Cahiers de Corey

Wednesday, July 09, 2003

I'm Drew Gardner. It could be verse.

Frustration today because it turns out the Library of Congress form that my publisher and I sent for Selah was unacceptable because it was a poor photocopy, or the wrong sort of paper, or didn't smell right, or something. Federal bureaucracy! AARGH. So now we have to start all over again, which means either doing without LoC info (not even exactly sure what it's function is—do I need it if I want libraries to buy the book?) or pushing back the publication date till, I don't know, November or something. Verrrry frustrating. It gives me a dark premonition of bureaucratic snafus to come.

Been doing some good reading this week—started in on The Maximus Poems, which are much more like a novel than I ever would have guessed, and I'm also knee-deep in Kant and Kant-related things. Some interesting dovetailings between Kant, Lyotard's Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, and the book of one of my professors, Douglas Mao's Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production: it's all about the tortured relationship between subject and object, which I've become very interested in both as it pertains to the work of the Objectivists and as it might pertain to pastoral. I'm becoming more and more convinced that "pastoral" as a mode has nothing to do with shepherds and instead is just a manifestation of the ancient fantasy of a) the unity of the subject and b) the unity of that subject with the object world (which changes valences interestingly if you redefine object world along the lines of "history/society" rather than as "nature"). Kant's "serene" experience of the beautiful, as clarified by Lyotard, is nearly synonymous with what I've been thinking of as the pastoral: "The analysis of the beautiful allows one to hope for the advent of a subject as a unity of the faculties, and for a legitimation of the agreement of real objects with the authentic destination of this subject, in the Idea of nature" (159). Of course Lyotard goes on to call the analytic of the sublime a "meteor dropped into the work" (ibid) because he seems to have derived his notion of the differend from the incommensurability of the faculties of taste and desire, the one being always disinterested and the other being always very interested indeed. It's all fascinating to me and probably dull as dishwater for you to read about. I promise to get back to talking about actual poetry someday.

Why is everyone so interested in these quizzes all of a sudden? Does hot weather incline us to waste more time than usual? Me, I'm taking the dog for a walk, right after I figure out what poetic form I am.

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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.

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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