Cahiers de Corey

Monday, May 31, 2004

Kent Johnson solicited my thoughts on his now infamous poem, "Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, or 'Get the Hood Back On.'" Here they are:

Hi Kent,

I have read the poem. I guess I want to say I'm glad to see you doing that thing you do. But you know, the petty rivalries of American poets look like pretty venial sins compared with the acts at Abu Grahib. And I find your alignment of poets with the soldiers who committed that acts to be a dubious one, since I happen to agree with those who argue that these soldiers were not acting as individual agents but were carrying out an all-but-written mandate from the Defense Department. Poets are as guilty of living off the embers of a dying imperium as any other American, but very very few of us are agents of the state. Even an NEA grant or a job in a public school or university is hardly equivalent to being a soldier in an army. If I or any other poet feels personally indicted by that penultimate paragraph--and sure, I feel indicted, why not admit it?--that probably has more to do with my reflexive willingness to consider my own culpability, aka the much-maligned phenomenon of liberal guilt. But I'm not going to waste a lot time on this emotion; instead I'm going to do my small part in booting the hell out of office those people without any such reflex. That is, those with severe and arbitrary limits on their empathy, which is the real failure of all the personae you present in the poem. Which is not to say that I think a President Kerry is going to make everything hunky-dory or do much of anything to alter the fundamentals of U.S. foreign policy. I'm going to work after he's elected to move him to the leftward; I want to see Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader in his cabinet; in short, I want a better compromise than we've got now. Because what we've got now is fucked. And if I have anything to thank Geo. Bush and company for, it's for raising my awareness of my complicity in evil, and for stimulating my desire to do good. Which may or may not have anything to do with my practice as a poet. It probably does. It has already certainly impacted that other much-maligned phenomenon, the subject matter of my poems. What necessary alignment exists between the form of reproduction I choose for those poems and their form/content is something I'm still actively investigating. For now, I choose to build locality into my practice--to foster community. The geopolitical for now remains confined to that odious cellblock, subject matter. At least it's not longer wearing a hood.

Your friend,

Josh

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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