Arts & Events

A Poetic Dialogue Between Poets and Novelistsg

John Curl and Jack Foley
Thursday January 16, 2020 - 09:14:00 PM

(Recorded 1/11/2020) 

Jack: We're two old poet fellows and we've known each other for a very long time. It's such a pleasure to be just chatting with John. We met when I published my first book, in 1987, a long time ago. There were three other people who were publishing at the same time and I thought I was running with the highest here. Mary Rudge, who is a wonderful poet from Alameda; H.D. Moe, who has been called a one-man experimental movement; and John Curl who, even then, was very deeply an activist poet. So I was among these high-class people. I was really delighted to be published with them. We did a few readings together with other poets but this is our first time in which just John and I are going to be reading. 

John: It's amazing that we've continued this connection, this relationship over these years. We worked with Mary Rudge’s poetry TV show at Alameda cable for a long time, and we worked together in PEN Oakland. 

Jack: Yes. Absolutely. We're going to be doing a reading at Bird & Beckett Books on the 30th of January. I think it will be a very interesting reading because we both have new books. 

John: Your book of poems, When Sleep Comes, Shillelagh Songs, and my novel, The Outlaws of Maroon

Jack: Neither of us has had a chance to read the other's book yet, but we’re familiar with each other's work over 30 years because we've been on and off running into each other, seeing each other's work, talking about poetry, arguing about things. You know, friends for 30 years and I think that's quite amazing. But tell me a little bit about The Outlaws of Maroon. What’s the story about? Without giving it all away, you know. 

John: It's set in the early 1950s, the early McCarthy era, in New York City. It’s about a group of kids rebelling in a public school. Fourth-graders. It's about the world of children and the adult world in conflict, in an atmosphere of political repression and attacks on freedom of thought. The kids find a forgotten room in the foundations of a building, and struggle to build their own world there and live their dreams, while the Cold War is enveloping their school. 

Jack: Kind of a great cover incidentally, the bridge and those children. Is that the Brooklyn Bridge? 

John: No, that's the George Washington Bridge, upper Manhattan. I grew up there, in the early McCarthy era. The Outlaws of Maroon is based on the world of my childhood and the school that I went to. The anti-communist witch hunts were affecting the whole community and affecting my school, and certainly affecting my family, since my grandfather was a union guy and the union he worked in was a communist union. 

Jack: [Chuckles] You had it there, yes, wow! 

John: I found out later that many people in my neighborhood were leftists also. It was a very progressive neighborhood. I also found out later that many public school teachers had been fired during the witch hunt, which I knew instinctively but I never really read in the newspaper. 

Jack: Just out of curiosity, was your neighborhood diverse or was it largely Jewish? 

John: It was mainly Jewish and Irish, except that the Irish kids went to a different school. 

Jack: Of course. 

John: So we met in the street. The streets were more diverse than the schools were. 

Jack: There's an Ira Gershwin lyric, “Loves the Irish, loves the Jews.” That connection has been going on for many and many a year. Also, the connection of course between the Jews and African-Americans as well. But I wondered because I've always felt that there was at least an overtone in McCarthyism of anti-semitism. More than a little. 

John: Of course, you've got the Rosenbergs. 

Jack: Exactly. 

John: That didn't go over very big in my neighborhood. People were very frightened. So the setting is the McCarthy era, the anti-subversives witch hunt. I hate to use that word witch hunt, because of the way it’s being used today. 

Jack: That’s the way it was. 

John: It affected the schools. There was a chill going on in the schools. The first hundred pages of the book is like a kid's book. It's all from the kids' point of view. But it’s not a kids’ book. Later on, it gets more into the adults’ point of view. The mechanism is kids eavesdropping on the adult world and trying to figure it out, and trying to create their own world in response to it. 

Jack: Is that the Maroon world? I mean, The Outlaws of Maroon sounds like a science fiction title. 

John: Maroon is a place across the bridge in New Jersey, a real place and at the same time also a fantasy place that they want to escape to.

Jack: I was born in New Jersey, but I wasn't marooned there.

John: You'll have to read the book. 

