Cahiers de Corey

Friday, May 28, 2004

Feeling sleepy. Bill Clinton may be in town: he's giving the Cornell commencement address tomorrow at 9 AM. Emily and I are planning to go to pretend he's still president for an hour or so. Though you can't go home again: my feeling is that Bush & co. have made the egregiousness of American foreign policy in general more visible: they didn't invent it. Which doesn't mean there isn't a qualitative difference between their depredations and those conducted under Clinton: the destruction of any semblance of international cooperation has definitely made us much less safe than we were. Anyway, he's probably being whisked in and out of town an hour before and an hour after the speech, but who knows? Maybe he'll come into the Bookery for a browse after dining at Moosewood. Though he doesn't strike me as a big fan of vegetarian food.

Browsing through some poetry books tonight: Drew's book Sugar Pill reads like a witty attempt to comprehend the world by an anthropologist who just woke from a deep sleep: "I guess the ground used to be a more formidable barrier", he muses. I love the procedure of the first section of Eric Baus' The To sound: surrealist prose poems grasping (literally) at birds and sisters are periodically broken down into their constituent phrases in a page-as-field arrangement. I will keep reading. Also, I'm finally breaking down and buying the store's copy of In the American Tree. It really is a useful and comprehensive survey of what I can't help but call the most important movement in American poetry since the New Americans. We can't understand our present moment (which is not quite the moment of this book) without them. I'd love to teach a seminar on Language poetry; maybe I'll do it someday. "What Was Language Poetry?"--a question that pushes us toward asking the more urgent question, "What Is Poetry For Now?"

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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