Cahiers de Corey

Monday, May 12, 2003

Wandering around in the tall grasses of theory. Trying to fit the most interesting pieces of Kristeva, Levinas, and Lacan (or maybe it would be more accurate to say: the pieces I think I understand) under the category of "pastoral" because I have an intuition about what the resulting framework might tell me about the strategies of some poets: Oppen, Zukofsky, Williams, Stein, Duncan, Creeley, Johnson. Who knows? I can't explain it to myself yet. This is what happens when I read a great synthesizing book like Jameson's Marxism and Form, it makes me feel like I understand everything in general even though I understand very little in particular. So I try to get particular. Slogging through Revolution in Poetic Language; I think I get the gist, but my God there's a lot of Husserlian and Chomskyan and psychonalytic jargon to hack through first. In a nutshell: Kristeva seems to think that poetic language is the root and ordinary forms of discourse are branches: communication is made possible not by what you posit but by what you lop off and suppress. When you trouble the procedures of ordinary discourse you have poetry, or at least the poetic impulse. Simple enough, right? Why does she have to go on about all those Greek words? At least transliterations are provided. Chora. Hyle.

Bought a new notebook for myself, a total indulgence at $9. It has a nifty black cover with a lizard-like texture and it's ruled with green lines. The green lines sold me. It's also a bit smaller than the usual 9 x 11 notebook size, which I like. And it's slim. Sometimes you have to let your inner aesthete have his head.

Like everyone else I'm being wowed by Barbara Guest's Forces of Imagination. I will definitely use some of this material in my creative writing class this fall. She makes me want to go read Mallarmé's essays but hey, what doesn't?

Also secretly regretting not purchasing a used copy of Wittgenstein's notes for the Tractacus—another book more read about than read, at least in my case.

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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