Cahiers de Corey

Sunday, February 16, 2003

Jim Behrle, poet, firebrand, and editor of can we have our ball back?, has posted an exhilirating speech he made at a San Francisco Small Press Traffic event yesterday (while, presumably, the marches were going on—and how thrilling was that—millions of people shouting millions of NOs? At the very very least Tony Blair will have to sit up and take notice) about the bad rap our generation of poets (Generation XXXVII, I think Ron Silliman likes to call us) gets from the generation that came up in the sixties. I don't endorse everything he says—how could I, being fully embarked upon the course of professionalization that he decries?—but I almost reflexively seize upon his claim for the relevance of young poets versus the tendency of certain older poets at certain times to become mired in dreams of beatnik glory. Let me add my voice to Jim's chorus and say: Get over it. Let me quote Jim quoting John Yau in the Poetry Project Newsletter: "All moments are historical." Abso-damnly right.

While I also want to simultaneously endorse Robert Creeley's declaration that "Poets are a company and poetry must finally be a tribal art, despite the fierceness of the contest," as well as Jim Behrle's update that "poetry is a Casanostra" (I take this to be a conflation of casa nostra, "our house" with the Sopranos-style "cosa nostra"), I think it's also healthy to remember that a poet should at least hesitate to join any club that would have him or her as a member. I'm a little alarmed by Jim's list of extra-poetic influences: "I'm thrilled to be influenced by Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, ABBA, Beck and The Pixies." Alarmed because I've been influenced by the exact same list. I guess it makes me wonder if our "generation" is really something much narrower: white boys and girls from the suburbs traumatized less perhaps by AIDS or Rodney King-style injustice as the sudden evaporation of the certainty that we ourselves would be evaporated by a nuclear war. When I look at the eighteen year-olds in my class I'm struck by the thought that not only is their pop culture subtly different from mine but also that they simply don't remember the Soviet Union, much less Reagan's promise that "The bombing will start in ten minutes." I guess I'm just reacting here to Jim's attempt to crystalize his historical moment, which is also mine, which is also passing as surely as the Sixties did. It's not just Silliman, Hejinian, and Larry Fagin who are going to be challenged to remain open and relevant in the coming years.

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