Jack: It sounds like a fascinating novel and I certainly lived through that history as well. One of the interesting things is the shift in the word subversive, because at that time subversive meant something entirely negative. It was terrible to be subversive, certain people were going to jail for being subversive and now you can use it as a compliment about a book. Or about a comedian. Oh, he's so subversive. I mean it's changed entirely, but maybe it's going back to the other meanings what with our president. 

John: Now tell me about When Sleep Comes, Shillelagh Songs. Why do you call them Shillelagh Songs? 

Jack: Thank you for pronouncing it correctly. What I'm discovering is that most people don't know how to pronounce it and don't know what it is. For the audience, shillelagh is a club basically, that the Irish used to defeat their enemies and hit them on the head with. But nobody does that any more with shillelaghs. They’re very beautiful and people use them as canes. It's a kind of symbol of the Irish. “The same old shillelagh father brought from Ireland” was an old ‘50s song, that Gene Kelly did. And so the shillelagh for me represents the whole Irish tradition, which I also talk about in this book in various different ways. Suffice it to say in, in let's say 1906, the Irish were No Irish Need To Apply, they're understood as a drunken unreliable people. By 1950, less than 50 years later, the Irish were Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald and they were playing priests in this Protestant country. What happened? My poems explore that a little bit. 

John: We’re both part Irish. 

Jack: We've also had certain other things in common too—and this is perhaps something that people should know about—we are both widowers from a very long-term relationship. Neither of us, I think, was quite expecting to be in this situation where we both are, and that, too, has probably affected us. The book in which I sort of dealt with what happened to me with Adelle, was Grief Songs, and that has a lot of material in it. We had a kind of private world that we made up. And the only two people who knew about it were us. And then she died. And I was the only one left and I didn't know what to do. And it was a world that we referred to daily and we had voices for it. It was a complicated world that we had made up. And I decided to out it. It was called Dellwackia, the country. Dell for Adelle and who was called Dell Dell when she was a child, and I got the name Jack Wack from John Wayne. Jack Wack was me. They were king and queen of Dellwackia. They performed poetry together, rather like Adelle and me, but Jack Wack always played The Palace, you know, because he was king and that's where he played. There were no silly theaters. He only played The Palace. Anyway, I dealt with all of that and allowed it to become more public. And there were drawings that we made and all kinds of stuff. It became much more public. 

John: That’s in your other book, Grief Songs

Jack: It's now actually shared in many, many ways by Sangye, who likes the world that I was creating then and we’re able to share that. So it became an enormously important part of her relationship to me. When Sleep Comes, Shillelagh Songs has a whole section called Sangye. When we met, I didn't think there'd be any chance at all of a romantic relationship. I mean, just not possible. But I wanted one. I met her because I was visiting her stepfather David Meltzer, the poet, who was a friend of mine. I know this sounds funny, but I wanted to tell David what I'd say about him when he was dead. I wanted him to know what I'd say after he died. He was dying and he knew it. Yeah. And I did that, but I met this gorgeous young woman, you know, I mean, she walked over to me and said, “I don't believe I know you.” Well, you know, I can fix that. I was enchanted and I didn't know I could feel like that. I came in with the weight of death upon my shoulders and grief and all of those things. And there was this beautiful young woman, but I was 78, she was 34. I didn't think there'd be any chance. So I came home and wrote a poem: “50 Designs to Murder Magic”: Can you say she took your breath away/Yes I can say that/But you talked on to her/And that/ Required/Breath/Can you say she was beautiful/Yes, I can say that/Her hair especially was beautiful/And her serious/Eyes/But she was also/Exceptionally kind/She listened when you spoke/Yes, and laughed/When I said/Something amusing/Yet her laughter seemed almost/Reluctant/As if she couldn't quite help herself/As if something came from within/(As something came from within me)/There was no way on earth we could be lovers/As I left she said, "It was wonderful to meet you."/I thanked her for being so considerate/Her hair moved often/As she moved 

John: Beautiful. 

Jack: And that's where it started. I tried to figure a way to get it to her. That's in this book, that's the beginning of the experience of Sangye that's in this book. And Adelle is here too, of course. 

John: Love and loss. 

Jack: One of the things that you didn't mention is that you had a... I won't say a near-death experience: you died for a brief moment or two. How did that affect you? 

John: I was in the middle of writing The Outlaws of Maroon at that point when... 

