Cahiers de Corey

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Kind of sick, worn out from traveling and general excitement. Full weekend, what with the grad student theory conference on Friday and Saturday (heard some really excellent papers on the topic of mimesis and poetics [not necessarily together] by Buffaloers Michael Cross, Eli Drabman, and Thom Donovan, along with Cornell stalwarts Alex Papanicolopoulos, Pedro Erber, and Alex Young-Bryant; plus a fascinating and useful lecture by Michael Hardt of Empire fame on the topic of multitude) and then of course the Soon reading with Ann Buechner and Mark Lamoureux. Be on the lookout for Mark's new manuscript, whose name I can't recall but which uses the names of stars as jumping-off points for intensely lyrical and moving poems. This morning Mark guest-starred in the D&D game, during which our intrepid heroes climbed precariously down into a not-quite bottomless pit, fought off a cloud of killer bats, and then took out a hideous Siamese zombie (two zombies badly stitched together). Experience points for all my friends!

I've admired Simon DeDeo's poem review blog Rhubarb Is Susan for some time now, and now I'm delighted to report that he's turned his acute and sympathetic critical eye on one of my own poems. The poem in question is pretty old, dating almost to Montana days, and it's interesting to get a fresh perspective on it. Simon doesn't call any attention to its being a ghazal in his review, but that kind of makes sense since I found the ghazal form to be more of a useful generative procedure than a form I was using in full consciousness of its history and implications. A form of orientalism, perhaps, but at the time it was a useful spur to the imagination. I kind of like the requirement that the poet insert his or her own name into the final line; it's a kind of boomerang treatment of lyric subjectivity for a form that puts most of the focus on the semi-objective fact of obsessive repetition. Anyway, my thanks to Simon.

Speaking of obsessive repetition: I know they're kind of evil, but via Paul Guest I've just discovered Amazon's rather beautiful new "Concordance" feature, a representation of the 100 most frequently used words in a book. In the case of Selah the top words are "eyes," "light," and "water," with "air," "mother," "sea," and "white" following close behind. Draw your own conclusions.... Looking forward to what they'll discover about Fourier Series (seventeen days remain!).

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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