Cahiers de Corey

Friday, February 25, 2005

The end of the chapter is so close I can taste it. Come on, big conclusion! Baby needs a new pair of shoes! While writing I'm listening to a CD I found used at Ithaca Books the other day, the Dilletti Pastorali of Johann Hermann Schein. Somehow it seems appropriate that the guy's last name would mean "appearing." Beautiful baroque choral music—a suitable soundtrack to what I'm writing. Other distractions: a new blog called The Great American Pinup with some refreshingly direct and thoughtful appraisals of poets as diverse as Mary Jo Bang and Adrienne Rich. And then there's this invitation from a new local outfit called the Ithaca Free School: anarchist education at its finest. I found the invitation letter inspiring and got permission from the School's founder to post it here:

My greetings to everyone.

I want to invite you all to join the email group for the Ithaca Free School. I hope
to generate more interest and participation in the School.

At present we have about ten regular or semi-regular participants. Our classes
mostly take the form of reading and discussion groups. There are no teachers,
although in some cases attendees with relevant knowledge may serve as facilitators.
All our classes are free and open to anyone with an interest in the subject matter.
Each class adapts its schedule to the needs of the participants and its pedagogical
procedure to the exigencies of the material. Classes are formed based on mutual
interest of at least two people. Therefore, if you have a friend, an interest, and
a time, whether one-time, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, we can declare it a Free
School class. The structure is intended to be as decentralized and
non-authoritarian as possible.

Our current subjects include Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Lucretius, Shakespeare,
Chaucer, Blake, the Bible, Heidegger and introductory Latin. Prospective classes
include German, the Cantos, American history from primary sources, the
Transcendentalists, and Dante. We have a weekly potlatch 7pm Thursday evenings at
the home of David Brazil and Crystal Koening. Our weblog
(ithacafreeschool.blogspot.com) updates daily with schedules, announcements, course
notes, and so forth.

At a time of political despair in our country, it is my belief that the individual
can best contribute not through alienated forms of protest politics but rather by
rethinking social practices and putting alternatives in place, here and now. Our
commitment to free education, to a non-institutional format, and to a common
interest in culture, is meant to question the usually unconsidered greed, ignorance,
selfishness, and obedience to power which governs our country, our cultural life,
and too often our own hearts. I hope that people who are committed to rethinking
education, and not only education, will contribute to this email group and
participate in the school.

For those of you out of town, I thought you might be interested in the goings-on. I
think this idea is one whose time has come (or come around again), and I hope it
spreads.

Best wishes to all -- David Brazil

They have a blog you can check out here. Right. Enough procrastinating. Either this chapter goes down or I do.

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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