Cahiers de Corey

Saturday, March 22, 2003

Sadness. There was a picture in the Times today of an Iraqi soldier literally cowering in fear before an armed American soldier, shot from behind seemingly at waist-level, akin to the way most heterosexual porn renders the man anonymous. It's revolting. And there's an irrepressible sense of excitement that builds when reading—just reading! I don't have access to a TV—about military action that comes without my willing it. I may have to give up video games for good.

Didn't make it to the readings last night. Instead went out with the family to a French cafe called Le Zinc, where I gorged myself on cassoulet and wine. Then couldn't quite stay awake for a dance performance at Yerba Buena. Home and to bed. This morning it's finally gray outside, befitting my mood. And yet of course it's March 22 and my sister is 30 today. Let me switch gears for a moment:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY VANESSA!

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled gloom. I'm going to take my sister's car and head up to Green Apple for a little more browsing before crossing the Golden Gate into Marin where the big party is happening this evening. I've seen a little bit of the protests but I haven't been tempted to join them. There's a strange carnvial atmosphere around protests here, and in any case the last thing we need are antiwar protests in San Francisco. We need protests in Durham, Grand Forks, Denver, Des Moines, Houston. Especially Houston. And in New York and Washington, the only cities that can speak with any authority about what it's like to be attacked, and what they think the proper response is. There have to be sizable minorities, if not majorities, in both places which have not been deceived by Bush's ability to metonymically link Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in the same breath. It makes me doubt the basic postmodern stance that metonymy is more democratic, materialist, and immanentist than metaphor. There may not be any transcendent metaphoric horizon, but Bush's rhetoric certainly shows that metonymy as a device enjoys no necessary moral authority.

The war poem that Stephanie has posted speaks most directly to my Beckettian sense of helplessness today: "Protesting is useless. I'll go on protesting."

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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