Cahiers de Corey

Sunday, January 02, 2005

So happy New Year, or whatever. It's not a holiday that's ever registered much with me, though perhaps its artifice (the manmade calendar's rolling over—woo-hoo!) is worth celebrating. Dampened, so to speak, by the continuing and escalating horrors post-tsunami. Dampened further by news from Emily's father on New Year's Eve that he has prostate cancer. We are hoping for the best, naturally—it's far from being an automatic death sentence—but it necessarily casts some gloom. Still, it's good to be back in Ithaca after a mostly pleasant week in the world of urbanness: first Philly, then New York. Emily and I had a lovely time staying in her friend Rob's apartment in Cobble Hill, hanging out, visiting her friends (including an adorable and amazing new baby, Isaac Miles), going to restaurants, and seeing the Alvin Ailey company's performance Friday night (which included the legendary "Revelations"). I love dance and if I must make a New Year's resolution, I resolve to see more dance performances this year. Dance strikes me as the performance genre closest to poetry, not just because of its capacity for lyricism, but because its medium, the human body, resembles language in always meaning something: you cannot reduce the human form to its sheer materiality in the same way you can reduce paint or marble or metal. There's a passage in Kant where he talks about the human body and its peculiar status in aesthetic representation more or less because of this, though Kant I think phrases it in terms of the human being as the teleological goal of nature, which is a notion difficult to subscribe to these days.

Some new blogs and bloggers I've become aware of: digital litterateur Nick Montfort's Grand Text Auto (I met Nick at dinner Tuesday with William and Christian); Carocaro's memoir blog, oncenterstreet; and my friend and fellow Ithaca-based poet Jasper Bernes's whipsmart Little Red's Recovery Room. Wish I'd known he was in Philly when I was there; he could have met Brian and Richard. His review of the new Grand Theft Auto seems spot-on. We used to meet up for games of Halo at the now-defunct Wownet internet cafe on Aurora Street.

The dissertation sits hulked in the corner, waiting for me to notice it. To feed it or rebuke it. To give it some air.

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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