble seeing mysticism as a literary technique rather than as a religious experiences that transcends language. Without literary mysticism, it might be difficult to understand many modernist poets and the confessional vein many of them love to needle and trouble. Foley even caringly questions the presumed greatness of “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg’s signature flag-raiser for what I used to call Alien Nation. With equal affection and reverence, Foley...