Cahiers de Corey

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Starting to get more of a grip on things. Yesterday made significant progress in revising the Pound chapter, which isn't as good as doing new writing maybe but valuable nonetheless. Need to extract a writing sample from its deepening prolixity. This morning felt the leisure to take the dog to various caffeinated watering holes: first Collegetown Bagels for a chunk of Late Marxism, from which I extract this luminous quotation from Adorno and Horkheimer on philistinism: "To those who spasmodically dominate nature, a tormented nature provocatively reflects back the image of powerless happiness. The thought of happiness without power is unbearable, because only then would it be true happiness." And then at Gimme Coffee to discover just such fragile images of happiness in Jordan's Million Poems Journal. I hope he won't mind:

Copper Beech

The plaster needs fixing
And the grout in the tub is gray
The plants are back from brown
The cheap rose in its third bloom
Dianthus blossoms cluster at a stem
Like geraniums
a feather driven
Out through the comforter cover
For the cold summer breeze

Confused the feather goes out
Over the empty dobule candlestick
And the trees are full of light seeds
Someone with a young voice is calling
Someone it's after eleven-thirty.
The dark hair of women in films
And the brown curly hair it's not red.

The police stand fat on Second Avenue
Tic-tac-toe drawn on my heart
Every autumn to ask the question
Of the red-blue air at quarter-turns,
What question? what question?
A purple cardinal whistles it
To a white chickadee.
The geese in the sky are black
Flying off in different directions,
Branches of a copper beech.

Sublime peeking through cracks, that ought to be the name of the genre of such a poem. Now off to the bookstore; if I have time, I'll turn to two chapbooks generously sent to me by Erica Kaufman: her own chapbook from the two coat syndrome (which has this kicker of a Frank O'Hara epigraph: "It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so") and Marcella Durand's The Anatomy of Oil, published by Erica's own press (with Rachel Levitsky), Belladonna Books.

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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.

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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