Cahiers de Corey

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Okay, I know I promised dirt on AWP as well as verbal mementoes of my assorted travels. But I'm just too tired! I will, however, list some highlights of the past ten or eleven days in roughly chronological order:

- Hanging out with Richard and Trevor. These guys are my poetry brothers and we always have a great time together. I miss them something awful.

- Meeting Richard's mom and brother in Portland; his brother looks just like him.

- Reading with Richard at PSU thanks in part to the gracious offices of Michele Glazer (author most recently of Aggregate of Disturbances from Iowa). Portland State is Richard's alma mater and it was fun to see the hometown boy make good. Also, my cousins Dan Smith and Josh Davidson live in Seattle and they came out to see me read for the first time. Met Dan's girlfriend Bethany for the first time, too.

- Discovering Open Books in Seattle for the first time. What an amazing store and what an amazing couple the owners John and Christine are. There was an especially nice crowd at our reading, plus three of our old Montana writing buddies who now live in Seattle (with babies!) showed up: Betsy Haring (sp?), Jon Groebner, and Emily Bedard.

- Powells! My god, you'd need three days just to browse the first floor! I had cannily brought some books to trade and so only spent $20 total on a number of interesting titles, including Johanna Drucker's Figuring the Word, the original edition of Peter Gizzi's beautiful first book Periplum, and the long-coveted double issue of o-blek, Writers from the New Coast. Next time I'm bringing a bigger box.

- The most marvelous fish and chips at a place called Chinooks in Seattle. Spring for the halibut.

- Seattle's great beauty and cosmopolitan vibe. Like a less pretentious San Francisco. Very high on my list of places I'd like to settle.

- Our AWP panel and the nice comments we got from seemingly everyone we met afterwards.

- The book fair: I'm not at home so I can't provide a list of everything I stuffed into my duffel bag, but I will tell you what I bought and read on the plane: Canadian film director Guy Maddin's wonderfully bitchy memoirs, From the Atelier Tovar, and A Book from Nicole Brossard's The Blue Books, both from Coach House. Passed up on both volumes of Steve McCaffrey's collected for just $12 each, a decision I now regret. The press' director, Alana Wilcox, was very friendly to me and invited me to come and tour the press (it really is in an old coach house) if I ever come up to Toronto. Which I will certainly do.

- Meeting up with Montana folks old and new; I pretty much covered this in my earlier post.

- The friendly atmosphere of Vancouver in general and the conference in particular; there were as always plentiful opportunities for humiliation but I managed not to answer that door. I think.

- New York, New York! Yesterday my parents and I took the ferry into Manhattan and one of the most flawless spring afternoons imaginable. We wandered through the galleries in Chelsea, then down to a late lunch/early dinner at Pastis, a terrific bistro on what I think they call little 12th Street. From there we ambled down to Houston and over to Bowery to Dixon Place, where we were treated to the most marvelous hospitality by Paul Johnson, Ellie Covan, Kimberly Brandt, and some other very cool folks. Embarrassed to realize that I'd met my fellow reader, Matthew Burgess, when he'd come up to read as part of Jane Sprague's West End Reading Series a couple of years ago with Lisa Jarnot. It was actually something of a West End reunion because Jen Coleman and Allison Cobb also showed up. I also got to meet Brend Iijima for the first time along with Erica Kaufman, both of whome were kind enough to buy copies of Selah. Dixon Place is currently in a very cool, cozy, and casual black box space with lots of couches and a fridge full of beer. We read to a full house: I read just one poem from Selah, "Infected Elegy" (which is strangely fun to read considering what a sad poem it is) and devoted the rest of my time to Fourier Series. Matthew read from a new chapbook, Yeah, You and some new poems, delighting me by ending with a New York poem with "pastoral" in the title. I'm semi-languagey, he's more New York School; it made for a surprisngly good mix. Rode the ferry home to New Jersey looking back at the blazing skyline feeling a little bit like the Michael J. Fox character in Bright Lights, Big City, only without the cocaine.

Found my second wind, I guess. That's all the news for now, though the alert among you will have spotted bigger news to come....

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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