Cahiers de Corey: Noli illegitimi carborundum

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Noli illegitimi carborundum

Welcome back, Laura. I haven't followed the Foetry business for months and I don't intend to start again now. But it made me sad and angry to think that they were driving good, creative people from the scene. I'm glad they haven't succeeded. Instead of saying any more about the subject, I refer you to the thoughts of Chris Murray and the cartoons of Jim Berhle.

We at Soon had a fabulous weekend hosting Jennifer Michael Hecht, her clever husband John, and their sweet baby Max. Jennifer and partner-in-poetry Theo Hummer gave a kickass reading at the State of the Art Gallery Saturday night. Jennifer's a funny and committed reader, Brooklyn all the way—watch out for her new book, Funny, which entertainingly deconstructs some very old jokes. (A sample: Man says to woman, "Tell me, am I your first lover?" She replies, "Could be—your face looks familiar.") You can read some poems from her first book here—she read "History" last night and it was very moving. As for Theo, she regaled us with poems from a series she calls "Tales of the Naked Wandering Dead Lady"—gothic, funny stuff—and pulled off what is becoming one of her trademarks, a long poem many of whose sections were read by members of the audience. Aside from the basic value of putting the poem in front of the reader, which I think makes a reading feel friendlier (that's also one reason why we—well, Aaron—do broadsides for all of our authors), it's a delicious and slightly spooky aural effect to not know where the next piece of a poem is going to come from. The audience (a record turn-out—we'll put photos on the Soon site soon) went home happy. This morning, Emily and I had everyone over for brunch, where we played an excellent game John introduced called, I think, One Two Three. Two people count to three and each say a word; for example, this morning it was "flower" and "nectarine." Then two more people each say a word that they think somehow combines those two (we got "hybrid" and "sex"). The game continues until two people each say the same word. Simple, brilliant, loads of fun. I recommend it for your next poets' brunch.

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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