Cahiers de Corey

Friday, August 08, 2003

Okay, it's official: I'm making a full epic ten-day excursion to Birmingham and beyond. Got my ticket and a reservation for the duration of the MSA conference at a charming (for Birmingham) little B&B in someplace called Acock's Green; spoke on the phone to a woman there named Margaret who was incredibly warm and gracious, putting me instantly at ease. According to the Frommer's website they even serve organic produce at this place. The rooms are probably small, but they can't be smaller than the room Emily and I had in the Hotel Place des Vosges in Paris spring of 2002 (Nada has made us both very nostalgic). That was a perfectly lovely experience—I highly recommend it—and although I'll be lonesome this time at least there'll be motherly Margaret down at the desk.

Where should I go once the conference ends? Wales? The Lakes? Edinburgh? East Anglia? Stratford-upon-Avon is just south of Birmingham if I want to be touristy. On the border between England and Wales there's Hay-on-Wye, which is supposed to have more used bookstores than any other town in the world. My dream would be to follow in the footsteps of Ronald Johnson and Jonathan Williams as they in turn followed the footsteps of Wordsworth and a number of other interesting English characters. I read the book that came out of that experience, The Book of the Green Man, this morning, and it was so purely beautiful that it made England, or rather the fantasy of England, real for me for the first time. Up till this point the trip seemed rather drab and businesslike in my mind—I mean Birmingham, or "the Brum" as the guidebooks insist on calling it, is not exactly a romantic destination. Now through Johnson's eyes I have the countryside, the hills and mountains, the rain, Grasmere, the Wye River, and other sights before my eyes the way I had cafes and arcades luring me on the trip to Paris. I only have five days or so after the conference, which would make it impossible to really follow Johnson and Williams (I'm also inspired by Richard Holmes' great book about biographying, Footsteps, which I read half of going to and from Chicago), but it would be marvelous if I could at least get onto their trail for a bit.

Gina Franco, who sent me a helpful nudging e-mail urging me to take the full trip this morning, still wants me to say something about the MFA/PhD split as I've incarnated it. Maybe I'll write on that this evening at the Bookery when I tire of poring over guidebooks.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

“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