Jack: You weren't finished. Wow! 

John: No, I wasn't finished. And while I was lying... 

Jack: Terrible time to have that happen. 

John: While I was lying on the operating table, I thought of Lao Tze, the writer of the Tao Te Ching. The story is: he was leaving by the Western Gate and the keeper of the Western Gate held him there and wouldn't open the Western Gate until he wrote down and gave him a copy of the Tao Te Ching. And I was thinking how fortunate that Lao Tze didn't exit the Western Gate without leaving us the Tao Te Ching. I thought I was not going to have that opportunity to leave this work which I was working on. So, when I got back from my near-death experience, I just dug into it because at that point, I didn’t know how long I was going to live. I thought, well okay. I'm going to make the most of this short time and finish this work because it was important to me. 

Jack: One of the things I think that happens to older writers is the presence of death. 

John: Absolutely. 

Jack: I had... it's not quite the same kind of experience. It was a very strange experience. I saw Adelle through her death and wrote a book about it, Grief Songs. That really helped me as I was seeing her through her death to deal with it. It was very, very difficult for me and her death was the worst day of my life, the day she died. Bar none. Undoubtedly worse than the day of my own death whenever that will be. How do you deal with that stuff? When Sleep Comes, Shillelagh Songs is also a kind of result of that. One of the things that seems to have happened to me is that my writing got better. And though I've always been reasonably prolific, I've gotten more prolific and I found myself in a situation in which I'd be writing a doggerel poem, something for somebody's birthday. Just to wish them a happy birthday. Nothing much. And it would start to get good. You get some good lines and things like that. It would become better than the doggerel poem I just started out to write. And that kind of thing happens. I think there's a great line in Whitman’s poem, "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d." Death's outlet song of life. I think that's what I've been experiencing. I survived the death Adelle had to die, and it's death's outlet song of life that I have been experiencing in this kind of crazy creativity that I've been going through recently. But you too. Death gave you a voice to speak. 

John: It gave me a voice to speak and also it really changed a lot of things in my approach. Now, I really gather up all of my energy when I'm writing, to write only the most important things because I don't really know if I have time for the garbage. 

Jack: I don't know your new book yet, The Outlaws of Maroon, because I’ve had no chance to read it. I'm anxious to. Was the book changed because of your near-death experience? 

John: I became totally focused on it. The book originally came to me from the sky. I sat down to write something else and all of a sudden from out of nowhere, this book came to me. 

Jack: I understand completely. Yeah, Jack Spicer used to say that poetry comes from Martians. 

John: Yes it does. To me poetry is kind of the same thing. It’s floating across the room and you kind of grab it and pull it down. 

Jack: Right, yes. Or it grabs you. 

John: It grabs you and pulls you down. 

Jack: One of the very interesting things about your whole career has been the extent of which you've been involved in politics as well as poetry and your work has been trying to meld the two in some ways or another. 

John: Poetry is really part of my life, but not my whole life. The creative part that shines a light on the rest of my life and brings energy to the rest of my life. 

Jack: What's the rest of your life? 

John: I'm just an ordinary person. Just getting up, putting my shoes on in the morning. 

Jack: I'm just an ordinary man. 

[Laughter] 

Jack: You had a career as a woodworker. 

John: Yes, I made a living as a woodworker for over 40 years. 

Jack: Do you still do that now that you're retired? As a hobby or anything like that? 

John: No. You need machinery. I still have hand tools. I do a few things. Also it's dangerous machines and heavy work, so I don't do that anymore. 

Jack: Good idea. I can see why. Now we're going to read for about 30 minutes each at Bird and Beckett in San Francisco on the 30th at 6:30. Can we tell people what to expect? 

John: You will be reading from the Shillelagh Songs, and I'll be reading from The Outlaws of Maroon.  

Jack: That's true. But will we overwhelm them? We hope so. We're old guys. We've got a lot to say. So we hope that the people who are listening to this or reading it will be interested to come to the reading. We've done many readings, so we're not newbies at this at all, and we love both of us to perform. And we’re old friends. I think some of that will come through in the reading too, the affection and respect that we feel for one another, which is not always the case among poets. 

John: It will be a lot of fun too.