Cahiers de Corey

Thursday, September 08, 2005

I seem unable to return to blogging as usual. Partly I'm overwhelmed trying to juggle a new teaching schedule with my bookstore job and dissertation obligations, while contemplating the academic job market to boot. Mostly, though, I'm consumed by indignation about the Katrina situation every time I go online. Read this eyewitness report of conditions on the ground there. And this will have you calling for the heads of FEMA and the androids at Fox News.

Still my mind does return by fits and starts to poetry. I was happy to finally get the copy of Linh Dinh's All Around What Empties Out that I'd ordered weeks ago. Composed of three chapbooks from earlier in his career, the book features electric and angry poetry I can get news about our current predicament from. On a different plane I'm glancing through the new Anne Carson book, Decreation: Opera, Essays, Poetry. My first impression is of a classically gorgeous mess, given the hodgepodge implied by the subtitle. More aware of her sly sense of humor after having heard her read some of this material in Vancouver. Some moving elegies for her mother. A thoroughly footnoted proper academic essay about literary representations of sleep: "Every Exit Is an Entrance." Poems dedicated to the oeuvre of Michelangelo Antonioni and his favorite star, Monica Vitti. There's "Lots of Guns: An Oratorio for Five Voices," which I remember vividly from Vancouver. A "screenplay" about Abelard & Heloise. The title opera, which takes title and theme from Simone Weil. Lots more. I like Carson's wit, the adroitness of her curiosity, her oddness. I wonder what the phenomenon of her poetry is about, though. Something about the way she reclaims the classical tradition in lively ways? I'd like to think readers are drawn to her unembarassed love for the modernist/high art tradition whose relevance is generally denied in an age divided between postmodern ricochet and aesthetic Republicanism. Weil, Woolf, Italian neo-realism (as "modernist" as 20th century film gets), Beckett: these are her lodestars in the new book, with Homer and Sappho always ready to swoop in from the wings to recharge the proceedings with blood and wonder. It doesn't hurt that Knopf has made each of her books into remarkably beautiful objects: Decreation is no exception, a ghostly silver-nitrate image with a touch of gold up front, all ashimmering behind. That describes the poetry too, I suppose.

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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