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April 6, 2020
Jack Foley's Playlist for His Poetry Collection "When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Roxane Gay, and many others.
In his own words, here is Jack Foley's Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs:
“Music is the primary thing,” I posit in When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs. “Words have meanings, yes, but in a poem they also have a musical quality. This music can be expressed in a myriad of different ways.” Moreover, my writing “arises out of a confusion resulting from the conflicting needs to communicate clearly and to transcend communication entirely—to turn language into an instrument of transformation. This book is in a way an experiment in sound.”
In terms of specific instances or even “tracks,” that’s a complicated question. I’m 79 years old and I’ve experienced an extraordinary amount of music in my lifetime. My tastes are wide-ranging and includes Classical, pop, “standards,” experimental music—all sorts of things. I don’t play any music when I’m writing, though: I’m trying to find the music in the words. Music in the sense of recordings would be a distraction. I’ve written and performed many, many choral pieces—pieces involving more than one speaker. Many of these can be found on YouTube. I’ve also written many song lyrics and some songs—music as well as words. I’m a guitarist and use that to compose. (my poem “Guitarra” in When Sleep Comes is about that wonderful instrument.)
In terms of songs or “pieces,” Charles Ives’s great song “General William Booth Enters the Kingdom of Heaven,” based on a text by Vachel Lindsay, had an enormous impact on me—as did his marvelous Concord Sonata, both the musical piece and the book Ives wrote about it. I’ve heard many renditions of “General William Booth,” but the one I heard first was Marni Nixon’s rendition from her collection of Ives songs. As for the Concord Sonata, the first version I heard was played by John Kirkpatrick—a marvelous interpretation. What I learned from Ives was a kind of sonic, and existential, freedom. His key changes are stunning. He’ll pitch wildly different kinds of passages against one another. Disparate contexts are played against one another—both influencing and interrupting. Astonishment is everywhere. “I didn’t know you could do that!” someone remarked about one of the choral pieces performed by my late wife, Adelle, and me, “The listener is seduced into the willing participation in chaos.” That seems to me an apt description of Ives, and it shows how much I learned from him. This is not Surrealism so much as it is a free play of the various contexts in which the mind is saturated. We are always selecting out from these contexts in order to present a unified and “rational” front. But it is only a front, and Ives sought the shadows that cling to it, thrusting them into the light. Choral poetry is one response, and I’ve done a great deal of that.
George Gershwin is another deep influence—the songs, yes, but even more the symphonic works. Some years ago, I published a book called Gershwin. The title poem wasn’t a portrait of the composer, though he does appear in it. It was rather an attempt to be "Rhapsody in Blue." Gershwin wrote of that piece: “I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” Doesn’t that sound like Ives—“a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America”? I’ve heard many versions of "Rhapsody in Blue," but I first heard it played by Gershwin’s friend Oscar Levant. There are moments in my poem, “Gershwin”—the book has a CD on which the poem is performed by Adelle and me—where I actually imitate Gershwin’s rhythms: “God I WISH I had a nickel or dime to spare, / I WISH I had a nickel or dime....”
When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs has a poem in which two vastly different folk musicians, Joseph Spence and Lead Belly, are set next to one another, seen as both different from and similar to one another. Some songs that informed the poem were Spence’s “Out on the Rolling Sea” and Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special.”
When Sleep Comes also finds me talking about Walt Whitman and song: “his complex, multi-voiced, multi-selved” poems, which inspired my homage to the bard’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” a song of songs in itself. My own song sings of “spontaneous unexpected utterance,” how it “It ushers in (under the magical multivalent moon, in the presence of the vast, talkative / sea) / Nothing less than the world as song.”
Jack Foley has published fifteen books of poetry, five books of criticism, and VISIONS AND AFFILIATIONS (Pantograph Press, 2011), a "chronoencyclopedia" of California poetry from 1940 to 2005. His most recent books include WHEN SLEEP COMES: SHILLELAGH SONGS (Sagging Meniscus press, 2020), RIVERRUN ( Poetry Hotel Press, 2017), GRIEF SONGS (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2017), THE TIGER AND OTHER TALES (Sagging Meniscus press, 2016), EYES (Poetry Hotel Press, 2013), and THE "FALLEN WESTERN STAR" WARS (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2001). He became well known through his "multivoiced" performances with his late wife, Adelle, who was also a poet; many of these can be seen on YouTube. His radio show, "Cover to Cover," airs every Wednesday on KPFA-FM in California. In 2010, Foley received the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Berkeley Poetry Festival.
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