Jack Foley

“A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”—title from Whitman—is a companion volume to poet Jack Foley’s autobiography, The Light of Evening. As the autobiography treats the events of Foley’s life, A Backward Glance treats his intellectual history. Poetry arrived in Foley’s consciousness in more or less the same way that the words, “Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute me” arrived in the consciousness of the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. 

At the age of fifteen, Foley, like most of his friends, thought of poetry as more or less inconsequential, old-fashioned, dull. A teacher’s suggestion that he read Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1750) changed all that: “The poem seemed to me the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. It affected me so deeply that I wanted it to have come out of me, not out of Thomas Gray, and I immediately sat down and wrote my own Gray’s “Elegy, ” in the same stanzaic form and with the same rhyme scheme as the original. 

I understood the state of mind named in Gray’s “Elegy” to be the state of mind of poetry itself; and in reacting so deeply to it, I understood myself to be a poet. ” On the face of it, it seemed like an extremely unlikely event. Thomas Gray was an English poet, a letter writer, a Classical scholar, and a professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Foley was an ambitious Irish-Italian working-class kid who was aware of what the British had done to the Irish. 

Yet at such life-changing moments, none of that mattered. To be a poet meant to change your life. The fifteen year old, half-Irish child suddenly transformed himself into an adult, eighteenth-century, British formalist. From there, Foley began to interrogate the entire history of poetry. The story of Foley’s spiritual history is the story of his finding what Wallace Stevens called “what will suffice. ” 

The range of his mind moved into radical poetic innovation as well as into deeply traditional modes and a recognition of the legacy of Modernism. At age eighty, Foley has led a unique life as a writer/performer of poetry, a radio host, and an all-around West Coast gadfly of the poetic establishment. If you want the interesting events of his life, read The Light of Evening. If you want the life of his mind, read “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads. ”

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