Jack Foley's 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 ''tradition,'' Foley offers
readings rooted in a consciousness which is
simultaneously non academic and open to the new. ''The
self of this book,'' he writes, ''is not a unity but a
multiplicity. Many people would agree with this idea of
selfhood - the self as a multiplicity of voices' - 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.'' Foley's
explorations lead him into radically new readings of
''canonic'' work by poets such as Keats, Yeats and
Mallarm , into the world of opera, free jazz, New
Formalism, and the writing of song lyrics, into
''ethnic'' literature, theater, and finally into
problems of ''spoken word'' and ''slam poetry.''
Throughout, his point of view, initially controversial,
becomes finally compelling. ''It is possible,'' he says
quietly about the whole of Western culture, ''that Plato
was wrong, and that we must make an effort to think in a
different way if we are to encounter reality at
all.''
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