Featured Poet: Jack Foley "Selva Oscura (original) (raw)

2003

Abstract

In our culture, a male child is encouraged to identify himself with his father, yet the atmosphere of the child's home is created almost entirely by his mother. I knew almost nobody who was Irish except my father, I never saw my surname repro? duced anywhere except in the case of Country-and-Western (then "Cowboy") singer, Red Foley, whose music held little interest for me. My father was an ex vaudevillian a tap dancer and now manager of the local Western Union office; he had almost completely lost touch with his family. We were the only Foleys in Port Chester, New York: really, for all I knew, we might have been the only Foleys anywhere. Italians, on the other hand, were everywhere and they had a strong sense of being Italian. My best friend Frankie di Giacomo told me he was sure that the singer Perry Como was orginally Perry di Giacomo. Was it Joe Masi who whispered that Jimmy Durante's Mrs.Calabash was almost certainly Mrs. Calabrese? What could I feel but a deep sense of exile a sense that my true home had to be elsewhere? Neither one thing or the other, I might have said, with Dante's Muhammad, "Vedi com' io mi dilaccol" "Behold how I have torn myself apart!" I sent the above paragraph to my friend Joe Masi, who is mentioned in it. He was quick to assure me that much of what I wrote was untrue:

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