light of evening

Jack Foley has played a major role in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene since the mid 1980s. The Light of Evening traces the arc of his life since his birth in New Jersey in 1940. Foley has spent his life in the pursuit of ways in which he might continue to write poetry in a world in which the status of poetry has been seriously diminished. This book offers a portrait of an artist who has continued to produce experimental as well as traditional work and who created theoretical underpinnings for that work. At eighty, he looks back at a life in which he managed to maintain himself as a contrarian poet who never resorted to the academy for sustenance and who never courted fame from the East Coast hegemony. As a young man he experienced Berkeley in the sixties and the political passion of that time. As he came into his own as a poet, his admirers included some of the most prominent poets of California: Michael McClure, Ishmael Reed, James Broughton, Al Young, Judy Grahn, Larry Eigner, Dana Gioia, many others. The Light of Evening-along with its companion volume, 'A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads'-is the story of a complex, always-in-motion public intellectual for whom poetry was first, last, and always.