The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions: A Book of Distinctions

Jack FoleyÆs The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions deliberately challenges many conventional ways of thinking about poetry. Though extremely scholarly and aware of the \u201ctradition,\u201d Foley offers readings rooted in a consciousness which is simultaneously non academic and open to the new. \u201cThe self of this book,\u201d he writes, \u201cis not a unity but a multiplicity. Many people would agree with this idea of selfhood—the self as a \u2018multiplicity of voicesÆ—but clarification is still required as to how the concept of the self as multiplicity affects literary criticism, how it affects our actual reading of poems. It may be that the self we postulate as we read a poem contradicts the self we experience in the world; it is also possible that familiar poems may be experienced anew by being read in the light of multiplicity.\u201d FoleyÆs explorations lead him into radically new readings of \u201ccanonic\u201d work by poets such as Keats, Yeats and Mallarm\u00e9, into the world of opera, free jazz, New Formalism, and the writing of song lyrics, into \u201cethnic\u201d literature, theater, and finally into problems of \u201cspoken word\u201d and \u201cslam poetry.\u201d Throughout, his point of view, initially controversial, becomes finally compelling. \u201cIt is possible,\u201d he says quietly about the whole of Western culture, \u201cthat Plato was wrong, and that we must make an effort to think in a different way if we are to encounter reality at all.\u201d

Jack Foley is the editor of The Fallen Western Star Wars and ALL: A James Broughton Reader. His books of poetry include Letters/Lights-Words for Adelle, Gershwin, Adrift, Exiles, and New Poetry from California: Dead/Requiem. He has published two companion volumes of essays and interviews entitled O Powerful Western Star and Foley's Books: California Rebels, Beats, and Radicals.