Cahiers de Corey

Monday, February 03, 2003

HISTORY OF FLIGHT

Yikes! Thirty-eight thousand feet and there's ice in my glass. Into the sun flies the head of a halo. Brilliant crystals up here and a network of blood vessels behind everybody's eyes, pressurized to sustain thoughts of level ground. A tickling. The orbiter burst and why not we?

Six flags over Texas and a Jewish star.

Leonardo's plan: to drop ice on Florence in the summer months. "Payload." The whirligig met the thingamabob and they made a baby with wings. Blue and oxygenated web that it's seeking from the nosecone. Inverted bell curve. Berlin through a bombsight, the impeccable network of death trains untouched.

Air power projects a spread hand over maps. Original dream from the air sexes landscapes and flattens their crowless history. Switzerland of peaks finds its ice eyed from lederhosen. The highest voice yodeling.

Eftsoons smoked spectacles heliograph at Kitty Hawk—the predator predated. Was there any so American as right? Those bicycle boys defend their patents jealously, fight their rivals' every featherèd plume. Wild spokes aflame with petroleum-glazed playing cards. True, true enough.

Dry bundled history set alight by wingèd tumblers. A smooth beast is born in a blue-eyed sky while the old squinting century smokes in a parking lot in Nacogdoches. Old-timey bankers shade their eyes cool green while a fiddle string snaps in the stratosphere. Fair thee well my lockboxed citizenry. Pop will eat itself.

Surly bonds of speech. "Throw weight." A hurled rock flies until the earth curves to meet it. Just in time manufacturing, that's gravity. Heeled and toed through the metronomed pine forest, gingermen search for the sons and daughters of apogee.

Earth in our eyes finds our tears' perihelion. Goonight multiethnic American star. Goonight the peace process and the falcon's heavy hood. Goonight moon, we're in our blackout period.

Telemetric seer O Houston the Raven, radio please with what we've done.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

“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