Jack Foley has been prominent 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 to continue writing poetry in a world in which the
status of poetry has been seriously diminished. This candid
autobiography 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. His exciting "choruses" - duets
performed with his late wife Adelle - established him as a unique
presenter of poetry in an area in which poets abound. Along with his
creative work, Foley studied at Cornell with the brilliant and notorious
deconstructionist critic Paul de Man. He lived through the 1960s in and
around Berkeley, California, attending the university at the height of
the Free Speech Movement. Following on the heels of Kenneth Rexroth, he
has presented poetry on KPFA-FM, Berkeley's radical radio station, for
over thirty years. He produced a 1300-page history of Californian poetry
from 1940 to 2005 that has been called "an oddball masterpiece ... the
first adequate account of California's complex and contradictory
literary life." At eighty, Foley 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 literary hegemony. The Light of Evening is the story of a complex,
always-in-motion public intellectual for whom poetry was first, last,
and always.
