Cahiers de Corey

Thursday, March 06, 2003

Gee, I played Dungeons & Dragons in high school, and beyond. Does that make me irredeemable? It makes me a geek, but I'd wager everyone reading this right now, much less anyone with a blog of their own, is on the same geeky plane. Try to deny it and I'll sic my sixth-level elf fighter/magic-user on your ass.

Don't know if it was because I mentioned him, but Joshua Clover has been taking a beating on Andrew Mister's blog (scroll down for the link) and David Hess' too (Heathens in Heat at left). The man stirs up a lot of ire, but then so do most poets who have been anointed by Jorie Graham. She is so consistent in choosing to publish former students that it must be a conscious policy; I even have a hazy memory or delusion that I've read her saying something to that effect, that she even considers it a duty to get her best students published. I also happen to think that a lot of the enmity directed toward Jorie stems from her being a powerful (in po-biz terms) woman. So there's a lot of sour grapes involved, I dare say. At the same time, her hyperbolic blurbs (if you think Clover's is over the top grab a copy of Mark Levine's Debt) are something no first-book poet could possibly live up to if his (it's usually a he) name isn't John Keats. As for Clover specifically, his book was important to me when I came across it, but that was before I understood his roots and influences—I'd never seen an abecedarian poem before, for instance. I think it's high time he came out with another book so we could judge him good and properly.

There's the poetry wars and the real deal. This morning on the radio I heard the announcer say something like, "Because of concerns about Arab allies, military planners are doing everything they can to minimize civilian casualties." Hey now, that's a relief. It's nice to know that our concerns with pacifiying our uppity puppet states are the only reason we can come up with for not slaughtering thousands of innocent people (though it won't stop us from selling out the Kurds, one group of Iraqis who will decidedly NOT be liberated by American action). Shock and awe—terror and death is more like it. It's digusting. I'm disgusted. What else is new? If it weren't for "Old Europe" I'd lose whatever remaining faith in Western civilization that I had.

Worth repeating: Reporter says to Gandhi, "What do you think of Western civilization?" Gandhi: "I think it would be a good idea."

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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