Cahiers de Corey

Tuesday, January 14, 2003

Back from an evening screening of the final two episodes of The Prisoner, the classic '60s TV series starring Patrick McGoohan. Two highly theatrical hours of television worthy, I think, of Beckett—whose plays on film I now have a chance of seeing because my friend Sam is an inveterate and indefatigable collector of cool media (in addition to the Beckett he has the entire first season of Twin Peaks on DVD, and he also has a vintage low-res Nintendo unit with a stack of classic games like the original Legend of Zelda). I had the pleasure of introducing Sam to The Prisoner and was gratified and slightly alarmed when he proceeded to collect all seventeen episodes. So Sam and his wife Maryam and their enormous and enthusiastic yellow Lab Blünchen (spelling, Sam?) sat and watched the show deconstruct itself. My take on the bizarre final episode, "Fall Out," is that No. 6's quest for individuality has literally gone as far as it can go. He has utterly rejected the coercive community of the Village but at the price of internalizing it into himself (as indicated by his retention of the Butler's services). The Prisoner cries out for a Lacanian interpretation: No. 2, standing in for le nom du père attempts by hook or crook to get No. 6 to admit that he's castrated ("Why did you resign?") and No. 6 simply won't do it, arguing from either the perverse position, as he seems to do in most of the episodes (there is no natural "no," no bar he will recognize to his desire) or the psychotic, as in "Fall Out." In that episode the mysterious No. 1 is "revealed" as a man wearing a black-and-white mask, under which is an ape mask, under which is No. 6's own face, and language breaks down into either incoherent laughter or the mindlessly repeated lyrics of three intersectings songs: "Dem Bones," "Pop Goes the Weasel," and the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love."

What a great show. I've been hooked on it since I watched the entire run at a friend's house (Andy Plotkin, are you still out there?) on bootleg VHS tapes when I was in college.

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“Joshua Corey has reinvented the good old-fashioned American avant-garde epic poem (Whitman, Stein, Crane, O’Hara) and thrust it, kicking if not screaming, into the early 21st century, ‘rescued / by what survives the will to survive.’ The result is thrilling, and unlike any poetry I know.”

—John Ashbery

"Joshua Corey’s The Barons is a sprawling collection of poems intent on toeing the line between the profound and the glib, brainy deconstruction and guttural implosion. These poems are like toys cranked up to the point of breaking or like hurricanes whipped into speed and spinning furiously in place."

—Joe Hall, Colorado Review

Available from Omnidawn Publishing and wherever books are sold.

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself.

"Corey’s prose registers the sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the novel’s characters — primarily the protagonist — in truly the only way such characters actually come to life: they live in language, and to that end the writing in Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page."

--Daniel Green, Full Stop

"We hold a letter, its creases worn nearly through from years of opening and folding shut again. Yet each reading is a revelation, a shock, a mystery, a challenge. Corey gives this a new jolt, a new charge, in this rich and intensely self-reflective novel."

--Spencer Dew, decomP

Available from Amazon in print or Kindle editions, from Small Press Distribution, and from the publisher, Spuyten Duyvil Press.

One of the Academy of American Poets' Notable Books for 2011.

"Joshua Corey's book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing. . . . [A]n extraordinary volume." —Paul Hoover

"These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness. . . . What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess 'the shipwreck of the singular' in the maelstrom of the many. . . ." —Michael Palmer

"In Severance Songs, Joshua Corey tends to the always-mysterious border that connects the interior and the exterior. Is one inside the tale if one alludes to it? Is the eye tethered as witness to what it sees? And who can avoid singing these 'culpability cantos'? Yet if the lush Eden of intimacy foresees our later expulsion, this poet shows us how to stand at the garden's threshold where 'reaching builds on reaching.' Corey risks the possible emptiness inherent in rupture to seek out the ways we are 'knotted to one another's possibilities.' The architecture of the poem, he reveals, is replete with doors and windows and it is for us to discover whether we are looking in or looking out." —Elizabeth Robinson

Now available from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or your local bookstore.

Read reviews at Publishers Weekly, Wave Composition, The Critical Flame, TrainBust, Poetry Northwest, and in Spoon River Poetry Review.

Goodreads

Joshua's bookshelf: currently-reading

Swann's Way

by Marcel Proust

Slowly, slowly sinking into the astonishingly sensual memory-world of Proust. At forty, I think I'm finally old enough to appreciate it. Reading the Moncrief but I'd like to check out the Lydia Davis translation as well.

tagged: currently-reading