Cahiers de Corey

Monday, April 11, 2005

The new Boston Review is here and a worthwhile read, as usual. The theme is politics and religion, and there's a particularly useful article by Mike Gecan explaining the appeal of evangelical Christianity to ordinary Americans as THE major social force appealing to their sense of individual personhood, whereas the remannts of New Deal/Great Society programs insist on reducing them to statistical entities with statistical needs. Now I'm an atheist Unitarian Jew and I've long felt the notion of a personal relationship with God to be an act of monstrous solipsism (blasphemy if you like), mitigated by the fact that the people who need it most are those who need love and support and relationship the most and who aren't finding it anywhere else in our ruthless capitalist society. Reading Gecan's article, I was reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's fundamental insight that the most devastating American affliction was loneliness: the novel Slapstick contains his fullest articulation of this idea, while the idea and its dialectical critique (sorta, kinda: Vonnegut's not the most rigorous thinker around) are presented in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. I haven't thought of either of those books in many years, but the man was onto something. So I agree with Gecan that progressives and liberals need to find a way to address, acknowledge, and respect people's desire to be persons, without falling into the trap of pandering aggrandizement. I may not believe in God, but I do believe in love as the fundamental social force (something Michael Hardt alluded to in his lecture). Clinton succeeded politically because he made you believe in his love (its efficacy in his case is another question). A political party can't love, but it can stimulate its members' individual capacities for it. I just wish people weren't so dependent on daddy-love, on the harsh ascetic love of a spiritualized Father. Love the earth, people. Love the one you're with.

Also some good poems in this issue (Sarah Manguso and Debbie Kuan are standouts for this reader), Cal Bedient on Jorie Graham's latest, and a review by Brian Kim Stefans of the new collected poems of W.S. Graham, a modernist English poet I've loved since finding his selected in Wessex Books in Menlo Park five years ago. There's an interesting page devoted to him over at Harold Pinter's website (who knew he had one?). The book is twenty-five English pounds in hardcover but hopefully it will make its way to our shores soon.

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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