Cahiers de Corey

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Had a pleasant visit with John Beer of Bridge magazine yesterday—his parents live in the area and we got together for some coffee. Bridge is an arts magazine based in Chicago but by no means provincial, especially now that they're about to quadruple their print run. Look for the magazine in your local bookstore.

Trying to explain to myself what nature has to do with language in pastoral. Is language like nature? Can I simply take the various metaphors on hand treating language and books like natural objects (Leaves of Grass, anyone?) at face value? Or is some theory possible, plausible? Keep running up against my own resistance every time the words "nature" and "poetry" meet: my interest in pastoral is really social and literary. Nature is important in its capacity as Being and non-identity: it's the model for any object that demands to be treated as an end in itself. So I'm just extending the categorical imperative to birches and wetlands? In revising my Pound chapter, I'm arguing that Pound moves from a highly subjectivist view of nature as that which is to be shaped by a knowing subject's techne (with Mussolini as arch-subject), to an encounter with nature as negativity: exposed to the elements he discovers the fragility of his own subjectivity and the need to treat both natural objects and literary objects (the moment of "objectification" in a text, to use Zukofsky's term) with new respect. Pound preaches a kind of objectivity in many of his writings, anticipating his buddy WCW's "no ideas but in things," but only in extremis does he discover the ethics of what we might call ecological objectivism. His relationship to his language changes: just as "when the mind hangs by a grass blade / an ant's forefoot shall save you," so shall language that breaks free from historical overdetermination (the "vortex" that the language of the earlier Cantos gets poured through) provide refuge for a troubled mind. Approaching an object aesthetically is more ethical than approaching it conceptually or in the service of production. But such an ethics only goes as far as refusal. Maybe a later constructivist like Ronald Johnson could be said to try and build with nature/language in a new way, natura naturata, while respecting the otherness of his objects, not making them subservient to a totalizing myth. Bricolage, eco-lage.

Someone gave me a copy of last month's Paris Review: what a cumbersome, stuffy magazine it is! Maybe worth reading for the interviews: Les Murray, Shirley Hazzard, Charles Simic. They don't seem to print a facsimile of the writer's first draft of something any more, which is a shame. That's one of the more enjoyable features of Lungfull!—along with the waterproof cover.

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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