August 19, 2014, was a terrible day for the United States, for journalists and aid workers in war zones, or for anyone sickened by the violence and destruction wrought by ISIS, the radical Islamic group that has taken control of parts of Syria and Iraq over the past few years.
That was the day James Foley, an American video and text journalist who had been kidnapped by ISIS members in Syria in 2012, was beheaded, his execution videotaped by his captors and posted on the Internet. Foley, who was 40, became the first American killed by ISIS.
His death sparked outrage and grief in many places, including in the Pioneer Valley, where Foley had once been a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, working toward an MFA in fiction in the early 2000s. Former professors and colleagues, amid their sorrow, remembered him as a generous, warm-spirited person who was dedicated to helping others.
Now those colleagues and friends are paying tribute to Foley again, and they’re doing so in the way they know best: with the written word. In “Ghazals for Foley,” they’ve produced a collection of original poems that celebrate Foley — a teacher, writer and journalist — and chart their own memories of him.
And on April 27, several of the contributors will come together at Amherst Books to talk about Foley and read from the collection, published by HINCHAS Press of Los Angeles. All proceeds from the collection’s first printing will be donated to the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes press freedom, advocates for imprisoned journalists and funds educational opportunities for disadvantaged youth.
“This was something we’d been thinking about for some time,” said poet Martín Espada, a professor of English at UMass and one of Foley’s teachers. “The question was, what do we, as poets, do about his death? How can we gather together and share what we feel, and do that in some poetic form?”
Espada credits Yago S. Cura, a UMass MFA writing program graduate and a friend of Foley, for putting the volume together. Cura, a poet, teacher and librarian in Los Angeles, is also the publisher of an online poetry journal, Hinchas de Poesía, and in “Ghazals for Foley,” he has collected poems from 23 of Foley’s friends and colleagues, including Espada and himself.
In an introduction, Cura explains that the idea of having contributors write (primarily) ghazals came from reading an Oct. 2014 New York Times article that said Foley had converted to Islam while he was imprisoned, perhaps to defy his captors. A ghazal is a poetic form with Middle Eastern/Asian origins that includes rhyming couplets and a refrain, such as a repeated word or phrase, at the end of each couplet.
“Using the ghazal’s form to ‘speak’ with Jim made sense to us, I guess, because of how the repetition crescendos,” Cura writes, “and because the form has addressed separation, mourning and loss for centuries.
“Maybe,” he adds, “we chose to write to him in a dialect that forces us to traipse in clunky, couplet boots because what we’ve come to say is painful and devastating.”
Foley, who grew up in New Hampshire, received an undergraduate degree in Spanish and history from Marquette University in Wisconsin in 1996 and then taught in Arizona for the Teach for America program. He came to UMass in 1999 to study fiction writing, then afterward got a degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Starting in 2008, he worked mostly as a freelance journalist in Iraq, Afghanistan and other overseas hot spots.
Espada, who taught Foley in a Latino poetry course at UMass and also served on his thesis committee, recalls him as someone “with a lot of intellectual curiosity, a lot of spirit and abundant generosity. He was very much guided by the principle of service to others.”
While he was at UMass, Espada notes, Foley taught at the Care Center in Holyoke, an education program for teenage mothers and pregnant girls who have dropped out of high school. Using his Spanish, Foley taught English and poetry at the center, Espada said: “I know his work was hugely appreciated there.”
Though he and Foley did not have specific discussions at UMass about Foley becoming a journalist — that decision was still in the future — it didn’t surprise Espada that Foley eventually ended up reporting from combat zones, including the Syrian civil war. “He was one of those rare people who have both physical and moral courage,” he said.
Because he was on campus when Foley was murdered, it fell to Espada, as one of his former professors, to field many calls from reporters, an experience that left him both horrified and almost numb, he says. It took Espada — an award-winning poet whose collection “The Republic of Poetry” was a finalist for a 2007 Pulitzer Prize — a long time to find a way to write about his former student.
In “Ghazal for a Tall Boy From New Hampshire,” Espada recalls Foley’s commitment to teaching and also reflects on the different ways people remember a person. His poem is something of a response to the question reporters asked him at the time: “Did you know him?”
He did, Espada writes, even as some of the students Foley once worked with knew another side of him: “He taught the refugees from an island where the landlords / left them nothing but their hands. In Spanish, they knew him. / They sounded out the English, made the crippled letters / walk across the page for him, all because they knew him.”
Brian Jordan, a fiction writer and teacher in Boston, became a good friend of Foley’s during their time in the UMass fiction writing program, and they stayed in touch afterward by email and in person, when possible. Jordan said they’d meet in Boston when Foley was flying to and from some of his journalism assignments; for a few years, they also spent New Years Eve together in Boston.
In “Ghazal for Jim,” Jordan recalls that time and imagines it still taking place, with Foley en route to an assignment in Latin America rather than the Mideast: “I’ll meet you at Logan for a beer and tell you everything I remember, aware / of the clock, your flight time getting closer.”
“Jim was such a charismatic guy,” Jordan said during a recent phone interview. “He was friends with so many different people — he brought people together. And he had this great generosity of spirit. I remember how closely he read my work. He really took it seriously and gave me good feedback.”
And as hard as it was to compose a poem for the collection, Jordan says in the end he was grateful for the opportunity: “He’d become such a public figure, with his picture on the news, and that had a kind of distancing effect. So it was nice to sit and remember him as I knew him.”
Another friend, Boston poet Daniel Johnson, taught with Foley in Phoenix, Arizona, in the 1990s and stayed in touch with him through the years. They traveled together to Cuba and Mexico and shared a love of literature, and Foley even introduced Johnson’s future wife to him.
So when Foley went missing in Syria, Johnson began writing a long narrative poem, “In the Absence of Sparrows” — it’s included in the new collection — to record his memories of his friend; the title referred to Foley being locked away from the everyday world. Yet Johnson left the poem open-ended, hoping Foley would eventually be released.
That hope was dashed in late August 2014, and Johnson has since contributed another work, “Ghazal for James Wright Foley,” that’s built around the refrain “Come home.” Johnson isn’t done yet: He’s left his job as the director of a writing center for Boston children and teens to write a full volume of poems about Foley.
“I want to preserve what I knew about him, what he did, to pay tribute to those memories,” he said. “He’s become this kind of heroic and tragic figure, but he was much more than that, and that’s how I’d like him to be remembered.”
Contributors to “Ghazals for Foley” will read Wednesday, 7 p.m. at Amherst Books, 8 Main St., Amherst. For information, call 256-1547.