Cahiers de Corey

Friday, June 20, 2003

Hello blogland. We have internet access in the new house now. It's big and full of boxes. My study is half set up, with a desk and the spare bed on one wall and all my books lining the other, plus two huge windows looking out on the street and another one facing the neighbors. It feels like it's going to take weeks to get completely settled, but Emily and I hope to accomplish a lot this weekend.

Got my contributor's copy of Fence on Wednesday and I've been perusing it. There's some excellent poetry in there by Martin Corless-Smith, Jason Zuzga, Eugene Ostashevsky (I love this guy! Who is he?), Eleni Sikelianos, Sarah Gambito, our own Jim Behrle, J. Eric Schwerer, and others I haven't read yet. What really makes the issue worthwhile is the essay by Kristin Prevallet (who impressed me with her intelligence and passion as a member of the translation panel I attended at AWP), "Writing Is Never by Itself Alone: Six Mini-Essays on Relational Investigative Poetics." Among other things, this essay has persuaded me to seek out and read Glissant's book on relational poetics; it's also made me think that this issue of Fence might make a good textbook for my creative writing class this fall. It would expose them to some of the kinds of things that are being written right now, and it would also force them to rethink any preconceptions they might have about poetry as inspiration/metaphysical autobiography/etc. Also useful along these lines are the little essays they've collected from various writers and artists under the title" "'Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Newspeak': Reclaiming Rhetoric and What Artists Can Do Now" in which the respondents were asked to talk about the role of the artist in the face of media hegemony and collusion with the forces of empire. Some of it is quite provocative, some of it is smart, some of it is dumb, but it would again serve to show students that there's more to "creative writing" than mere self-expression. Q: Is it wrong of me to force upon my students a magazine in which one of my own poems appears? A: I don't think so. It might make poetry look more like something real people can actually do as opposed to something only found in anthologies.

I'm working again tonight at the Bookery; Fridays are slow so I may have more to post then.

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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