Cahiers de Corey

Sunday, October 03, 2004

What better way to celebrate my birthday than to go to the semi-annual Friends of the Library Book Sale? I am reliably informed that Ithaca's is one of the three largest in the country. Brought a box full home yesterday and a bag today, after which I really must cut it out. The birthday money is all but exhausted.

New acquisitions in no particular order:

Marjorie Perloff, Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters
Paul Valery, Aesthetics (Vol. 13 of The Collected Works in English)
The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (nice Random House hardcover)
Muriel Rukeyeser, Out of Silence: Selected Poems
Simone Weil: An Anthology
Jim Elledge, ed., Frank O'Hara: To Be True to a City
Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
John Wieners, Selected Poems 1958-1984
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Barbara Guest, Moscow Mansions
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography
James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company
Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Steve McCaffrey, Bouma Shapes: Shorter Poems 1974-2002 (especially happy about this because it has "Some Versions of Pastoral" that appeared in BAP 2004)
Four copies of the Henry Rago Poetry, all with Zukofsky contributions in them: June 1959, February 1960, May 1960, December 1960. Can you believe that a chunk of Bottom: On Shakespeare appeared in Poetry? Which is now such a sinkhole of self-importance, stuffiness, and outright malevolence (q.v. the "Antagonisms" feature in the latest issue)?

But I digress. I also acquired a few CDs, the most interesting of which by far is The Mother of Us All, an opera with music by Virgil Thomson and text by Gertrude Stein. Looking forward to giving that a listen.

Thanks for the happy birthday wishes, y'all. It's been a peaceable transition so far.

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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.

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