Cahiers de Corey

Monday, May 17, 2004

Drew may have the right read on our inability to process American wrongdoing—he suggests that decades of repressing the guilt for the evil done in the name of "America" (c.f. slavery, American Indian genocide) have made denial the most powerful reflex we've got. Nevertheless, I continue to believe against evidence to the contrary that truth is powerful and impossible to suppress permanently. This Slate article suggests that we're only at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to trouble for the administration and its supremely arrogant, cruel, and despicable actions and policies. This story ain't going away. And I'm not Michael Moore's biggest fan, but I think Fahrenheit 9/11 is going to have an impact. Now, if Kerry would only step up to the plate that the Bushies have obligingly dusted off for him. If you haven't already, head on over to MoveOn.org and send him that "Go Big" message. He needs to hear it.

In poetry news I found a copy of Ashbery's Hotel Lautreamont on our bargain shelf for $3.98 and I'm trying to remember if I have it already. It seems like every time I see an Ashbery book remaindered (it happens often) I'm convinced I already own it. Maybe I should write down what I have on a notecard and carry it around with me. For me a little late Ashbery can go a long way, but he sure does come up with great titles: "Not Now But in Forty-Five Minutes," "Private Syntax," "The Great Bridge Game of Life," "A Stifled Notation," "From Palookaville." He really does just riff, doesn't he? Somebody ought to do a study of casual poetry, if they could find a way to go about it. It's not just him and O'Hara—I'm convinced many poets, including myself, simply dash off a fair amount of stuff, and it's just as good or better than what gets labored on for hours and weeks and years. "If it doesn't come easy it doesn't come at all"—who said that? Might be a line from Augie March, which has bogged down a bit since its hero ran off to Mexico with the heiress to practice falconry. (Seriously, that's what he does.)

Slow night at the Bookery. Should read poems but I'd rather finish this Henning Mankell mystery. They're like candy. Poisonous candy.

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